Beatrice Lennie.pdf - 75 Years of Collecting - Vancouver Art Gallery

Beatrice Lennie
The Atom, c.1938
75 Years of Collecting
Vancouver Art Gallery
Carr discovered a unique interpretation for west coast totems and forests. Some
of her contemporaries like Beatrice Lennie and J. W. G. Macdonald were more
"modern"; others working within the older traditions found equally valid
perceptions of the province and its people. It is to these artists that the
exhibition is devoted.
In the spring of 1887 when M. and Mme. L'Aubiniere came to Victoria, Emily
Carr, then a mere 15, was "tremendously awed" by the "artist couple." She was
soon disappointed when the L'Aubinieres said that "Canada had no scenery . . .
and banged down the lids of their paint boxes" and went back to the old world.
Contrary to Carr's recollections, their work shows they had little difficulty
capturing the scenic views around Victoria, Saanichton and Goldstream.
With the beginning of the annual exhibitions at the Willows Fair and later at the
Arts and Crafts Society in Victoria, more artists emerged. Painting was often a
polite occupation for genteel ladies like Josephine Crease and Maude Lettice or
a relaxing hobby for successful architects like Samuel Maclure. They painted
views from Beacon Hill, the Esquimalt Lagoon and Gonzalles and worked from
sketches of the Cornish coast and misty London made on visits "home". One
artist who rose above these amateurs was Thomas Bamford. Although largely
untrained before coming to Victoria in the 1890s to work for the provincial
survey department, Bamford's pictures were, according to one critic, "quite
charming," "well composed and painted."
Within Vancouver's counterpart, the B.C. Society of Fine Arts formed in 1910,
arose three artists of note: Thomas Fripp, Charles John Collings and Statira
Frame. Fripp was well-equipped when he came to British Columbia from London
in the 1890s. Education in the tradition of Cotman, De Wint and Cox at St.
John's
Wood Art School, and The Royal Academy Schools was complemented by
instruction from his well-known watercolourist father, Sir George Arthur Fripp,
R.W.S. Applying this training to the British Columbia landscape, he soon won a
reputation for capturing, like no other artist, the misty awesomeness of the
mountains. While Fripp deliniated the reality of the view, C.J. Collings, who
settled on Lake Shuswap in 1910, "deliberately ignored the mountain gorges,
forests and lakes" and abstracted from nature those insignificant facts which
stimulate him. Com-
bining the English and Japanese watercolour techniques of Turner and Hiroshige,
he showed that there was "much behind and beyond the ordinary vision, not
expressed by abstractions, but
by colour and form related to nature." More alive to European trends Statira
Frame was at one with the French Impressionists in her "worship of the sun and
high keyed colour tones." Coming to Vancouver from Quebec in 1892, Frame
began a long, rich career of painting. Her colour, praised by Varley, was her
strong point. New York critic Robert Henri saw in her work "a very
decided sensitiveness to the orchestration of colour . . . good sense of form and
the compositional possibilities of form." Although envied by Carr for having the
support of her family, unlike British Columbia's most famous artist, Statira Frame
has been largely forgotten.
With the formation of the Vancouver School of Applied and Decorative Arts in
1925 new life was brought to the art community. The school's faculty drew
Charles Scott and Grace Melvin from Glasgow, J. W. G. Macdonald from
Edinburgh and F. H. Varley, a member of the Group of Seven, from Eastern
Canada. While some artists studied in Vancouver like Beatrice Lennie, others
including Edythe Hembroff, Jack Shadbolt and Max Maynard travelled to Paris,
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