Mary Evelyn Wrinch

Cowley Abbott Auction House Biography and Notes

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.