This book, part of the Canadian Art Library series published by the Art Canada Institute, summarizes the life and works of Helen McNicoll, a Montréal-born painter who found fame as an Impressionist painter in the first decade or so of the 20th century. She produced 150 works in her lifetime, which ended much too soon in 1915, at the age of 35. The book talks about her art education and influences, common themes in her work, and how her work was perceived at home and abroad.

This is an excellent book. Throughout there are full-page and two-page spreads of McNicoll’s paintings, as well as reproductions of paintings from her contemporaries and predecessors to illustrate her influences and what else was being done in the art world as she worked. The writing is clear and uses technical terms but is not totally inaccessible to the interested reader. For the academic reader, it is amply endnoted and has a bibliography. For the art gallery visitors, there is a roundup of McNicoll’s paintings that lists where each one can be found in case you want to organize a road trip.

I did find the writing ever so slightly repetitive in places, but this might have been a deliberate editorial choice to cater to the paging-through reader rather than the cover-to-cover reader, so I do not consider this a significant problem.

I highly recommend this book if you want to know about Canadian art besides the Group of Seven, about Canadian women artists, or women artists in general. ( )