Sarah M. Robertson

Sarah Robertson was born in Montreal, studied art under William Brymner, Maurice Cullen and Randolph Hewton. Part of the group known as the Beaver Hall Group, members included Randolph Hewton, Mabel May, Edwin Holgate, Lilias Newton, Anne Savage, Nora Collyer, Ethel Seath, Kathleen Morris and Prudence Heward.

Robert Ayre wrote in The Montreal Star of her retrospective of 1952, “She loved the rhythm and warmth and color of the earth, and its fruits and flowers, and painted them with love. A picture like On Lake St. Louis, with its shafts of light striking dramatically on stark house and tree, does not seem like Sarah Robertson. She was close to the Group of Seven too, in October, Ottawa Valley, with its trees bowing before the gale, but much more intimate and personal, more herself. And most herself, I think, in the pictures like the Toronto Gallery’s In the Nuns’ Garden, Hamilton’s Coronation and in her happy sketches. The show follows her development from the hooked rug flatness of the delightful Blue Sleigh to the almost tropical sumptuousness of our own Museums (Montreal Museum of Fine Art.) Fort of the Sulpician Seminary, noting here and there acknowledgements of the styles of her friends as she came to the fullness of her own style.