The Life and Work of Rae Hendershot

 Pearl Rae Hendershot was born on May 1st, 1921, in the industrial city of Hamilton, Ontario. She lived there her entire life. Hendershot drew from an early age. She studied music and was a talented pianist. 

She began art training as a youth at Westdale Secondary Technical School. In 1939, she graduated with a four-year diploma from the art programme. Newly built, Westdale Tech had a modern outlook--faith in industry, labour, and individual merit. It operated as a series of independent workshops—drafting, commercial printing, motor shop, wood working, art. 

Her formative teacher was Ida Hamilton (1887-1974), a pioneer in art therapy, a founding member of the Hamilton Weaver’s Guild, an art educator, an artist. In 1934, Hamilton studied with Hans Hofmann in Gloucester, Massachusetts; her deep commitment to art and learning set her apart. 

Hendershot’s education at Westdale Tech was modelled on avant-garde theories and practices--Cézanne was a guiding presence; design and colour theory were emphasized. As a student, she did abstract colour studies to appreciate the myriad relationships of hues and values. Through her teacher, Hendershot also absorbed an avant-garde identity.  Art was a means of reclaiming selfhood from the modern alienation of experience from reality.  This early formation was lasting. Many of the hallmarks of Hendershot’s mature works remain true to Modernist principles: compositions of bold shape and concise design; subtle values and vivid hue; an abiding painterly and formalist interest in still life. The artistic identity was abiding too, but in the decades ahead it became a deepened state of being, haunted, urgent, and complex.

In 1944, Hendershot entered the drawing and painting programme at the Ontario College of Art, being accepted directly into third year. Her object was to further her studies of the human figure. The atmosphere at OCA was old-fashioned and workman-like; she took classes of interest and never stayed for weekends. Teachers included Rowley Murphy, Manly MacDonald, Archibald Barnes, and John M. Alfsen. Her Self-Portrait c.1945, done as a class assignment, exhibits her technical finesse and aloofness. 

Nevertheless, the encounter with Alfsen was significant. He had studied in Europe and at the Art Students League in New York with Kenneth Hayes Miller where he absorbed the worldly and ambitious figurative art of George Bellows, Isobel Bishop, Edward Hopper and John Sloan. In the Canadian context, (outside of Quebec) landscape was the pre-eminent Modern form, but Alfsen, through the American example, countered this, affirming the vitality of the human subject. The contemporary figure is the central motif of Hendershot’s oeuvre; she developed it in multiple genres, and it would be the subject of her most ambitious works.

On graduating from OCA, Hendershot returned to Hamilton and set-up a studio on King Street. She was active in local art circles, co-founding the Contemporary Artists of Hamilton, attending evening life classes, and contributing to regional juried and traveling shows. In 1950, her painting The Orphanage1947 won Best Figure Subject at the 10th Annual Western Ontario Exhibition in London, Ontario. The work is a smart, stylish performance. Shapes are bold and placed with élan, the brushwork assured and inventive. The Orphanage is a work of understatement, its subject, the absent mother, potent.

In October 1950, Hendershot married Montreal painter and first Director of the Hamilton Art Gallery, T.R. MacDonald. In 1952, the foundation of their home in a Hamilton suburb was poured, an inexpensive structure in a Modern style.  The house was simple in design:  a large studio with living quarters. But the building would not progress as planned; a small secondary foundation was added on. The artist was pregnant. In August 1953, Hendershot’s daughter Katherine was born. Marriage and motherhood provoked the central crisis of Hendershot’s life, her clarity of purpose as a Modern artist being deeply at odds with the role of mother and wife. 

Hendershot’s marriage to MacDonald placed her at the centre of one of Canada’s most respected arts organizations. She was on familiar terms with an entire generation of leading artists and gallerists. An apparent place of privilege, her career did not flourish. Her painting The Judgement of Paris, 1960s, represents in wry and sobering terms the nature of her predicament: the women, beautiful goddesses, are present, engaged, expectant, and yet they go unseen. Paris’ gaze falls short of them, the other man turns away. 

The work of this middle period reveals the frustrations and setbacks the artist faced in sustaining an artistic identity. It was a second beginning, a longer, more awkward apprenticeship. From the early 50s to late 60s her art is stylistically volatile, ranging from earth palettes with modeling, to broad flat shapes in strident colour, to glazing, to painterly techniques. Many works centre on the theme of creative identity and picture women and men in the same composition. Motifs of the artist and model, or musician and muse are recurring. In these canvases, women and men cohabit with tension. In Couple in Park, Music 1960, the underlying essence of the couple’s union is their separateness. In Other Times c. 1964-- closely related to The Singer c. 1971-72—the creative figure, the woman, is shown in a pressing state of isolation and vulnerability, while the men form a group. 

Hendershot continued to exhibit locally and regionally at venues like the AGH’s Annual Winter Exhibition and the Annual Exhibition of the Ontario society of Artists in Toronto. Hendershot pursued two commissions to decorate churches with murals but was unsuccessful. In 1961, at age forty, she had her first solo exhibition, Paintings and Drawings by Rae Hendershot, at the Westdale Gallery, a local establishment run by Julius Lebow.

In the mid 1960s, Hendershot created a series of portraits of members of the AGH Women’s Volunteer Committee. Today three of them are in the AGH collection: Jean Keogh1965, Kate Steiner 1966, and Portrait of Mrs. Robertson1967. The works form an uneasy statement of female identity at the mid-century. Kate Steiner hovers between shadow and light; Mrs. Robertson’s dress, and with it her body, threatens to be engulfed by the surrounding darkness; Jean Keogh’s lipstick is firm, but her air is disappointed. 

The mid 1960s was a time of near defeat; there were stretches when the artist didn’t work. Her mother died in 1967, theirs had been a close relationship, especially in the latter years. In 1968, her father picked a bouquet of roses for her from his garden. It was a signal moment, a loving spur to Hendershot to regain herself--she sat down to paint. The small oil on panel, Roses 1968 is an outpouring of virtuosic painting and complex feeling; like Manet’s late flower paintings, it is a statement of artistic identity, the work and soul of a mature artist. It was a turning point. 

So too, was her public commission Dr. Freda Farrell Waldon c. 1968., the only public commission of her career. Dr. Waldon was the chief librarian of the Hamilton Public Library and first president of the Canadian Library Association. During her tenure, the HPL became the fourth largest collection with the third largest circulation in the country. One of the features of the portrait is the striking naturalness with which Waldon inhabits the robes of honour. She is resplendent, wise, canny—a modern-day Athena. Here was a subject whose identity the artist could both aspire to and engage with on modern terms. Waldon is portrayed as a woman of thought and reflection, but also one who is subtly active. She tips her head, interrupting the direct passage of our gaze from her lap, to her shoulders, to her head.  She is a woman with her own purpose, freely defying expectations, a woman not to be too easily gauged.

The period beginning in the late 1960s and culminating in 1974 with her solo exhibition at the AGH represents an extraordinary creative outpouring. In these years, Hendershot accomplished three of the major works in her series on Demeter and Persephone and reconceived the way she approached genre painting and portraiture. Her daughter was now grown up and had gone away to school; her husband was coming to the end of his career at the AGH and would retire in 1974. Her family responsibilities were less persistent; she had longer days in the studio. 

Hendershot had hoped for public work, but it did not materialize. In her mature phase, she transferred and intensified these ambitions to a project of her own making. The major Demeter and Persephone works—Demeter and Persephone, c.1969-70, 1974, The Return of Persephone c. 1970-74, The Etruscans 1974, Woman with Sketchbook 1975-76—elicit social insight from intimate experience, an ethos shared by contemporary feminism which recognized private life as a site in which cultural inequities were played out. 

In taking up a familiar classical theme, Hendershot engages the Western tradition of history painting. In the Early Modern Era, artists frequently centred the narrative in the scene of rape and abduction, thereby producing a drama that situated male action at its core. In Rubens’ painting in the Prado—The Rape of Proserpina 1636-37-- Pluto is the focal point. Sexual violence is interpretated as masculine passion; horror is erotized. Proserpina is not a child, but a ripe sexual being.  In the 19th c., Lord Leighton shifts the scene to the Return of Persephone; he depicts the mother and daughter’s reunion occurring under the goodly auspices of male authority vested in the figure of Hermes. 

Hendershot’s Return of Persephone is a startling alternative vision. She shows the primacy of the female bond at the centre of the drama. In the myth, Demeter will not be reconciled to the masculine order and, by her love and fury, fundamentally alters it. Hendershot has set the scene not at the heroic climax, but in the pause of its immediate aftermath. The reunion is conceived with subtlety and insight.  Rather than easily joyous, it is a moment of vulnerability when experiences of death and trauma are reclaimed by the forces of life. Where the Rubens and Leighton pieces ultimately celebrate, this work disturbs. Persephone is unequivocally a child, the undone belt of her coat, a sign of horror and violence. 

In Hendershot’s The Return of Persephone the women are doubly vulnerable and this second aspect, their isolation, functions as a pointed social critique. In the canvas, the artist represents a scene of powerful female experiences, and yet the single other figure in the picture, a man, looks away. Hendershot portrays a world in which the substance of women’s lives threatens to go unseen. 

Many of the works in Hendershot’s 1974 exhibition were interpreted as portraits and viewed as distinct from the larger Demeter and Persephone paintings, but as traditional portraits, these works are ambiguous. None of them were commissioned; in fact, Hendershot paid the models for their work. Hendershot employed the formal conventions of traditional portraiture, but she used them to frame an alternative social reality. The binary of artist and muse is undermined: all participants are at work, the portraits are, in many senses, a collaboration. At the same time, Hendershot is the author and artist, and her work a kind of activism. In a world in which women’s experiences go unseen, it is her purpose to render them seen. Many of the portraits and genre scenes in her exhibition were painted very quickly. While they recall the tradition that inspired them, the paint handling is light, responsive, restrained, the compositions concise, even spare. The women are not called upon to always exist in heroic roles.  They are approached in a more prosaic light and this attitude reveals Hendershot's moral courage. In her paintings, women are given the occasion to be seen living with a private sense of purpose. And this is enough. They do not need to justify themselves as subjects.

In her lifetime, the 1974 AGH exhibition was the artist’s most important critical success. The show closed in November.  Shortly afterwards, Hendershot was diagnosed with cancer. She underwent surgery and treatment in early 1975. The recovery was painful. In the Spring of the same year, her daughter married and in October her granddaughter was born. Near the end of the year, she began the last of her major works in the Demeter and Persephone series, Woman with Sketchbook (Self-Portrait) 1975-76. It is a work of disguises. Just as the goddess Demeter disguises herself as a common mortal, so to the artist veils her expression with a calm and enchanting scene.  Woman with Sketchbook challenges viewers to see a Modern artist in the disguise of a middle-aged woman, to see raw feelings of rage and isolation under a blanket of snow. 

In the mid to late 70s, inspired by her abiding interest in Titian, the artist experimented with greater modeling in her portraits, creating ambitious works like Shannon Kyles 1977 and Katherine 1978. In Spring 1978, she had her final solo exhibition, Rae Hendershot: New Paintings and Drawings at the Damkjar-Burton Gallery in Toronto. 

In October 1978, while the couple were on holiday in Paris, France, MacDonald suddenly died of heart failure. The journal Hendershot kept in the days following his death is written in a language of profound dislocation. 

MacDonald had determined, from a young age, to be an artist. As a youth in Montreal, he studied with Edmond Dyonnet and Adam Sheriff Scott; he was close with members of the Beaver Hall Group; he served overseas as a war artist in WWII; he formed one of Canada’s most exceptional public art collections; he painted every day. Art was the core of his identity, a source of certainty. Another certainty he carried was that his wife was an artist in her own right. Throughout their marriage, he photographed her--brush poised, sketchbook in hand, the artist in her studio, the artist in the Canadian landscape, the contemporary Mary Cassatt at home in her world at the Louvre. 

Hendershot spent much of her time in 1979 and 1980 supporting the work on MacDonald’s posthumous retrospective at the AGH; she had hoped that the show would travel more widely. In a note to a friend, dated January 1981, she wrote that his art is “a great affirmation of the joy of being alive.”

When Hendershot returned to the studio, she painted a work representing absence and dislocation. In Self-Portrait, The Artist in her Studio 1979, the artist emerges in the cluttered lower third of the work. The empty studio walls tower above her. The image in the painting is of a mirror and its reflection. The mirror--the frame of which is depicted on the left side of the picture--was used and represented by MacDonald many times in his art.  In life, MacDonald held up a mirror to his wife reflecting her identity as an artist. In the painting, the mirror and the studio walls evoke MacDonald; but they are also not him. The work is a self-portrait, and Hendershot has painted the mirror herself. 

As the title of this last self-portrait states, now she was in her studio. In the years of their marriage, Hendershot’s studio had been peripatetic. The work of sustaining a separate artistic identity had, for Hendershot, required a separate studio space. MacDonald worked in the central studio. She worked in the kitchen, the living room, even the bedroom, and in the studio when MacDonald was away on business. It was an arrangement she had developed, but it was difficult and impractical. 

The late works are an extraordinary artistic flowering. By dimension small, they are a series of virtuosic compositions—still lifes, genres scenes, portraits. More than a restoration of her youthful confidence, the paintings—in spirit and craft--are expansive, nimble, and worldly in their artfulness, the achievement of an artist painting firstly for herself. Still Life with Painting 1984 shows the artist’s extraordinary command of colour and handling. She approaches the medium like an instrument, her performance responsive, inventive, buoyant. The work holds a tension between lightness and sagacity: by apparently effortless means, she evokes the soft wisps of a napkin’s fringe, the brittle edge of a leaf, the glassy surface of a mug, yet this textual brilliance is underpinned by the presence of steadfast attention. 

By the mid-1980s, Hendershot’s health had begun to fail. Oils became exhausting; she worked in watercolour and sketched. Still Life with Small Pitcher, Grapes, Plums and Apple 1987 is one of her last paintings, done in the Autumn before she died. It is a work of life and force.

Her final artwork is a sketch in blue ball point pen on a drugstore pad of paper. Patient and Visitor in Hospital January 1988 was done while the artist was in hospital following cancer treatment. It depicts the primacy of the female bond, even in the face of helplessness; it asserts an artistic identity to the very end. 

Hendershot died in her home on June 21st, 1988, at age sixty-seven. 

In 1990, the AGH mounted a retrospective of her work curated by Ross Fox.