Lilias Torrance Newton

Lilias Torrance Newton was one of the most important portraitists working in Canada during the 20th century. She trained with the painter William Brymner in Montreal and later in Paris and was a member of the Beaver Hall Group. Elected an associate of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1923, she became a full academician in 1937 and deposited her diploma painting, a striking portrait of Louis Muhlstock, in 1940. A single mother, Newton struggled to make a living as a portrait painter in the Depression. Supported by the National Gallery of Canada, in particular its director Eric Brown, Newton forged a significant career as a portraitist of both the business and artistic elite of Canada. The Portrait of Frances Holgate, the wife of fellow artist Edwin Holgate, is one of her most accomplished compositions. Frances Holgate, as is evident in many of Holgate's images of her, was a woman of considerable elegance and poise. Smartly dressed in a black and scarlet gown, she sits delicately on a chair and, although she does not look at the viewer directly, is clearly aware of the presence of the painter and viewers. The delicate pinky-orange background colour provides a foil to the vivid black and red of her gown and her skin tone. The angled placement of the chair on which she sits, the acentral placement of her head and the strong form of her elbow all give the composition a dynamism and force that is striking.