Randolph Hewton, Isabel McLaughlin, Gordon Webber, Audrey Taylor, Prudence Heward and Rody Kenny Courtice, around 1935, from the Isabel McLaughlin fonds. Courtesy: Queen's University Archives
Exhibitions
Isabel McLaughlin (1903-2002): Painter, Patron, Philanthropist
Samuel J. Zacks Gallery
9 July - 30 September 2007
Following her death in 2002 at age 99, Queen's University Archives, Kingston, acquired the extensive personal papers of Isabel McLaughlin, daughter of Canadian automobile magnate Sam McLaughlin. Trained as a painter, throughout her long life she nurtured a wide circle of friends, among whom numbered Canada's prominent artists of two generations, including members of the Group of Seven, the Beaver Hall Group and Painters Eleven. Well educated, well travelled, and passionately committed to the arts, Isabel McLaughlin was a prominent actor in the Canadian artistic scene, and her papers - totalling several thousand documents - are a remarkable record of her life and times.
Through a rich range of materials - manuscript letters, photographs, catalogues, postcards and typescripts, as well as original works of art such as artist-made Christmas cards and sketchbooks - Isabel McLaughlin (1903-2002): Painter, Patron, Philanthropist will evoke the breadth of her relationships with such pivotal Canadian artists as A. Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, Prudence Heward, Yvonne McKague Housser and Kazuo Nakamura; her practice as a pioneer Canadian abstractionist; her role in the arts community, including her early involvement with the Toronto Art Students League and the Canadian Group of Painters; and her patronage of artists and of arts organizations such as Toronto's Heliconian Club and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery.
Janet M. Brooke
Organized by the Art Centre, this exhibition is guest-curated by Heather Home, Archivist, Queen's University Archives.