Artist Info
Henrietta Mabel May
Henrietta “Henry” Mabel May, labelled the Emily Carr of Montreal, was born in 1877 to Evelyn Henrietta Walker & Edward May, who was a successful real-estate developer. Anne Savage, another Beaver Hall Group artist, described her work as “where she built up her singing happy pictures.”
May was 25 when she attended the Art Association of Montreal school; She helped raise her nine younger siblings, delaying her enrolment in art school. After art school, May travelled to Europe with Emily Coonan , a fellow student who would also join the Beaver Hall Group. The trip to Europe sparked May’s interest in Impressionism. Its influence is evident in her earlier works such as Yacht Racing and The Three Sisters. Once she had returned to Canada, she lived at the family home.
During WW1, while many men were away fighting, May was commissioned by the Canadian War Memorial Fund to paint the home front. She was paid 250 a month which would be equivalent to about 5500 a month today. She visited CPR Angus Shops and Northern Electric plant in Montreal to use as references for her project and the final painting she created, Women Making Shells depicts men and women working side-by-side in a munitions factory. This was an unusual subject matter for a women artist to tackle at the time.
After the war ended, May, along with several other artists formed the Beaver Hall Group. She was the oldest of the group, and was known to disguise her actual age by listing her birth date as September 11, 1884. The Beaver Hall Group with its female members helped lay the foundation for women artists to be taken seriously. Several of the women remained close after the dissolution of the Beaver Hall Group, and their combined forces helped empower them.
May’s painting, Melting Snow received an honourable mention in the National Gallery of Canada’s prestigious Willingdon Arts Competition. A piece that, even though there is an absence of people, reflects her delight in humanity as Robert Ayre described “she has always been a joyous painter, taking pleasure in people as well as light and landscape.”
The Great Depression brought finical difficulties to May and her family. The family summer cottage where she sometimes painted was sold, and May took up teaching. She eventually became an art history teacher at a private school in Ottawa and taught “Happy Art Class” Saturday mornings at the National Gallery of Canada. In 1933, May was a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters, which included other members from the disbanded Beaver Hall Group, like Anne Savage and Sarah Robertson.
As her career matured, her fascination with colour and rhythm grew and she was able to more skilfully render scenes. The Group of Seven influenced her landscapes and May joined the religious group, I AM, The Foundation of St. Germaine in the 1930s that connected colours with spiritual significance, like black and red having negative effects, which had an effect on her paintings. These negatively labelled colours seem to appear less in her later works.
Low Tide, Lower St. Lawrence painted by May in 1939 is owned by the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery and was shown in 1998-99 "A Holiday Sampler" at the Galt Museum in Lethbridge, Alberta, and in 1986 at the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery “Canada in Colour” exhibition. Eventually, May moved to Vancouver to be with her sisters and died at the age of 94 in Burnaby, B.C. in 1971.
Sources:
1. The beaver hall group and its legacy by Evelyn Walters (108-114)
2. The women of beaver hall: Canadian modernist painters (61-72) by Evelyn Walters https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uleth/reader.action?docID=3249663
3. https://www.gallery.ca/magazine/your-collection/our-new-unreliable-winter-mabel-may
4. Women Making Shells: Marking W omen Making Shells: Marking Women’s Presence in the Munitions Work 1914–1918: The Art of Frances Loring, Florence Wyle, Mabel May, and DorothyStevens by Susan Butlin
5. https://cowleyabbott.ca/artist/mabel_may
