Backyards

Provenance:
Collection of the artist

---

Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, 1983

---

Private Collection

Exhibitions:
Three-person exhibition with Isabel McLaughlin, Prudence Heward and Sarah Robertson, Scott & Sons Gallery, Montreal, 1934

---

Five-person exhibition with Isabel McLaughlin, Paraskeva Clark, Rody Kenny Courtice, Kathleen Daly [Pepper] & Yvonne McKague [Housser], Malloney Galleries, Toronto, 1936, no. 13

---

Rody Kenny Courtice, B. Caghill Haworth, Yvonne McKague Housser, Isabel McLaughlin, Ontario Society of Artists Little Picture Exhibition, Print Room, Art Gallery of Toronto, 1940

---

An Exhibition of Paintings by Isabel McLaughlin and Margaret Luke McLaughlin [Alexandra Luke], Adelaide House (Y.W.C.A.), Oshawa, 1946, no. 3

---

“Paintings by Isabel McLaughlin”, Hart House, Toronto, 1948, no. 4

---

“Tribute to Ten Women Artists,” Sisler Gallery, Toronto, 1975, no. 13

---

Three-person exhibition with Isabel McLaughlin, Yvonne McKague Housser and Kathleen Daly Pepper, Heliconian Club, Toronto, 1979 “Isabel McLaughlin: Recollections”, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, 1983, no. 15

Literature:
Joan Murray, “Isabel McLaughlin: Recollections”, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, 1983, page 16, reproduced page 41: “Backyards, which both Harris and Jackson liked, shows her firm grasp of structure and spatial depth”

---

Joan Murray, “Home Truths”, Toronto, 1997, reproduced page 28: McLaughlin “painted this canvas in her studio on the fourth floor of the Royal Bank building in Toronto, at the northeast corner of Bloor and Yonge streets. This is a view from the window, looking down

---

into the fascinating patterns of the backyards of nearby houses. As she painted, she sometimes smelled peppermint wafting up a central ventilation shaft from the lower floors of the building, which was mostly occupied by dentists’ offices”

---

Fred Housser, ‘The Amateur Movement in Painting’, “Yearbook of the Arts in Canada, 1928-1929” (ed. Bertram Brooker), Toronto, 1929, pages 89-90

---

‘Women Painters Exhibiting Work’, “Gazette” (Montreal), 8 May 1934

---

Arthur Lismer, ‘Work by Three Canadian Women’, “Montreal Star”, 9 May 1934
Notes:
Born in Oshawa, Ontario, the daughter of Mr. & Mrs. R.S. McLaughlin, she studied at the Ontario College of Art, Toronto; the Art Students’ League, New York; the Scandinavian Academy, Paris, and in Mexico. She held her first solo show at the Art Gallery of Toronto in the winter of 1933, when the Toronto Globe notes, “Miss McLaughlin has become interested in a section of Canada, unexplored by artists, namely, Northern Ontario mining settlements. Kirkland Lake and Cobalt are represented in the group of paintings which also includes the Ottawa, Quebec, Muskoka, and Southern Ontario landscapes in the neighborhood of her home at Oshawa and in Toronto. City streets, which have held tenaciously to a few colorful cottages of an earlier day, standing wedged between newer structures have gained the interest of this young artist…. The work exhibits a fine sense of design – a quality well expressed in the still-life drawings and plant studies. A series of watercolors, named “Here and There in Toronto,” reveals the fact that the artist likes to place on canvas those familiar and unnoticed pictures that we meet and should see every day from windows or a street corner.”