A local artist's work is coming home

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Few locals know of Brockville’s connection to the Group of Seven.

That link will become a lot clearer this spring, when the Brockville Museum hosts three works of A.Y. Jackson alongside the paintings of a lesser-known artist who called Fernbank home at least part of the time.

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Painting Picnic with Prudence Heward, which will run Mar. 31 to Oct. 9, will highlight the work of Heward, a member of the Beaver Hall Group whose paintings of Brockville and the area will be shown together here for the first time.

Museum curator/director Natalie Wood also hopes the exhibit will introduce locals to a significant artist whom they can claim as one of their own.

“It’s not a story very many people know about, but it’s a national story that Brockville has a piece in,” said Wood.

Prudence Heward was born in Montreal in 1896. Although she lived in Montreal, her family had a cottage at Fernbank, along the river just west of the city.

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She was definitely of local stock. Her grandfather, Chilion Jones, was descended from the founding Brockville Jones family, while her grandmother, Eliza Jones, was born Eliza Harvey, from a United Empire Loyalist family in Maitland.

“She (Heward) would come back in the summers and the falls to paint at Fernbank,” said Wood.

Heward would host “painting picnics” at Fernbank, leading to many largely unknown paintings of Brockville and its environs, added Wood, noting they are contained in the collections of some of this country’s most notable galleries.

A.Y. Jackson, a founding member of the Group of Seven, was among Heward’s notable friends and he would paint with her at Fernbank.

Heward herself was a member of the Beaver Hall Group of painters. It was one of the first groups of Canadian painters that included both female and male artists. And Heward was something of an innovator for women in fine art.

“It was common for them to be artists; it was uncommon for them to be considered professional,” said Wood.

Heward was indeed a professional. While she is best known for her portraits, “there’s all these paintings that she did of the Brockville area and nobody knows about them,” said Wood.

One of her more notable works, a painting of the Blue Church, will unfortunately not be in the coming exhibit, but the works on exhibit here will include a painting of the Black Church in Soperton.

Wood has spent the last few years trying to get some of those paintings of the Brockville area together in order to bring them home, at least temporarily.

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There are works coming to the exhibit on loan from the National Gallery of Canada, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, the Art Gallery of Windsor, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, as well as from several private collectors.

There will be 15 paintings on exhibit, 10 of them by Heward, three by A.Y. Jackson depicting the local area, and one each by Heward’s friends and neighbours Ruth Eliot and her brother, Charles Eliot.

It’s the most ambitious Brockville Museum exhibit to date, and putting it on is not cheap.

It involves bringing in pieces of art that require specific environmental controls and handlers who have experience with art, said Wood.

Along with the standard conservation and crating fees, the museum faces significant shipping costs. (One doesn’t drive an A.Y. Jackson from one museum to another in the back seat of a Volkswagen.)

Once they’re here, there will also be hefty costs to house them, including the usual exhibit furnishings and security.

To host this “National Gallery-level art installation,” notes Wood, the museum has set a fundraising target of $20,000, and so far has raised more than $13,000.

The museum continues to fundraise and seek sponsors to help defray the costs of the exhibit. That includes an event on the evening of Friday, Mar. 27, when the museum will host a viewing of the exhibit and a soiree to follow with hors d’oeuvres and sparkling refreshments prepared and served by the Brockberry Cafe, as well as live music from a talented local pianist, Matthew O’Halloran.

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Tickets to that event are limited, and early-bird tickets bought by Feb. 14 are $70 per person, as opposed to $80 after that date.

All tickets are available through the Brockville Arts Centre box office.

Sadly, Heward died at a relatively young age in 1947, having struggled with asthma and other health problems. Wood suggests the asthma was exacerbated by her painting.

Bringing some of her works together a few kilometres from Fernbank is an excellent way to ensure that, though her flame burned out early, its light will endure.

City hall reporter Ronald Zajac can be reached at rzajac@postmedia.com.