![]() ![]() While a number of women artists were commissioned to create art on the homefront, "sending a woman to Europe during the First World War would have been just beyond the pale."īut Hamilton persisted, and left for France and Belgium during the armistice in 1919. "The idea of sending a woman to portray war was in many ways unthinkable," said Brian Foss, a professor of art history at Carleton University in Ottawa. Professor Irene Gammel resurrects the life and legacy of Mary Riter Hamilton and the significance of her art in her biography I Can Only Paint: The Story of Battlefield Painter Mary Riter Hamilton. They claimed she was "too direct, that she was too pushy and that she didn't have the right temperament," said Gammel. Time and again, she was rebuffed by those in charge of the Canadian War Arts Program, particularly Edmund Walker, chair of the National Gallery's advisory board. Riter Hamilton fought hard to serve as one of Canada's official war artists during the war. "I was drawn to the story of a strong woman whose story had not yet been told, or not yet been sufficiently or accurately told," said Gammel, a professor of art, literature and culture at Ryerson University in Toronto. Biographer Irene Gammel is working to resurrect Riter Hamilton's life and legacy, having spent a decade following the artist's footsteps in order to write I Can Only Paint: The Story of Battlefield Painter Mary Riter Hamilton. The contributions of women are often absent in the larger commemoration of Remembrance Day. Riter Hamilton's Clearing the Battlefields in Flanders (1921). ![]()
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