Impressions of difference: the painted canvases of Helen McNicoll

This paper examines the works of Canadian impressionist painter Helen McNicoll (1879–1915), analysing them as creative inventions that mediate the irreducible gap between cultural symbolization and experience. McNicoll was a painter of women and girls, and the essay centres on the difference that gender makes in her canvases. Femininity is not the works' only operative axis of distinction, however. McNicoll's nationality and, most significantly, her deafness, conjoined with gender as constitutive and structurally overlapping elements of her pictorial production. The artist's applications of paint to canvas are visible renderings of an ambiguous relation to symbolization wrought by this conjunction. In this context, McNicoll's choice of pictorial style is especially apposite, and the paper explores the way in which impressionism's ideal of direct correspondence between experience and representation resonated forcibly with the ideologies of femininity and language available to a deaf woman painter at the beginning of the twentieth century. Kristina Huneault is Associate Professor and Graduate Programme Director in the Department of Art History at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the author of Difficult Subjects: Working Women and Visual Culture, Britain 1880–1914 (Ashgate, 2002), and is currently working on a book that examines visual inscriptions of gender in art by nineteenth‐century Canadian women.