Canada’s 1st female battlefield artist to be featured in upcoming ‘Heritage Minute’ | CBC News

For over two years, Canadian Mary Riter Hamilton toured Europe’s post-war battlefields, creating hundreds of paintings evoking the devastation and loss of the first world war. She was a 50-year old widow, propelled by a sense of empathy and a duty to bear witness.

Mary Riter Hamilton was Canada’s first female battlefield artist, creating the largest known collection of First World War art. For a century, her name and work were largely forgotten. But now, she is being featured in an upcoming Heritage Minute, airing later this month. 

“She took it upon herself to take all of her tools and went to live in the trenches and in the ruined cities at the time, and painted as many scenes as she could possibly reach,” said Irene Gammel, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and author of I Can Only Paint: The Story of Battlefield Artist Mary Riter Hamilton.

“She had never really been given her due, so this Heritage Minute is just the perfect opportunity to pay tribute to her,” she said in an interview with Jonathan Pinto, host of Up North. 

Heritage Minutes,  produced by the non-profit Historica Canada, are 60-second videos documenting significant moments and people in Canadian history. The dramatic retelling of historical figures and events can be seen on TV, in movie theatres and online and have become the subject of both satire, and academic study. 

Mary Riter Hamilton first applied to document Canada’s war efforts during the conflict but was continually denied by the Canadian government because of her gender.

She was later commissioned by the Amputation Club of British Columbia, now known as The War Amps, to paint for The Gold Stripe magazine shortly after the war ended. Arriving in 1919, she completed more than 300 paintings depicting scenes from Amiens, the Somme, Ypres, Passchendaele and Vimy Ridge. 

A story of perseverance

While she was born in Teeswater, Ont., in 1867, Riter Hamilton had strong ties to Thunder Bay, Ont. She met and married her husband Charles Watson Hamilton, in the northwestern Ontario city where they ran a dry goods store. But by the age of 26 she had lost both her husband and a stillborn infant. 

In 1954, she died in British Columbia after years of mental health issues, her biographer Irene Gammel believes she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder from her war experiences.

Her ashes were sent back to Thunder Bay, Ont. to be buried alongside her husband in Riverside Cemetery. In 2008, retired military officer Fred Johnson discovered that her grave had no headstone. As a fan of her work, he spearheaded a campaign and raised the money for a granite headstone, inscribed with both her and her husband’s name. 

In 2016, Riter Hamilton was inducted into the City of Thunder Bay’s Women’s History Month Exhibit . One of her paintings, featuring a mother nursing a child is displayed at Thunder Bay City Hall. She bequeathed Maternity to the city, in the memory of the child that she lost while living in Port Arthur. 

“It was that experience that also gave her that empathy that she communicates so powerfully in her war paintings,” Gammel said.

Fred Johnson continued to lobby for recognition and in 2020, Riter Hamilton’s Trenches on the Somme (1919) was featured on a Canada Post stamp.

“What I also appreciate about that particular painting, and that’s a strategy she uses in many paintings, is that she takes us right inside the trench,” Gammel told CBC’s Up North on Wednesday.

“She takes us into the position of the soldiers at the time who would have been in these trenches … and so the result of this is pretty extraordinary.”

The title of Gammel’s biography was inspired by a quote attributed to Riter Hamilton: “I cannot talk about all of this trauma that I’ve seen. I can only paint.”

She never made money from her battlefield paintings and in 1925, Riter Hamilton donated the collection to Library and Archives Canada. She was awarded France’s Ordre des Palmes académiques in 1922.

Anthony Wilson-Smith, president and CEO of Historica Canada, described Riter Hamilton’s story as one of perseverance in a release announcing the Heritage Minute.

“Mary Riter Hamilton faced a lot of discrimination as a WWI artist, a job generally reserved for male painters,” Wilson-Smith said.

While it’s hard to capture a person’s life and accomplishments in only 60 seconds, Gammel said she’s hopeful the Heritage Minute will highlight Riter Hamilton’s contributions to Canadian history. 

“The story that we are hoping to get across is the story of her talent, her dedication, but then also the price that she paid for what she did – and I think the Minute does that beautifully.”