“The out-of-doors sketches represent what were probably the happiest days of her life.  Most of them were painted at Fernbank, the family’s summer home on the bank of the St. Lawrence near Brockville.  Here the green water of the river flowed through the Thousand Islands and a continuous succession of boats passed a few hundred yards from the shore. [...]  There was a serene beauty to many of Prudence Heward’s sketches of this region. They were boldly simplified and solidly painted with the deep green of the pines, the silver-grey of barns, and sun-bleached fields and such wild flowers as milkweed, iris, and mullein to enliven the foreground” [1]

Farmland near Brockville and Fernbank and View of the Needle's Eye from Fernbank hung at Alan Klinkhoff Gallery in Toronto

 
Following her demise, the National Gallery of Canada organized a memorial exhibition for Prudence Heward.  A.Y. Jackson, Heward’s life-long friend, wrote the catalogue introduction for the the show. In his text, Jackson notes the sheer scarcity of works by Heward, which he praised as “robust and vigorous” [2].  The above quotation comes from Jackson’s discussion of the the painting places of Prudence Heward.  He writes specifically of the Fernbank area, where he and other artists such as Anne Savage, Sarah Robertson, and Isabel McLaughlin would gather with Heward for what Jackson called “painting picnics” [3].

Although Prudence Heward had stayed at the Fernbank house on numerous occasions, from 1941 until her death 6 years later she was essentially restricted to living there.  

At the above mentioned exhibition, Heward’s nephew, Heward Grafftey later recalled speaking to A.Y. Jackson [4].  Grafftey asked Jackson if he would rank his aunt amongst the best female painters in Canada [5].  Grafftey recounted Jackson’s response, 

He became slightly irritated and replied, ‘Heward forget the woman part of your question.  In my opinion, she was the very best painter we have in Canada and she never got the recognition she richly deserved in her lifetime.  I wanted her to join the Group of Seven, but like the Twelve Apostles, no women were included' [6].

Map of the Fernbank area including Needle’s Eye Island [8]

Heward’s family has said that Prudence and her friends only painted at Fernbank in the autumn [9] . Jackson describes the countryside of some of Heward's sketches, “It was typical lower Ontario country, flat for the most part but with the rock cropping out of the shallow soil. [...] the subjects were weather-beaten barns and silos, little wooden churches, pasture fields and scattered wood lots with their pines, maples and elms." [10]

 A Thousand Islands scenic view, Fernbank, [n.d.]

The above undated photograph suggests that the present Heward oil sketch, View of the Needle's Eye from Fernbank, c. 1942, is topographically quite accurate.  She situates her view from atop the rocky shoreline of Fernbank, looking southeast.   From this spot, we see the tip of Needle’s Eye Island: a breathtakingly modernist formation of brushstrokes and daubs of oils that are unmistakably the dense hills and trees of the Brockville area isle.

Heward compresses the pictorial space in a radical way.  The foreground, with its interjecting tree branch that lurches across the panel from the right, is pressed flush to the surface. Here, vibrantly coloured heaps of foliage in the centre of the panel glow in greens, reds, and blues like gems against a backdrop of the shimmering sapphire waters of the St. Lawrence River.    

Jackson closes his text to the memorial exhibition, “It was a grievous loss to Canadian art when illness interrupted her work, and her death at Los Angeles in March, 1947, ended the career of one of our most individual and gifted painters” [11].   

Works Cited

1. A.Y. Jackson, Prudence Heward, 1896-1947 : Memorial Exhibition, (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1948), p. 8

2. Ibid., p. 7

3. Ibid., p. 8

4. Wayne Larsen, A.Y. Jackson: The Life of a Landscape Painter, (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2009), p. 203

5. Ibid.

6.  Heward Grafftey, Portraits of a Life (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1996), p. 68

7.  Janet Braide, Prudence Heward (1896-1947): An Introduction to her Life and Work, (Montreal: Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, 1980), p. 17

8. NB: Variant spelling includes Needles Eye Island

9.  Jackson, however, recalls, “for several successive summers, I was also fortunate enough to take part in [the] ‘painting picnics.’” (Jackson, 1948,p. 8)

10. Jackson, 1948, p. 8

11. Ibid., p. 10 

External Images Cited

Fig. 1.

Map of the Fernbank area including Needle’s Eye Island, Via Google ™ Maps

Fig. 2 

Unknown Photographer, A Thousand Islands scenic view, Fernbank, [n.d.] CN Images of Canada - Scenic Views - Large Image View, Img.No. CN007027,

(http://imagescn.techno-science.ca/scenic/index_view.cfm?photoid=-1637072745&id=44)