Helen McNicoll: An Impressionist Journey

One of Canada's Premier Impressionists at the Art Gallery of Hamilton 

          I had already grown to appreciate Helen McNicoll’s (1879-1915) works while studying early twentieth-century Canadian art. Though I had only seen them in photos, I was impressed by their use of light, their ability to convey atmosphere, and their confident brushstrokes. So, when I heard that a McNicoll retrospective was being shown at our local Art Gallery of Hamilton (AGH), I jumped at the opportunity to experience her works in person. 

          The show includes some 65 works from throughout her career and is arranged, somewhat biographically, as you would expect from a retrospective. It opens with a timeline of her life, and one of the show's strongest works, titled Sunny September (Figure 1). This painting is not only compositionally strong and a prime example of McNicoll’s ability to represent light and atmosphere, but the movement of the wind provides a rare example of her brushstrokes' expressive potential. Outside of the entryway, the show is organized by genre into three main rooms. The first room is composed of sunny outdoor domestic scenes, the second room is an amalgamation of genre, landscape, and beach scenes, and the third room is mainly interior scenes. I have no complaints about this choice; if anything, organizing by subject or genre enhances the viewing experience. This was especially true in the first room, where the affective potential of the atmospheric works was amplified by their neighbour’s similarities. 

          There are two other rooms outside of this main structure, one of which I was less convinced by. The first of the two is at the back of the exhibit and is devoted to the long-lost painting The Bean Harvest (Figure 2), with a looped video explaining how it was found on a BBC program and the processes that were used in authenticating it. The other room is connected to the entryway, and it shows a variety of works from McNicoll’s contemporaries. The first of the two rooms fits the flow of the show better; it adds an air of excitement to the exhibition. For example, it got the show featured by a local news network, CHCH (CHCH 2025). The second room comes across as slightly more tangential. I believe the point of this room is to show the viewer that while McNicoll is who we are celebrating, there are many other women during her time who also deserve our attention. I wholeheartedly endorse this point, though I feel it could have been more convincingly executed. I think my main complaint is that the examples they provide are not the strongest. The most impressive works, in my opinion, are a still life by Florence Carlyle and a small portrait by Laura Muntz Lyall (Figure 3), but even these are from what I would consider mid-tier examples of these artists' capabilities. I don’t feel as though these works hold up well enough when compared to those shown by McNicoll (Figure 4) to achieve the curator's noble intentions. 

          Where this show really shines is in the number and quality of McNicoll’s paintings. Their sense of light and atmosphere, mixed with her technical proficiency, is what defines the overall experience (Figure 5). There is a sense of quiet in her work that relaxes the viewer. In fact, this quietude is theorized by Kristina Huneault to be tied to McNicoll’s experience of the world (Huneault 2004). An astute viewer will have noticed in the show’s opening remarks that McNicoll lost her hearing to scarlet fever in 1881 (at the age of two). This is what theoretically explains the sense of quiet that transcends our expectations from domestic scenes (Huneault 2004). Beyond this sense of quiet, one of the things that stood out upon seeing a wider variety of her works was the amount she experimented stylistically; from broad planes of colour (Figure 6), to different modes of post-impressionist mark-making, such as rectangular dabs (Figure 7) and pointillism (Figure 8). In books, I had only ever seen her purely impressionistic domestic scenes, and while that is where she seems most at home, it is interesting to see how much she innovated with other approaches. Organized and well lit, the main body of the show let McNicoll’s painting ability take center stage, and it did not disappoint. 

          Coming out of the exhibition, my considerable respect for McNicoll as a Canadian impressionist painter has only grown. Her works are suffused with an effortless flow of light, warmth, and life. Her harmonious palette and the quietude of her subject matter make the viewing experience akin to taking a stroll in the spring or resting in the silent shade of a tree on a summer’s day. While the subject matter and mode of expression may not be everyone’s taste, I have yet to find a Canadian artist who paints impressionistic domestic scenes as competently. Her ability to capture light and display atmospheric feeling is among the best I have seen, and to think that such a number of her works are currently accessible to us here in Hamilton is quite an honour. 

The exhibition runs from February 15 to August 31, 2025. 

Further Information and Works Cited: 

• CHCH, find the story they presented Lost Helen McNicoll painting on show at Hamilton gallery 

• Huneault, Kristina. "Impressions of Difference: The Painted Canvases of Helen McNicoll." Art History 27, no. 2 (2004): 212 -250.  

  • • • It should be noted that caution must be used when imposing an artist's biography upon their artworks. Art is not biography, nor should it be treated as such. That being said, we can still look for where the artist's self is (or is not) perceptible in a work.