The Chintz Sofa
Artist: Helen McNicoll
Media: Oil on canvas, 81.3 x 99.1cm
Date & Location: c. 1913, Private Collection, Thornhill, Ontario
Image Source: Art Canada Institute / Institut de l’Art Canadien
Significance to Queer Art History
Helen McNicoll was an Impressionist painter. She was born in Toronto and started her artistic training in Montreal. In 1902 when she was 23 years old, McNicoll moved to London, England where she attended the Slade School of Art. She would spend the remaining 13 years of her life in England with frequent visits to Canada.
In this oil painting, McNicoll shows us her partner, Dorothea Sharp, embroidering on a sofa in the West London home and studio where they lived together from 1908 to 1915. The two women met at the Cornish School of Landscape and Sea Painting when McNicoll moved from London to St. Ives, Cornwall in 1905.
When The Chintz Sofa was painted, Sharp (also an Impressionist painter) was the vice-president of the Society of Women Artists. This society worked to support women artists navigating the patriarchal barriers of the art world.
It has been suggested that this painting might show Sharp crafting memorabilia for the women’s rights movement. Some of the articles I encountered while writing this post suggest that reading this painting as a moment of feminist intervention rather than feminine domesticity is preferable. To this interpretation, I would add that that feminine-coded domesticity and feminist intervention have often been crucially intertwined rather than opposed. Feminine-coded crafts like textiles have often been engaged for activism and the gatherings surrounding this work have provided opportunities for connection and valuable discourse.
Perhaps this could be more meaningfully read as showing a moment of femme activism.
Resources
Kristina Huneault. Impressions of difference: the painted canvases of Helen McNicoll. Art History, 27(2), 212–249, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0141-6790.2004.02702002.x*
Samantha Burton, “Helen McNicoll: Life & Work,” Art Canada Institute. https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/helen-mcnicoll/key-works/the-chintz-sofa/.
Sara Angel, A Transatlantic Sensation: The Impressionism of Helen McNicoll, Art Canada Institute, May 15, 2026 (newsletter).
Andrea Jo-Wilson, “Queering St. Ives,” Foyer, August 28, 2023. https://readfoyer.com/article/queering-st-ives.
*I used this article for some information that I did not find elsewhere. It is also useful for the way it considers possibilities surrounding how McNicoll’s experiences as a deaf artist intersected with her experiences of gender and Impressionism. It does not, however, recognize McNicoll’s partnership with Sharp as romantic. As well, although it offers useful information for thinking about McNicoll and her family in the context of colonialism in Canada, it does not address the harms of colonization. Please read it critically and use this background information to do your own reflecting on the complexities of McNicoll’s life, identity, and place in history as a queer settler artist.