LECTURE | Irene Gammel - The Power of Witnessing in the Work of Battlefield Painter Mary Riter Hamilton

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Irene Gammel, author of I Can Only Paint: The Story of Battlefield Artist Mary Riter Hamilton, presents “The Power of Witnessing in the Work of Battlefield Painter Mary Riter Hamilton”.

Canadian painter Mary Riter Hamilton blazed a trail by painting the First World War graveyards and battlefields in oil and daring to be—unofficially—Canada's first female war artist. Irene Gammel will speak about the extraordinary life of this long-forgotten Canadian artist discussing how her paintings render powerful meanings as acts of witnessing. She will give insight into her own travels to Vimy Ridge, the Somme, and Flanders, while ending her talk with a brief reading from her new book on the topic.

Hosted by Guelph Museums in partnership with the Laurier Centre for Military, Strategic and Disarmament Studies.

ABOUT THE BOOK

For Canadian impressionist Mary Riter Hamilton, capturing the emotional landscape of battlefields and graveyards in the months after the Great War's armistice became an artistic calling and defined her work. A woman alone after the storm had passed, she found that her life after the war was indelibly marked by the experience.

Undeterred by a rejection from the Canadian War Memorials Fund, who nominated only male war artists abroad, in 1919 Hamilton received a commission from the Amputation Club of British Columbia (now the War Amps) to commemorate those lost at war. She travelled from Victoria to the pre-reconstruction battlefields and towns of the Somme, Vimy Ridge, and the Ypres Salient where amid harsh conditions - inadequate shelter and food, surroundings littered with unexploded shells - she recorded with determination, pride, and grace the ruins of war. Based on intensive archival research in Canada, France, and Belgium, and using many previously unpublished letters, I Can Only Paint offers an insider's view of the artist's vast, underexplored body of war work and the conditions in which she created it.