Anne Savage
BIOGRAPHY
Anne Savage was born in Montreal in 1896. She studied with William Brymner and Maurice Cullen at the Art Association of Montreal, and, in 1920, she joined the Beaver Hall Hill Group of artists, which, unlike the Group of Seven, included women. There she met A.Y. Jackson with whom she had a lifelong artistic and sentimental relationship.
Occupied as a teacher for most of her career, she continued to travel the country widely on sketching excursions. Although Savage was influenced by members of the Group of Seven and exhibited with them, her sense of colour and design was a departure from theirs and was marked by a lyrical and passionate response to the land.
SUBJECTS
Savage paints the Quebec countryside. “The backcountry was always perfectly beautiful”, she said. “And it’s wonderful the way the land rolls away in great sweeping folds. The forms, they run in long laps right up from the sea. Field after field. It was like a patchwork quilt.”
TECHNIQUES
Through the poetic use of colour and line, Anne Savage evokes a joy in capturing the splendour of the Quebec countryside along the shores of the Lower St. Lawrence.
COLLECTIONS
Her paintings are to be found in the National Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Source: Anne McDougall, Anne Savage, Borealis Press, Ottawa, Canada, 2000; Anne Newlands, Canadian art from its beginnings to 2000, Firefly books, Canada, 2000
