Mary Ritter Hamilton

Mary Riter Hamilton was born in Ontario, raised in Manitoba and, early in the twentieth century, went abroad to study art in Berlin and later Paris, where she was to exhibit in the annual Salon shows. Her early paintings were more academic and classical in nature, but after exposure to the fomenting European art scene, they became more attuned to the tenets of Impressionism. Using vigorous brushwork, she took a 'plein air' approach in her art, painting directly from her subject. It is that immediacy which is one of the most appealing features of her work. This fine, rare painting was done in Giverny, located about eighty kilometres west of Paris and home of the famous artist Claude Monet and his spectacular garden and lily pond. The town was also the location of a colony of artists from North America at the turn of the twentieth century. A.K. Prakash comments on this work: Market Scene, Giverny "is a brilliant example of Hamilton's understanding of Impressionism. Painting outdoors, she overlaid the forms with the vibration of light. To achieve vibration, she used broken brushwork like that of Claude Monet. The subject is framed in an abrupt compositional format suggestive of the paintings by Camille Pissarro of peasant women at work. The central importance of the figures is heightened by the deliberate modelling of solid forms that delinieate them from the abstract design of the background. Natural light accentuates the spontaneity with which Hamilton speckled the figures, a characteristic that aligned her with the development of modernism in Canadian Art."