Caroline Helena Armington (1875–1939) was a Canadian born artist.
Armington worked in a number of mediums including a large body of etchings. Her main practice consisted of painting and printmaking. In addition to her career as an artist, she also trained at Guelph General Hospital as a nurse.
Armington has worked in a variety of media, including numerous etchings. Armington has worked in a variety of media, including numerous prints. It was during her early years of school that she first met her future husband, artist Frank Armington. His work is exhibited at the Belgian Library in Brussels; British Museum, London; Cleveland Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ontario; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; Peel Art Gallery Museum and Archives, Brampton, Ontario; and the Museum of Fine Arts, San Francisco.
She insisted on signing her name to the artwork, despite the eras having diminished the commercial potential of female artists. As a student and briefly working as an art teacher in Toronto, she met another Forsters student, Frank Milton Armington. Caroline Armington and her artist husband Frank Armington (1876-1941) spent most of their working lives in France.
In 1929, the Armingtons had their first group exhibition at the Toronto Art Gallery (now the Art Gallery of Ontario), and Caroline had a solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Caroline Armington is of Canadian descent but has been carving mainly in Paris since 1900. Caroline Helena Armington (USA, 1875-1939) Pont-Neuf signed 33 x 42 cm etching and partner (pair) in margin. One of her commissions was the 1924 U.S. government-ordered gift of a White House print to First Lady Grace Coolidge, persuading T. Eaton to submit some of her work to art galleries in the United States. In Toronto, and possibly Winnipeg; and a one-man show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., usually a cramped space showing the work of American artists, not French Canadians.
At the Library and Archives of Canada (LAC), the archives collection of the Canada War Memorials Exhibition includes the work of five artists, of whom Caroline is the only woman.
Research and publications in the late 20th century revived interest in the Armingtons, especially Caroline, and effectively integrated them into the ongoing construction of Canadian art history, which was more comprehensive and detailed than previous reports.
The LAC library includes 30 articles on Caroline, mostly exhibition catalogs, from the 1919 British Royal Academy of Arts exhibition on the aforementioned war dead show to the 2006 exhibition catalog at the Caroline and Franks Workers’ Club in Halifax on the North Shore of Lunenburg. The Canadian art company The Armingtons, and especially the Caroline, were known for their strong business acumen. List of 257 prints (out of 551 printed by the artist) from the collection of the Peel Art Gallery.
In 1899, Armington was working as a nurse at Miss Alston’s Hospital in New York. Caroline Helena (Wilkinson) Armington was born on September 11, 1875 in Ontario, Canada. Armington left Paris in 1939 and moved to New York, USA. Caroline Wilkinson, aka Carrie, attended public and high schools in Brampton and began studying art in Toronto around 1890 with her father’s cousin John Wycliffe Lowes Forster.
After 1892, she taught in Halifax and became a nursing student in Guelph, Ontario. In addition to being an artist, she trained as a nurse at Guelph General Hospital. In 1925 and 1926, the Armingtons were sent touring the United States and exhibited in private galleries and art spaces in New York, Detroit, Toledo, Ohio, and Des Moines, Iowa. The Armingtons had close ties to a group of American artists, writers and intellectuals living in Paris.
Caroline took on private care, offered art lessons at home, and attended meetings at the Winnipeg Chapter of the Association of Women Artists of Canada. In 1918, she was commissioned to produce engravings for a portfolio of Canadian war memorials. She kept herself lower than her husband, did not participate in local exhibitions and was never mentioned in art reviews.
He exhibited work in the 1932 All-Canada Exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. From 1905 to 1910, the couple returned to study at the AcadA (c) mie de la Grande ChaumiA’re and AcadA (c) mie Julian in Paris.
The Armingtons viewed landscapes, cities, and monuments as landmarks. Types of work include paintings, drawings, watercolors, sculptures, costumes, jewelry, furniture, prints, photographs, textiles, arts and crafts, books, and manuscripts. His brilliant canvases are full of feelings, where love is felt with all the senses.
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