Efa Prudence Heward 1896 - 1947

Private Collection, Ottawa

Possibly exhibited in The Art Association of Montreal, 39th Spring Exhibition, 1922, no. 139 as Mrs. Hope Smith

Prudence Heward, 1896 - 1947, Memorial Exhibition, National Gallery of Canada, 1948, p. 5

This work is in very good condition. Lower stretcher bar line and left stretcher bar lines are visible. Minor paint loss in the sitter’s lip and left eye. Some valencing of canvas in the upper left corner. Under UV examination there is a horizontal line in the left arm at which is most likely surface dirt.
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For the retrospective of Heward's paintings at the National Gallery of Canada in 1948, the director, Harry McCurry, wrote: "Heward was a figure painter of unusual distinction at a time when the emphasis among Canadian artists was almost exclusively on landscape."

'Unusual distinction' is an accurate and fitting description for Heward, for among the members of the Beaver Hall Group of painters, formed at almost the same time as the Group of Seven, she was paramount among those who devoted themselves to portraiture. Indeed, only Lilias Torrance Newton and Edwin Holgate were her equal in Montreal, and only Lawren Harris, F.H. Varley and, when he turned his hand to it, R.S. Hewton could match her in the rest of Canada. 

Portrait of a Lady which may have been exhibited in 1922 as Mrs. Hope Smith, is certainly an early work and probably done while Heward was still a student of William Brymner and in her mid-twenties. She went on to paint major paintings of figures, sometimes nude and sometimes not, most often of women, but really of a wide range of characters. Her paintings were not so much portraits as studies of kinds of people. Who they were was not as important to Heward as how they were and what kind of painting she was making. Her portraits, like those by some other major artists, rise above simple identification to portraits of humanity.