Riter, Mary Matilda (Hamilton)

  • From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: See full biography at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Riter_Hamilton
  • Wiki Biography Notes:
    • Mary Riter Hamilton (7 September 1867 – 5 April 1954) was a Canadian painter, etcher, drawing artist, textile artist, and ceramics artist who spent much of her career painting abroad in countries including Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain, and the United States.
    • Mary Riter was born in Culross, Ontario (now part of South Bruce, ON), on 7 September 1867. As the youngest of five siblings, Mary was born to homesteading parents. Her mother, Charity Riter, and one of her brothers, Joseph, supported her striving for artistic expression from early on. Suffering setbacks when the farm burnt down, the Riter family showed collective resilience, eventually building a new life as homesteaders in Manitoba, where Mary lived for a few years as a teenager. Still in her teens, she returned to live in Port Arthur, now Thunder Bay, striking out on her own at an early age. Here she met Charles W. Hamilton, a dry goods merchant, with whom she partnered in running the Paris Dry Goods House. The pair married in July 1889, though the marriage was short-lived, as Charles Watson died suddenly in 1893 following an infection when Mary was in her mid-twenties. She also lost her baby son who was stillborn. These losses had a deep impact, prompting her new career.
    • While she had been taking sporadic painting lessons during her marriage, now she turned to building a professional artistic career. She began painting, exhibiting, and selling ceramics, what was then called china painting, and watercolours in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
    • She gained renown as Canada’s first female battlefield artist, pioneering an empathetic style of painting the trenches and ruined towns of Belgium and France in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. Among her most famous works are her oil on cardboard Trenches on the Somme (1919), her oil on wove paper Isolated Grave and Camouflage, Vimy Ridge (1919), and her oil on board Market Among the Ruins of Ypres, a depiction of the survivors of the war and the ongoing reconstruction in the war-battered town of Ypres. She shaped an ethical portrayal of the war by drawing attention to the war’s destruction and by mourning the dead.
    • Mary Riter Hamilton’s work developed in three distinctive periods and styles. The first period (1901-1911) comprised over one hundred works painted and drawn in Europe that established her in Canada following her TransCanada exhibition tour from 1911 to 1912. This early style is best represented by her oil painting Easter Morning, La Petite Penitente (c. 1906) and her watercolour Young Girl in Blue Dress (1911). Hamilton’s second period (1912-1918) was inspired by her return to Canada in 1911, shifting her focus on Western Canada, as she painted the Rockies and the prairies, as well as scenery in the cities and forests of Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. In this, she pursued a distinctive vision for rendering Canada’s West and honouring its Indigenous peoples.Hamilton’s third period is focussed on her battlefield art as she depicted the destroyed landscapes of World War I, and drew the portraits of marginalized war workers and civilians returning to their destroyed villages. Exceptionally prolific and inspired, her over 320 battlefield works constitute her “magnum opus.” Painting en plein air, with impressionistic flair, her work increasingly eschewed studio finish. In her work, Hamilton embraced the perspective of the underdog, showing sympathy for the socially underprivileged and the suffering, while being bold in transgressing constraining institutional boundaries. In this, she helped shape women’s art and Canadian art, even though she was denied a place in the National Gallery of Canada.
  • Great Granddaughter of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=9441
  • Find A Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/195506814/mary-matilda-hamilton