This is Charlotte Schreiber

Charlotte Mount Brock Schreiber (21 May 1834 – 3 July 1922) was an English-Canadian painter and illustrator, among the first of Canada’s notable female painters.

Schreiber, née Morrell, was born in Essex, England. Before marrying and emigrating to Canada in 1875, she studied and found expertise in her indigenous country. At Mr. Carey’s School of Art in London, she trained below John Rogers Herbert, R.A., who specialized in historical paintings and portraits. She then studied anatomy and acquired a great understanding and wave for the human form: she wrote in 1895, “The human hand, the finger nail, the foot, every ration of the perky body, the parts of a flower, are divinely beautiful … it is a joy to paint them as they are in reality”. Equipped bearing in mind this training, Schreiber achieved professional achievement early in her career, exhibiting at the Royal Academy at the age of 21 and receiving commissions to illustrate several books. In 1875, she married her cousin Weymouth Schreiber and moved to Canada gone him and his three children, settling in Toronto. She quickly got operational in the Toronto art scene. In 1876, a year after she emigrated, Schreiber was elected to the Ontario Society of Artists, and the following year, she became the first girl to teach at the Ontario School of Art, today`s OCAD University, where she was plus the only woman to serve upon the school’s council. She along with played a role as a founding aficionada of the Women`s Art Association of Canada.

In 1880, Schreiber became the first woman elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, which had been strictly and exclusively male until then. However, despite this great achievement, she was not tolerable to attend meetings or engage in policy-making, and she remained the only woman on academe until 1933 (53 years later), when the second woman, Marion Long, was elected. The National Gallery of Canada holds the painting that she submitted toward her Academy diploma. Titled The Croppy Boy (The Confession of an Irish Patriot), it is based upon the Irish ballad “The Croppy Boy”, which was popular during the Irish disorder of the 1790s. It tells the checking account of a youth who stops in a church to welcome his sins as he prepares for the battle of Wexford. His audience, however, is not a Catholic priest, but a disguised British soldier who arrests him and takes him for execution. The painting shows the youth on his knees, earnestly addressing the cloaked soldier, whose uniform is visible to the viewer but not to the penitent. The two figures are united by the red in their clothing, but the soldier occupies the shadowy portion of the canvas, with the youth on the lighter side, perhaps suggesting Schreiber’s sympathies.

Schreiber’s contributions to Canadian art are immense. She painted scenes of secret life, and she based her paintings on the things she motto and the people she knew personally. For instance, her 1876 painting Don`t Be Afraid (previously titled Springfield upon the Credit) is based on close observation of her stepchildren playing in the snow upon the banks of the Credit River. Because of her insistence and loyalty to realism, Schreiber is recognized with introducing the realist style to Canada. Further, her experience in England allowed her to carry higher than European stylistic changes in art to Canada, leading directly to the country’s artistic maturity. Schreiber’s be active epitomized the realist interest through the upset of both neoclassicism and romanticism. This can be seen in her Portrait of Edith Quinn, showcasing the naturalism portrayed in contemporary literature while maintaining a detailed, realistic portrayal of the subject.

Her art was influenced by literature, including her further on illustrations of poems by Chaucer (The Legende of the Knight of the Red Crosse), Edmund Spenser (The Faerie Queene, illustrated 1871), and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (The Rhyme of the Duchess May, 1874).

After a long and booming career in Canada, Schreiber moved back up to England in 1898 after the death of her husband, and she died in Paignton, South Devon, England in 1922.