Rita Mount
Rita Mount (1888-1967) – Artist Biography
When Rita Mount was born in 1888 in Montreal, her older cousin Georges Delfosse, son of Mélaine Delfausse and Joséphine Mount was himself an artist starting out at the Institut national des beaux-arts de Joseph Chabert and the Art Association of Montreal with William Brymner and Edmond Dyonnet. Delfosse eventually established a strong enough reputation to found the Canadian Society of Portraits and Oil Paintings or National Art in Montreal and it is here, at the age of ten, that Rita Mount began to follow in her older cousin’s footsteps.
Mount was initially trained in studio drawing alongside such artists as Rodolphe Duguay and Narcisse Poirier. She distinguished herself as an outstanding impressionist painter during outdoor classes offered in the summer by Maurice Cullen and eventually won a two-year scholarship to the Art Association of Montreal, a school and a private museum founded in 1860, which was the ancestor of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. She studied there with William Brymner, who ran the school from 1886 to 1921.
Many outstanding female Quebec artists would be trained at Art Association of Montreal under Mount’s cousin George Delfosse including Émily Coonan, Claire Fauteux, Mabel May, Helen McNicoll, Lilias Torrance Newton, Alice Nolin, Sarah Robertson, Anne Savage, and the young Marian Dale Scott and Regina Seiden, to name only those whose work is represented in the collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Like all those who were considering a professional career in Quebec at the time, Mount would soon supplement her initial training with various study trips abroad. In 1910, at the age of 25, Rita Mount studied at the Atelier Delécluze and at the Cercle international des beaux-arts, in Paris, as well as at the Art Students' League in New York, with Frank DuMond (1865-1951), one of the most influential Impressionist painter-teachers in America at that time. Mount also took painting lessons with John F. Carlson in Woodstock, New York. After her studies, she returned to Canada and opened a studio in Montreal.
In search of inspiring landscapes, she made many trips exploring the continent, to the Pacific coast (Banff in 1934, Victoria, Yellowstone Park and Wyoming in 1937) then to the Atlantic side (Cape Breton, Nova Scotia but also Gaspésie, where she stayed several times). She gained notoriety for her seascapes which were the subject of a solo exhibition at the Art Association in 1934.
Living with her sister Marie Mount on Outremont Avenue, Rita Mount died on January 22, 1967 at the Montreal General Hospital after a short illness . She is buried in the Côte-des-Neiges Cemetery in Montreal.
Key Exhibitions:
From the age of 18, Mount exhibited regularly at the Salons of the Art Association of Montreal and, from 1910, at the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
1917: Exhibition at the Saint-Sulpice library, with Claire Fauteux and Berthe Lemoine.
1936: Collection of Contemporary Canadian Paintings which circulated in the countries of the Commonwealth
1937: Coronation Exhibition, London, UK
1939: New York World's Fair, NY
1943: An exhibition at the Musée de Québec was devoted to Mount’s paintings representing the Gaspé Peninsula and Cape Breton.
1958: Mount organized an exhibition of her works in the company of two other women painters, Irene Shaver and Vivian Walker.
Permanent Collections:
Rita Mount's works are held at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Quebec Museum and the National Gallery of Canada. When he died in 1967, his sister entrusted his archives to the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec. This collection, which also includes correspondence, is one of the rare collections devoted to the career of a woman painter in Quebec.
Artist Specialization: A combination of impressionism and decorative realism. Viewing her 1939 show at the Art Association of Montreal, The Gazette noted, "as a painter Miss Mount’s work is marked by a good sense of picturesque design, fluent brushwork and clean color."
