Provenance:

Estate of Randolph S. Hewton.
By descent to the present owner.

Literature:

Natalie Luckyj, “Expressions of Will, The Art of Prudence Heward”, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, 1986, pages 31 and 59.

Note:

Painted circa 1925.

Prudence Heward enrolled at the Art Association of Montreal where she studied under Randolph Stanley Hewton. Later, they were among the artists who formed the Beaver Hall Hill Group in Montreal as well as the Canadian Group of Painters, a group Heward co-founded in 1933. It is not surprising that Heward and Hewton shared similar traits in their work. Heward often positioned the sitter of her portrait in front of a landscape as seen in her “Portrait of Randolph Hewton”, a characteristic also present in Hewton's portraits such as “Miss Audrey Buller” (ca. 1924).

Heward's preference for familiarity with her subject allowed her to express the heightened emotion and distinct temperament of the sitters. Luckyj describes how the artist successfully integrated figure and landscape through the use of “broadly painted simple forms, strong linear outline and flattened space which result[ed] in compositions which convey monumental scale and heroic inevitability.” The choice to paint a bust of Hewton alludes to classical portrayals of heroic and serious subjects; possibly how Heward regarded her former teacher - as an important pioneer in Canadian art.