Painting created in early 1900s returned to family
New friendships were made and part of an incredible family history shared when a small painting purchased in Ontario some 30 years ago was returned to the artist’s 80-something-yearyoung granddaughter in Barrington on Sept. 5.
“It was meant to be,” said
Betty June Smith, whose grandmother Hattie B. Fox had created the painting “Surf Off Emerald Isle” almost a century ago while on the small island off the coast of Shag Harbour that was once the family home.
The painting’s journey back to Nova Scotia began when it was purchased at an antique market in Ontario.
“About 30 years ago my mother ... she always liked going to antique markets,” said Linda Tremblay. “She would pick out little things she loved and she found this painting there. She really liked it because of the inscription on the back that said Nova Scotia.”
When Linda and her husband John moved to Nova Scotia in 1982, “my mother felt I had to have it because it said Nova Scotia on the back,” she said.
Over the years, the little painting adorned the walls in Tremblay’s home.
“Every once and a while I’d picked it up and read the inscription on the back: Surf Off Emerald Isle, Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia by Mrs. Hattie B. Fox Uncle Ashford’s Mother, December 1950.”
The personal inscription touched Tremblay.
“At one point I tried to figure out a way to find the family,” she said, but a busy life raising three children put the task on hold.
Earlier this summer Tremblay once again had the painting in her hands.
“I thought I really need to get this back to the family. It might have some meaning to them,” she said, so she posted a photo of the painting along with the inscription on the Facebook group, We Love Nova Scotia, thinking it may be an avenue to find the family.
“All of sudden there were hits from people,” said Tremblay. “That was my grandmother, my great-grandmother, my greatgreat-grandmother ...”
It didn’t take long for Tremblay to connect with Smith’s daughter Beverley.
“I was so surprised to hear it existed,” said Smith, who was hoping the painting hadn’t already been spoken for and was excited to find out when it hadn’t been.
“This is a wonderful gift, there is so much family history connected to it,” Smith said. “It is so thoughtful for Linda to make sure it went to someone in grandma’s family.”
FAMILY HISTORY
Smith’s family history is one of islands and lighthouses that began when her great-grandfather Captain Ephraim Larkin (Hattie’s father) bought Emerald Isle for the family home.
Born in 1874, Hattie lived on Emerald Isle as a child, said Smith, marrying Arthur Fox in 1895 and later moving to nearby Clark’s Harbour, where Arthur was school principal. Hattie returned to Emerald Isle for summer and Christmas holidays while grandfather Larkin was still living.
The Fox couple had seven children including Smith’s mother, Evelyn Richardson, who won the Governor General’s Award in 1945 in non-fiction for her memoir, We Keep a Light.
In one of her other literary works, “My Other Islands,” Richardson writes about her mother: “Hattie had been given six lessons in oil painting from a travelling teacher ... and managed to paint a few small pictures a year ... copied from lithographs of flowers and landscapes but altered and improved to her own taste.”
To Smith’s knowledge, her grandmother Hattie painted two original works while on Emerald Isle, including Surf Off Emerald Isle and a three-panel painting on tin of the wrecked steamer.
Express breaking up in the surf on the rocky shore right below the lighthouse on Bon Portage Island a few miles to the westward.
“These two are the only pictures I know of that she painted from life,” she said, noting Surf off Emerald Isle had to be done before 1950 as her grandmother would not have been visiting Emerald Isle at that time, and the inscription was not in her grandmother’s hand.
CONNECTIONS TO LIGHTHOUSES
It was on Bon Portage that Smith’s connection to lighthouses began, where her parents Evelyn and Morrill Richardson were lighthouse keepers. A second gift to Smith by Tremblay — who is a wool fibre artist — of the Bon Portage Lighthouse, sparked memories of growing up on the island for Smith, and fun with her sister Anne and brother Laurie.
“This window was closer to the roof than that,” she said while looking at the artwork. “One thing we used to like to do was shimmy out the window, along the roof down onto the back porch and down the screen door on to the ground. I was so little I needed help getting out of the window and onto the roof but whatever Anne and Laurie would do I had to do. They’d pick me up and get me going.”
Smith lived on Bon Portage until she was 20. Completing a secretarial course in 1951, she got her first job in 1952, married in 1953 to a lightkeeper’s son, the late Sydney (Sid) Smith, and made the move to the Cape Sable Lighthouse station where the couple lived, worked and raised their family until 1979.
Where her grandmother Hattie had moved to Bedford in 1917, Smith said she didn’t really get to know her that well but recalls she was a kind, very loving person.
Hattie was also an accomplished seamstress creating clothing for her children that were “little works of art.
She was very supportive of her children and her husband, said Smith and would often tell stories and sing ballads as she worked.
She passed away in 1961.