Artwork by Mary Evelyn Wrinch,  Beach Scene with Children

Mary E. Wrinch
Beach Scene with Children

oil on board
signed lower left
25.5 x 20 ins ( 64.8 x 50.8 cms )

Auction Estimate: $4,000.00$3,000.00 - $4,000.00

Price Realized $3,220.00
Sale date: March 8th 2017

Provenance:
Gallery Gevik, Toronto
Galerie Valentin, Montreal
Private Collection, Montreal
Literature:
Paul Duval, “Canadian Impressionism,” Toronto, 1990, page 106
Mary Evelyn Wrinch found inspiration in Toronto and its rural surroundings, particularly around Lake Bays in the Muskoka region, where she owned a summer cottage. The artist made trips to Europe in 1906 and 1912, where she encountered the works of Monet, Pissaro and Sisley. Wrinch had been specializing in miniature portraits at the time, but she was so struck by these artists that upon returning to Canada she embraced plein-air landscape painting. She later reminisced of these sojourns: “It was such a revelation being in France at that time. Coming into contact with Impressionism was like being let loose with a box of coloured candy.” The pastel palette in “Beach Scene with Children” is borrowed from that of French Impressionist artists. Wrinch’s colourful modernist approach, as demonstrated in the swimsuits and parasols filling the beach, were avant-garde and even considered extreme at the time in the first half of the twentieth century. The artist consistently looked ahead to the next step – she later gave up oil painting to experiment with linocut prints of botanical imagery.

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Mary Evelyn Wrinch
(1878 - 1969) OSA, ARCA

A painter and printmaker, Mary Wrinch immigrated to Toronto from England in 1885. The artist made this city her home base, from which she ventured into the Ontario northland to paint, particularly around Lake Muskoka. Remarkably, Wrinch adapted her modernist style to this landscape years before the Group of Seven became famous for depicting the same region. Her art education began at the Central Ontario School of Art in Toronto (now OCAD), where Wrinch studied under Robert Holmes, Laura Muntz, and G. A. Reid (whom she later married, in 1922), graduating in 1893. She subsequently travelled to London, England, to further her training at the Grosvenor Life School under Walter Donne until 1899, and to study miniature painting under Alyn Williams. Her education continued at the Art Students' League in New York, where she also received private lessons in miniature painting from Alice Beckington. She was elected an associate of the Royal Canadian Academy in 1918, and was also a member of the American Society of Miniature Painters (1902), the Ontario Society of Artists, the Society of Canadian Painter-Etchers and Engravers, the Canadian Society of Graphic Art, the Women's Art Association of Canada, and the Canadian Handicrafts Guild. In addition to exhibiting with these associations, she participated in the Canadian Painting Exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto (where her work was displayed alongside that of several members of the Group of Seven), the British Empire Exposition in Wembley, England (1924), and in a show at the Tate Gallery, London (1938), among many other exhibitions. She is represented in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the National Gallery of Canada.