THE PORTRAITS OF MARIE CECILIA GUARD

Excerpt: Passionate Gesture

 

Just as Ken was finding the truest expression of himself in his Toronto drawing, Marie, at this time, was returning to exploring portraits, the genre which had always attracted her most. The challenges faced by the artist who attempts this now rare art form are considerable. Indeed, Maurice Grosser, in his book The Painter's Eye, has observed that "...the portrait is the most trying on the nerves and the least certain of success of any work a painter can undertake. Not only must he paint his sitter, he must convince him as well. And he must entertain him at the same time." Marie's friend, fellow artist, Langley Donges, who had intended to specialize in portraits, finally settled on landscapes "'because a landscape doesn't have a lot of critical relatives to tell you how it should be painted.'" As Grosser points out, where other painting is done "in privacy of mind", the portraitist is continually confronted with her "most captious critic". The painting of a portrait becomes a tug‑of‑war: who has the more power, the painter to reflect a perceived impression or the sitter to impose her own understanding of her image. It is interesting to speculate that one arresting portrait, which Marie painted of her mother in the thirties, may be representative of a struggle by a sitter to remain private. Nellie's fascinating complex expression here appears vigilantly closed to her daughter--and the viewer. In another century, Marie's studio might have been a meeting place, where family or friends entertained the sitter. But in this period Marie was on her own. Shy and no longer used to conversation, she chose to simultaneously entertain and create a work that satisfied her and her sitter.

 

Her most available subjects were her two growing daughters. Against a background of verdant beech leaves, she painted a piquant picture of Peri as a child of nine, dressed in scarlet and holding a book. *** Sometimes, as in her portrait of Lisa in 1955, she used pastels, a medium admirably suited to her sense of colour and graceful approach. At fourteen, Peri, somewhat more quiescent as a model than her sister, was hooked into an antique blue-black velvet lady's riding jacket and asked to hold her breath; at sixteen, wearing a billowing white satin ball gown, she rested within the arms of the Victorian chair her mother had bought specifically for the models who sometimes came to her studio, while her mother worked on her largest (48" X 35") and most ambitious portrait. Inevitably, children make the most difficult models, restless and reluctant. Often, with her daughters, perhaps because they were so familiar to her, Marie failed to capture the depth of expression she secured with aquaintances and strangers. Sometimes she fell into the temptation of settling for a sweetness that was lacking in wit. In her 1962 portrait of Lisa in a pink sweater [illust], however, she succeeded in evoking a young woman bristling with dignity but betraying a lurking inner sorrow.

 

It was when she expanded to accept commissions that she was confronted with the problem that one's own perception of oneself differs greatly from that of others. For instance, sitters often complain of being represented as looking too old because they live in their memories of themselves, while a portraitist paints the person as she actually appears at that time. Generally, in her portraits, Marie secured a victory, or at least a truce in her representations. She coped successfully with the whims of sitters such as an affluent neighbour, whose greatest wish was that the topaz pendant she wore (a gift from her husband) be prominently displayed. Only once, after completing a commissioned portrait of Lillias Alexander, a personal friend of Ken and Marie, and Toronto's head librarian, did she have the painful experience of being rejected. This portrait was painted as a commission for the Toronto library system, however, it was an unsatisfactory commission from the beginning. She had been asked to hurry her work and she was required to please too many people. Neither the sitter's sister nor the library board liked it and it was subsequently returned to Marie. After its return, Marie attempted many times to rework it, but found that the more times she tried to improve it, the less satisfied she was. This awkward and disappointing episode no doubt contributed to her eventual cessation of professional portraits.

 

In her portraiture Marie strove to evoke a balance of character and resemblance while also creating a picture which rested on its own merit. She tried to reveal character through pose and clothing, as well as through the expressive qualities of face. Indeed, her preference, whenever possible, was to integrate her subject into nature. Surrounding her always was some of the Renaissance painters' sense of glory. The stalking of soul she found to be very exciting, she said, quite tense. One had to keep the sitter stimulated and alive, which distracted her from painting. All the while, over numerous sittings, she got to know her subject, observing and eliciting the intricacies of personality, asking herself which aspects could best project the thinking, feeling person. Characteristically, she aimed to bring forth the sitter's best. With great self-discipline, she held back working up the eyes, (the reflection of the person's spirit and to her the key to the work) until she had a general effect. But she revelled in it all--"the human body is so fluid, such line, such a complex picture, so changing. Flesh colour has such depth and translucence. Renoir's flesh tones are especially fine. The sheen of hair."  But always, lurking in the background there was the danger Roger Fry detected in a Sargent portrait, "I cannot see the man for his likeness." Marie guarded against this because she felt that, as well as being a representation, a portrait should be a satisfying work in an abstract way.

 

As time went on, increasingly Marie was confronted with the question: "Why a time-consuming painting rather than a photograph?" Her own answer was that she was aiming for "the very personal warm, breathing, changing, qualities of her model. Things that a photo cannot get." And here are two critics augmenting this: first Grosser once again: "The human eye is not the innocent eye of the camera; the world of nature has more dimensions than the simple camera's vision can record."  And second, Eric Newton, in his book, The Meaning of Beauty: "The camera's eye, unlike the artist's was incapable of sorting the objects confronting it into categories ‑ especially the categories of interesting and uninteresting, significant and insignificant." In other words, painting is uniquely able to interpret its subjects because of its superior ability to use degree in the elements of time and emphasis.

 

One small portrait of her seven year old daughter Peri, painted in 1952 while the girl was ill, typifies the expressive nature of Marie's work. There is a medieval quality to this portrait of a pale, suffering, pensive child. It could be seen to reflect Marie's own waiting and endurance of a difficult period in her life, while suggesting the new maturity to her portrayal of character, which was to develop over the following decade.

 © Peri Phillips McQuay

 

*For Marie Cecilia Guard's Chronology and Exhibition History, click here.