Painting Friends tells the story of ten Montreal women who met at art school in the early 1900s and formed friendships that lasted all their lives. They had successful professional careers exhibiting with the Group of Seven and at international exhibitions during the 1920s and 1930s. Despite their achievements they had been largely overlooked by art historians but are now being appreciated as a result of Barbara Meadowcroft's ground-breaking book published in 1999. Painting Friends is the first book-length study of these gifted painters: Nora Collyer, Emily Coonan, Prudence Heward, Mabel Lockerby, Mabel May, Kathleen Morris, Lilias Torrance Newton, Sarah Robertson, Anne Savage, and Ethel Seath.

Painting Friends is back in print to coincide with 4 major exhibitions of the Beaver Hall Women Painters beginning with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (October 24, 2015 - January 31, 2016, then travelling to the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Art Gallery of Windsor, and the Glenbow Museum, Calgary.

Barbara Meadowcroft has had a life-long interest in the arts, particularly literature and painting. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on writer Arthur Stringer, who was her great-uncle, after which she became a Research Fellow at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University. She has written articles on Canadian women painters, including catalogue essays for the retrospective exhibitions of Anne Savage and Lilias Torrance Newton at the Walter Klinkhoff Gallery in Montreal.

Barbara Meadowcraft's profile page

"A very readable book about how our modernist painters were determined to express a sense of Canadian identity." - Quill & Quire