Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Helen McNicoll, Canadian Impressionist About this episode Helen McNicoll was a Canadian painter who had a significant influence on the rise of Impressionism in that country. McNicoll, who lost her hearing in childhood, was quite successful as an artist, though her career and life were short.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:45 Tracy V. Wilson? in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Workplace chaos, we've all been there. Deadlines are slipping, projects are piling up, and suddenly you realize the missing piece is the right person. That's when you say, this is a job for sponsored jobs. With Indeed Sponsored Jobs, your job post gets a boost so you can connect with quality candidates faster. In fact, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs.
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1:43 Holly Frey? We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts.
2:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:27 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:31 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
2:33 Tracy V. Wilson? A name I was introduced to while working on our most recent installment of Unearthed is Helen McNicoll, who was an impressionist painter. The way the Unearthed episodes work, if you haven't heard me tell this story before, is I just, I look at a ton of news and research sources over the course of a quarter. I bookmark everything that seems relevant. And then when it's time to actually write the episode, I go through all that, pick out the ones that seem the most interesting or fun or notable. And there are way more things that I've bookmarked over the course of the quarter than can possibly go into an episode, even if I expanded it into a third part, which I don't want to do for a number of reasons.
3:15 Tracy V. Wilson? One of them being that I would need to write an entire third episode in the same amount of time that I'm currently writing two in most cases. But there are also a lot of reasons why something might not go into that final cut. Like, maybe it's confusing, or seems really similar to something we just talked about, without really adding anything new, or maybe I just, I can't figure out what is notable or really interesting about it. The Helen McNicoll find that came up as I was researching our most recent Unearthed was a rediscovered painting, and it didn't wind up in this latest installment for two reasons.
3:56 Tracy V. Wilson? One was that the story came from a BBC TV show called Fake or Fortune, which is about art authentication. I try not to put too much stuff from TV shows on Unearthed, especially TV shows that sort of have a whole focus on unearthing things. Like, I think we've had one thing that was from Antiques Roadshow on Unearthed ever, and that was because it was one of the Bronte sisters' hair.
4:25 Tracy V. Wilson? The other reason, though, was I immediately just wanted to do a whole episode on Helen McNicoll, so here it is. Helen Galloway McNicoll was born in Toronto, Ontario, on December 14, 1879. She was the first child born to David and Emily Patchley McNicoll. David had been born in Scotland, and Emily had been born in England, and they immigrated to Canada before Helen was born.
4:52 Holly Frey? When Helen was still very young, the family moved from Toronto to Montreal, Quebec, and that's where her six siblings were born, three brothers and three sisters.
5:02 Tracy V. Wilson? David's career was in railroads, starting back when he was still living in the UK. After arriving in Canada, he worked for a couple of different railroad lines before being hired at Canadian Pacific Railway, where he spent the rest of his career. He worked his way up through the ranks there. And so the family became increasingly prosperous and prominent over the course of Helen's early life. By the time she was in her early twenties, her father had become a vice president and had commissioned the building of a large house that they called Brayley. It had five bedrooms and two servants' rooms. A 1916 obituary described him as "one of the best-known railwaymen in North America."
5:47 Holly Frey? It's likely that Helen's exposure to art started at an early age. David and Emily were both interested in art. Emily painted China, and she was also a poet. And David sketched and painted and also built up an art collection. And art was probably also part of Helen's early education, which happened at home. She contracted scarlet fever and became deaf when she was still a toddler, and she was tutored at home rather than being sent to school.
6:16 Tracy V. Wilson? We don't really have very much detail about Helen's early life, or about her hearing loss, and how it might have affected her sense of herself or her relationship to the world. The sources used in today's episode agree that she learned to read lips and that her family and friends helped her in situations where she needed to communicate with people she didn't know. It's also really clear that she enjoyed music. A couple of sources noted that she learned to play the piano. And we also know that the family traveled. Helen's first trip abroad was when she was five, when she and her oldest younger siblings made a trip back to England with their mother.
6:58 Holly Frey? Helen's first formal instruction in art was at the Art Association of Montreal, which had been founded in 1860. Her education there included things like nude figure studies, copying the works of great masters, and creating drawings of plaster copies of famous statues. McNicoll got a scholarship for these drawings in 1899.
7:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Helen's teachers at the art association included William Brimner, who served as director of the association for more than 30 years, although he'd been really reluctant about taking on this role when he first accepted that job 10 years earlier. It was one of those things where he really wanted to focus on his own arts, but his paintings weren't selling and he needed the income.
7:46 Holly Frey? In terms of his art, Brimner is probably most known for his landscapes, but he also played a huge role in the development of Canadian art overall. The British colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the province of Canada had become one nation in 1867. So the Dominion of Canada was only about 20 years old when he started teaching, and he played a deeply influential role in the education of a whole generation of Canadian artists. So he's sometimes called the father of Canadian painting.
8:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Also in 1899, McNichols sketched some students at a school for the deaf. So we're going to take a moment to talk about education for deaf children in Quebec in the late 19th century. This school was described as the Oral School, and most of the sources used in this episode conclude that it was the McKay Institution for Protestant, Deaf, Mutants, and the Blind in Montreal that had been founded in 1869. At that time, for the most part, there were separate educational and social institutions for Catholics and Protestants in Quebec. Catholics were also more likely to speak French, while Protestants were more likely to speak English.
9:04 Tracy V. Wilson? The Roman Catholic Church had already established two schools for deaf, French-speaking Catholic students in Quebec, one for boys and one for girls. But the McKay Institution was Quebec's first school for deaf children who were Protestant and from English-speaking families.
9:22 Holly Frey? The McKay School was named for Joseph McKay, who was in the dry goods business and donated the land and building for the school. But one of the people who was really instrumental in its founding was Thomas Wid, who was a journalist and educator who had grown up and been educated in England, and who was himself deaf. Wid became the school's principal, and his wife Margaret, who was also deaf, was heavily involved as well. In the earliest years of the school, the two of them made up most or all of the staff.
9:55 Tracy V. Wilson? When the McKay School was founded, the focus was on teaching deaf children to read and write, and to finger spell and use other signs, along with other basic academic work, vocational and life skills, and religious instruction. Not long after it opened, a student was enrolled who had become deaf after learning how to speak, and the school hired a hearing teacher to both help meet that student's needs and to teach other students how to speak. But then, over time, the school's focus shifted, in part because of debates over the best ways to teach deaf children and for deaf people to communicate. Broadly speaking, manualists advocated for sign language,
10:38 Tracy V. Wilson? while oralists advocated for deaf people to learn to speak and read lips.
10:43 Holly Frey? In 1880, an international conference of deaf educators was held in Milan, Italy. The assembled educators resolved that oralism was the superior method, and they banned the teaching of sign language. These resolutions were based on the incorrect belief that learning to sign was harmful for children's cognitive development, and a desire among hearing educators for deaf students to assimilate with the hearing world as much as possible. In 2010, the 21st International Congress on Education of the Deaf was held in Vancouver and denounced these resolutions and formally apologized for this ban.
11:24 Tracy V. Wilson? So to get back to how this relates to Helen McNicoll, several sources used in this episode say that the McKay School, by that point teaching the oral method, was colloquially being called the Oral School. And so that's where McNicoll sketched these students. I'm not completely confident that's the case, though. I looked through all kinds of documents associated with this school and articles and a master's thesis about the school's history, news reports from Montreal from the 1860s to about 1900, and reports on schools for deaf children in North America over those years.
12:03 Tracy V. Wilson? And I really didn't find any references to the McKay School being called the Oral School.
12:10 Holly Frey? That doesn't conclusively mean it didn't happen. But a couple of sources describe McNicoll visiting a different school in 1899, the Mystic Oral School in Connecticut. Earlier in the 19th century, a man named Jonathan Whipple had developed a method to teach his deaf son how to speak. And decades later, his grandson had established the Whipple School for the Deaf. The Whipple School also included academic and vocational training, along with a big focus on reading lips and speaking. This school went through various changes and difficulties before becoming Mystic Oral School in 1898.
12:49 Tracy V. Wilson? So regardless of which school these students were attending when McNicoll sketched them, the fact that she was drawing students at a school for the deaf suggests that she had connections to the deaf community around her. We don't know exactly what those connections were, though. Very few of McNicoll's letters have survived until today, and there's really no diaries or other personal writing of hers. Newspaper articles about her art career don't reference her deafness at all, which isn't necessarily surprising considering attitudes about deafness and disability at the time. This is similar to what came up last year in our episode on tennis player Charlotte Cooper Stary.
13:33 Holly Frey? When Helen McNicoll was in her early twenties, she went abroad to study art. And we'll get into that after we pause for a sponsor break.
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15:51 Holly Frey? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
16:33 Holly Frey? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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17:29 Holly Frey? In 1902, at the age of 23, Helen McNicoll went to London, England, to study at the Slade School of Art. There's a bit of speculation about why she decided to go to London rather than to Paris, since Paris was considered the more prestigious and influential place for promising artists.
17:49 Tracy V. Wilson? McNicoll had family connections in the UK and her father had work connections there as well. So this might have been a factor. There's also no mention of her speaking French in the research for this episode. So it's possible that that played a role too. She definitely visited France later on. She had a studio there, but she or her family may have had concerns about her living somewhere that she didn't speak the language to study art while also being deaf.
18:20 Holly Frey? Of course, London also had a more conservative and respectable reputation than Paris did. So there's also a possibility that McNicoll, or perhaps her parents, just preferred that. The Slade School specifically is described as having a, quote, "restrained brand of modernism during this era." It could still be controversial for women to participate in art classes with nude models, but as had been the case at the Art Association of Montreal, this was allowed at the Slade School, so it was popular among women art students. In the late 19th and early 20th century, about two-thirds of the students there were women.
19:01 Tracy V. Wilson? McNicoll spent two years at the Slade School of Art, earning first-class honors. She took a trip to France and then went to St. Ives in Cornwall to attend the Cornish School of Landscape and Sea Painting. St. Ives was a fishing town that was also home to artist colonies. A few decades later, after World War I, St. Ives became home to a group of more abstract, avant-garde artists, and that's often what people are talking about today when they say the St. Ives School. But when McNicoll was there, a lot of the focus was on Impressionism and landscapes and seascapes painted on plein air or out in the open.
19:43 Tracy V. Wilson? One of McNicoll's teachers was British Impressionist Algernon Talmage, and Canadian artist Emily Carr studied there at the same time that Helen McNicoll did.
19:54 Holly Frey? In St. Ives, McNicoll also met British impressionist Dorothea Sharp. Sharp had been born in 1873, so she was about six years older than McNicoll, and she was a little farther along in her art career. Sharp had studied in London and Paris, and she had exhibited work at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Paris Salon. She was able to share her knowledge and experience in both art and the European art world with McNicoll.
20:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Sharp and McNicoll were together for the rest of McNicoll's life. They lived together and shared studio space, mutually supported and encouraged one another, and called each other Nellie and Dolly. The titles of their paintings often don't say who the model was, but many of McNicoll's paintings are believed to be of Sharp and vice versa. Sharp was also really skilled at communicating and working with models, like getting them into poses that were both realistic and evocative. There are a lot of paintings in which Sharp and McNicoll were clearly working with the same models in the same setting. In addition to working with their models, Sharp also made a lot of their arrangements
21:05 Tracy V. Wilson? when they traveled together and helped McNicoll communicate with others at art shows and other events.
21:12 Holly Frey? We don't really have things like diary entries, letters between the two of them, or letters to other people in which they wrote about one another. It is clear, though, that their relationship made their work as artists possible. It was not appropriate for women to live and work alone, so the fact that they were together gave them access to spaces that they wouldn't have had otherwise. While McNicoll's family was affluent enough that she didn't need to sell her work to support herself, that was not the case for Sharp. But they were able to share their costs on things like supplies and accommodations. They also created an artistic world that was really focused on women. Aside from a few street scenes or crowd scenes,
21:55 Holly Frey? their models were almost entirely women and children, and they had connections to a number of other women artists.
22:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Although Helen McNicoll never lived in Canada full-time after going to London to study art, she did visit and she sent her paintings back to Canada for various exhibitions. Her first professional exhibition took place when she was 26, at the Art Association of Montreal. That was in February and March of 1906. She very quickly developed a name for herself as an artist, and in 1908, her painting "September Evening" was awarded the Art Association of Montreal's Jessie Dow Prize, named for the association's governor. This was the first year this prize had been awarded, and McNicoll shared it with painter
22:43 Tracy V. Wilson? W. H. Clapp, who had also studied with William Bremner. "September Evening" depicts a gold field dotted with sheaves of grain bordered by a forest. Most of the forest is shown only in shadow, except for one tall tree that's covered in browning leaves. There's a pair of ruts left by wheels off to the side, and barely visible off in the distance, there's a shape of what looks like a woman in a skirt walking away toward the woods with a small child.
23:14 Holly Frey? Also in 1908, she and Dorothea Sharp got a studio in London, and later they had one in Paris as well. They traveled frequently, doing a lot of painting from remote villages, painting the villages themselves, as well as countrysides and seaside. McNicoll became involved in the Society of Women Artists, which Sharp was already a part of, and Sharp became its vice president. In 1913, McNicoll was elected to the Royal Society of British Artists, which had been established in 1823 in response to the exclusivity of the Royal Academy of Arts, which admitted only 50 members at a time. The year she was elected to the society, she also had three paintings shown in its exhibition.
23:59 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1914, McNicoll was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. She was also awarded the Women's Art Society Prize that year for her painting "In the Shadow of the Tent," which we'll talk more about in a little bit.
24:14 Holly Frey? McNicoll made a visit back to Canada in April of 1914, and after returning to Europe, she and Sharp went to Saint Valérie-sur-Somme on the northern coast of France. On June 28th of that year, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie were assassinated by a Bosnian Serb. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and by the start of August, multiple nations in Europe were at war.
24:41 Tracy V. Wilson? There are some surviving letters from this time, and they don't really make it sound like McNicoll and Sharp thought they were in danger at this point. But people back home in Canada did not feel the same. David McNicoll's role as vice president at Canadian Pacific Railway had already made a lot of Helen's travel possible. And at this point, officials with the railroad worked with their connections in Europe to get Helen and Dorothea back to England. Both women donated some of their artwork to help raise money for the war effort.
25:15 Holly Frey? Sadly, in June of the following year, Helen McNicoll's family received a cable that she had suddenly become ill. And then the next day, a second cable saying that she had died. She died in Swanage, Dorset, on June 27, 1915, at the age of 35. The sources that Tracy used in this episode all agree that she died of complications from diabetes, but none of them really mention her having diabetes prior to her death. She was buried in Northbrook Cemetery in Swanage.
25:49 Tracy V. Wilson? We will talk more about her art and her influence and legacy after another sponsor break.
25:58 Holly Frey? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
26:40 Holly Frey? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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27:29 Holly Frey? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life.
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29:45 Tracy V. Wilson? After Helen McNichol died, her obituary in the Montreal Gazette described her as "one of Canada's most promising artists." It went on to say that she was, quote, "a conscientious and sincere painter. Despite the temptation to which so many succumbed to pattern their art on that of instructors, Miss McNichol went her own way, and with each succeeding year saw advance in the work, which she showed at the Spring Exhibitions under the auspices of the Art Association of Montreal and the Royal Canadian Academy Exhibitions." This obituary described her last picture shown in Canada that spring as "a revelation," even to people who had kept watch on her previous pieces.
30:28 Holly Frey? This obituary also references the changing world of art in the early 20th century. When the Impressionist movement had started to take shape in the 1860s, it had been really controversial, an avant-garde artistic movement that rejected the formal rules and standards of the Academy des Beaux-Arts in France. Helen McNicoll was born almost 20 years after that, and by the time she started formally studying art, Impressionism had become a lot more popular and accepted within and outside of France. Other artistic movements had become the ones seen as the avant-garde. The Montreal Gazette describes her as being "interested in Impressionism only through,
31:11 Holly Frey? quote, 'attaining the ends that school stands for, the rendition of light and atmosphere.' While the art centers were agitated by the Cubists and post-Impressionists, the Montreal artist retained the individuality of her style and went on improving along her own lines, unimpressed and unaffected by the latest movements in art."
31:31 Tracy V. Wilson? So while Impressionism wasn't novel in France anymore, when McNicoll started her career as an artist, it was fairly new in Canada. The first exhibition of Impressionist art in Canada took place in 1892. So McNicoll was part of the first generation of Canadian Impressionist painters and really helped to popularize Impressionism in Canada and by Canadian artists. She also helped connect the world of Canadian art to the art worlds of London and Paris.
32:06 Holly Frey? In terms of her paintings themselves, that bit from the obituary about the rendition of light and atmosphere has been echoed by multiple writers and art critics in more recent years. Light and its effects on her subjects are a huge part of her paintings. In Fishing, painted in 1907, two little girls are sitting by a stream, fishing with rods made from sticks. They're under a tree with a broad trunk, and the sunlight through the leaves dapples the surface of the water and the grass around them. There are bright spots of sunlight on their white dresses, a white hat on the ground next to them, and a glass jar filled with what looks like lemonade.
32:47 Holly Frey? Toward the top-left corner of the painting, there are two ducks, one white and one brown, swimming through a brightly sunlit part of the stream that's uninterrupted by shade.
32:57 Tracy V. Wilson? Another example is In the Shadow of the Tent, which is the one that earned McNicoll the Women's Art Society Prize in 1914. Two women are at the beach, under a white tent. Outside of the tent's shadow, the sand is bathed in golden sunlight, and there are sketchy figures of children in the far distance by the water. In the shadow are two women, one in a white dress and the other in a blue dress covered by a bluish-white jacket or smock. The one in blue is on a stool, looking through the box of art supplies, while the one in white is on a blanket on the ground, looking at a sketchbook. The contrast between the light and the shadow is really dramatic.
33:40 Tracy V. Wilson? The painting almost feels cooler in the part that the tent is shading.
33:45 Holly Frey? The models' names aren't specified, but it's possible that the woman in blue is Dorothea Sharp, and that the woman in white is Marcella Smith. Marcella Smith was also an artist, a bit younger than Dorothea and Helen. Marcella would have been about 27 when this was painted, while Helen would have been about 34, and Dorothea about 40. Marcella was also close to Dorothea and Helen, and the three of them often worked together. Dorothea and Marcella continued to work and travel together after Helen died.
34:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Another quality that often comes up in discussions of Helen McNichols' work is a sense of quiet or distance. It's rare that her subjects are looking out from the canvas, and when they are, they are rarely looking directly at the viewer. Often, they seem to be really immersed in what they're doing, or in their own interior worlds. In paintings with more than one person, they often aren't interacting with one another. Those two little girls fishing have their eyes on their own poles. The two women under the tent are focused on their art supplies and their sketchbook and not on each other. A few of her paintings are of spaces that are made for people but without any people
35:02 Tracy V. Wilson? in them. So, a round table out in a cottage garden with a tablecloth and a tea set, or a corner of a bedroom that has a fireplace and a vanity, and one's bright streak of sunlight on the floor but no one in there. This is speculative, but a number of art critics have interpreted this as possibly connected to McNichols' deafness.
35:27 Holly Frey? Another source of speculation is how to interpret McNichols' work in terms of gender and gender roles in the early 20th century. Some of her paintings are of women working, like "The Apple Gatherer," circa 1911. It shows a woman pulling a branch of a tree toward her so she can pick an apple from it, with her cheeks flushed in the heat and her back slightly arched. "The Fruit Vendor," circa 1910, depicts a woman sitting by her fruit stand in an alley, resting her forearms on her knees with a cloth awning providing her and her wares a little bit of shade. In "A Welcome Breeze," which was painted around 1909, a woman in a blue skirt and white top is taking in the laundry from
36:10 Holly Frey? the line as it billows in the wind. But there are also lots of women, often dressed in white, doing things that were considered typical and appropriate for middle-class women of the era: reading next to a child in a pram, or reading alone, or doing some kind of embroidery or needlework, or seemingly just waiting while dressed for an event.
36:32 Tracy V. Wilson? Sometimes these are interpreted as conventional paintings of women in conventionally feminine settings, the kinds of scenes McNicoll would have had access to as a woman painter at a time and place in which women didn't have the freedom to just do whatever they wanted while still being seen as respectable. But there are some critics who have interpreted some of her work as more subtly subversive. One is the chintz sofa painted around 1913. In it, a woman in a white dress is doing some kind of needlework on a chintz sofa, supported by a brownish-red throw pillow. The window behind her has beige drapes and there's a blue vase containing some silvery foliage behind her.
37:17 Tracy V. Wilson? This could be interpreted as just what it looks like, woman in a white dress doing needlework. But that chintz sofa is one that was in McNicoll's London studio, and it's possible or even likely that the model is Dorothea Sharp. If that's the case, then this painting is of McNicoll's partner in both her work and her life, who was herself a working artist and vice president of the Society of Women Artists. This painting is in their shared professional working space. Maybe it was intentional, but also maybe not. By this point, the white dress had also become an emblem of the suffrage movement.
37:57 Holly Frey? We have almost nothing from McNicoll herself on how to interpret her work, or what she intended when she painted it. As we said earlier, there aren't many surviving letters or other writing with her own point of view. She did keep a scrapbook full of clippings, mostly of images of women and children. Most of these images were by other women artists, a lot of them by American illustrator Jessie Wilcox Smith, who maybe needs her own episode at some point. She also had a clipping of past podcast subject Elisabeth Vigé-Lebrun's 1789 self-portrait with her daughter. A couple of write-ups on McNicoll describe her as focused on maternal imagery, and that's
38:40 Holly Frey? not really true in her own work, but images of mothers and children are very common in this scrapbook.
38:46 Tracy V. Wilson? Helen McNicoll was well-known as an artist during her lifetime, and she was prolific. When the Art Association of Montreal had a memorial retrospective 10 years after she died, it included more than 120 of her works. Some of these were sort of sketches and figure studies, but that is incredible, considering that less than 15 years passed between the beginning of her formal study of art and her death. Only two of her works were acquired by museums or galleries during her lifetime, though, possibly because she just didn't need to sell paintings to make a living. The National Gallery of Canada acquired her painting "The Stubble Fields",
39:30 Tracy V. Wilson? which she painted around 1912 and is reminiscent of Claude Monet's haystack paintings. The St. John Art Club bought "The Farmyard", which was painted around 1908. That one is less detailed with thicker brushstrokes than some of her other work, and it shows a woman in a billowing skirt standing next to a white farmhouse with a reddish roof.
39:53 Holly Frey? Most of Helen McNicoll's work continues to be held in family and private collections, which is probably part of why it took 10 years to stage a memorial exhibition. But the fact that little of it was publicly available meant that Helen McNicoll faded from prominence soon after her death. In Canada, she was also overshadowed by other later artists, like the group of landscape painters known as the Group of Seven, who came to prominence a few years after her death. Additionally, the first histories of Impressionism in Canada really overlooked the contributions of women artists, even though McNicoll had been one of the artists to really help popularize Impressionism in Canada.
40:35 Tracy V. Wilson? That's changed a bit in more recent years, though. A comprehensive retrospective of McNicoll's work was held at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1999. In 2023, the Art Gallery of Ontario also hosted an exhibition called Cassatt McNicoll: "Impressionists Between Worlds", which featured the work of both McNicoll and American Impressionist Mary Cassatt. It doesn't seem like McNicoll and Cassatt ever actually met, but they were contemporaries and they were compared to one another during their lifetimes. There were also some parallels between McNicoll's life and work and that of past podcast subject Berthe Marisot, who we covered on the show in 2021.
41:19 Holly Frey? The first retrospective of McNicoll's work to be held in Quebec just happened. That was Helen McNicoll: An Impressionistic Journey, held at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, and that closed on January 5.
41:33 Tracy V. Wilson? And about what was unearthed last year, McNicoll's painting The Bean Harvest had been shown during her lifetime and then it had gone missing. Many years later, British artist and art dealer David Taylor saw a piece in an auction house that was titled in their records as Women in the Fields, and it was described as "in the style of Helen McNicoll." He bought this for 2,000 pounds. It was in an inexpensive frame that seemed to date back to the 1960s when he bought it, and when he removed the frame, he saw McNicoll's signature. Experts from the BBC TV show Fake or Fortune authenticated the painting and estimated its
42:15 Tracy V. Wilson? value as more than 300,000 pounds, or more than half a million Canadian dollars. This piece was sold at auction through Sotheby's in November, and the buyer's identity has not been publicized, at least not as of when we are recording this. That is Helen McNicoll.
42:37 Holly Frey? Do you have a bit of listener mail?
42:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Yes, this is from Sarah. Sarah wrote in after our most recent unearthed with an email titled, "Horn Bostel Socks Is My Jam." It says, "Dear Holly and Tracy, I wanted to write after hearing your most recent unearthed episode to say thank you for highlighting the musical instrument research taking place in Zimbabwe and South Africa." My ears definitely tuned in when you brought up this project and I had a good chuckle when you mentioned the horn bustle sax classification system. As an organologist, someone who studies the history and development of musical instruments, I don't often hear my somewhat obscure field of study referenced in podcasts and very rarely does anyone mention horn bustle sax.
43:23 Tracy V. Wilson? I use this classification system in my work at a musical instrument museum where we study how instruments develop over time and how these developments have changed instruments, sound and music overall. It is also a helpful tool for helping to understand the similarities of instruments from around the world. Although instruments may look different or be made from different materials, they can all be connected or grouped together through the ways they make vibrations. We mentioned in the segment that some of the instruments in the artworks looked to be played by particular genders. This is another interesting part of organological research. Today, we don't really think of instruments as being gendered, even in Western musical practice.
44:06 Tracy V. Wilson? There was a long tradition of restricting instrument performance to one gender. Women in particular were restricted in their musical practice with winds instrument performance being forbidden. Imagine the scandal of a lady blowing into an object while guitar and keyboard instrument performance were encouraged. Obviously, I'm a big musical instrument geek and I could go on for ages, but overall, the thing I love most about my field is how musical instruments connect people and cultures and that by studying instruments of the past, we can learn not only about the music of today, but also how people have interacted with this music across time. For a pet tax, I've attached pictures of my big goofy couch potato of a white boxer
44:50 Tracy V. Wilson? named Miss Betty White. Betty has heterochromia and we are often stopped on the street by people commenting, "Oh, she has two different colored eyes." It gives me great pleasure to look down at Betty and respond, "Oh, Betty, you lost a contact again." There's usually a bit of confusion before they realize I am teasing, but her mismatched eyes are always a good conversation starter. The photos are from one of our recent walks through a park in Edinburgh. There's definitely a before and after moment in the pictures after our big white dog jumped in a big mud puddle, one of her favorite pastimes. Thank you again for all you do. I have a PhD in SYM IHC and I look forward to all your episodes. Keep up the
45:30 Tracy V. Wilson? good work. All the best, Sarah. Thank you so much for this email, Sarah, and for this very adorable set of dog pictures.
45:39 Holly Frey? Goodness.
45:40 Tracy V. Wilson? I love that you have a dog named Miss Betty White. I love that Miss Betty White has two different color eyes. So cute.
45:50 Holly Frey? Betty White would be very honored since she was a big advocate for animals.
45:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. I think there's not as strict gendering of musical instruments today, but I do remember when I was in, you know, middle and high school, the age of taking orchestra and band classes in school. There was definitely a perception that flutes were for girls and brass instruments were for boys.
46:28 Holly Frey? Yeah, I would say the same.
46:30 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. And I don't know if that is still true at all because I have not been to a high school marching band competition in many, many years at this point. And it was like not strictly adhered to. There were, there were, you know, kids that played different instruments than one might have expected based on their gender, but it did seem like that was a kind of unwritten rule.
46:58 Holly Frey? Yep.
46:59 Tracy V. Wilson? So anyway, thank you again so much for this email, Sarah. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, we're at [email protected] . If you want to subscribe to our show, we're on the iHeartRadio app and we are anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts.
47:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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48:13 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
48:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Long hours, work deadlines, family commitments. You give so much to everyone else, isn't it time to invest in yourself? The University of Arizona Global Campus is built for working adults with flexible online degree programs designed to fit your life. Your previous education, training, and eligible experience may even help you earn college credit. At UAGC, you can take one accelerated course at a time, helping you move toward your goals in five- and six-week class formats. Visit uagc.edu today.
49:16 Speaker 06 Livright, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of the Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Seitz proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
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Previous SYMHC Classics: Jelling Stones Next Ada Coleman and the Savoy’s American Bar Page updated November 4, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated