No Man’s Land: The Life and Art of Mary Riter Hamilton by Kathryn A. Young and Sarah M. McKinnon (review)

With No Man’s Land, Young and McKinnon provide the first biography of western Canadian artist, Mary Riter Hamilton. Relying on correspondence and gleaning newspaper advertisements and society pages, Young and McKinnon emphasize Hamilton’s professionalism, describing the artist’s businesslike decisions about where to train and how to market herself as well as the economic realities she faced: a reliance on patrons, the effects of financial hardship, and the necessity of teaching. Young and McKinnon also describe the geographical realities of Hamilton’s work. Having spent much of her youth in Manitoba, a province to which she would periodically return, Hamilton had to leave the Great Plains, studying and exhibiting in Europe and eastern and coastal Canada, to gain credibility as an artist. The book is at its best when describing these milieux in which Hamilton lived, from artists’ neighborhoods in Berlin and Paris, to Winnipeg, a rapidly developing city just beginning to establish a culture of fine art in the Canadian interior.

Given the title of the book, I had hoped for a stronger engagement with recent scholarship about women as artists and women’s role in constructing narratives of the Great War. For instance, the authors cite World War I historian Jay Winter, but I was left wondering how Hamilton situated herself within the tension between modernism and traditionalism that Winter focuses on in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. How might Hamilton’s letters or critics’ responses locate her battlefield paintings both within this wider discourse and her wider body of work? What insights could be gained by putting Hamilton’s experience into conversation with work on Great War women writers who, lacking frontline fighting experience, were perceived as not having the authority to speak about war? Were the conditions, products, and reception of Hamilton’s work—whether post-war or peacetime—shaped by gendered motivations as well as by gendered limitations? These questions are largely addressed with bibliographic references rather than sustained discussion.

Young and McKinnon synthesize secondary and primary sources, including previously un-published material, to present a biography that will be appreciated by art historians interested in an important Canadian painter. However, the reader interested in a deeper analysis of why women’s artistic production was important, particularly in the context of World War I, would be best served by pairing No Man’s Land with other social and critical cultural histories.