Impressions

Molly Peacock’s Flower Diary could be just another book about the long line of female artists, several with double-barrelled last names, whose works went unrecognized by patriarchal critics for so many years. Such overlooked women figure prominently in Carol Bruneau’s Brighten the Corner Where You Are, a fictionalized account of Maud Lewis’s life, and in Katherine Ashenburg’s Sofie & Cecilia, a novel that reveals the unknown talented wives of the celebrated Swedish artists Carl Larsson and Anders Zorn. The Art Canada Institute has added Helen McNicoll, an early Canadian impressionist who was long forgotten, in its Online Art Books series. And the McMichael Canadian Art Collection’s new exhibition Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment, curated by Sarah Milroy, showcases the work of women who had to fight for recognition in the interwar years. (The show runs until mid-January 2022.) But...