Name/Title
Mayne Island View – Briggs Landing, View from our HouseEntry/Object ID
2018.08.15Description
Painting
This landscape image depicts a scenic view from the artist's home on Mayne Island, Brigg's Landing. Brigg's Landing was likely located on the southern coast of the Island, near Coconi Reef Park, on Navy Channel Road.
The image is framed by tall trees on either side of a beach looking out to the calm water and other islands in the distance. Mayne is an island in the southern Gulf Islands chain of British Columbia, midway between the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island.Artwork Details
Medium
Watercolour on paperSubject Place
Region
Pacific NorthwestContinent
North AmericaContext
Mayne Island was long inhabited by Tsartlip First Nation members and some of their descendants are still living there. Spanish explorers arrived in the late eighteenth century, and Captain George Vancouver briefly in 1794. The island was named in honour of Lieut. Richard Charles Mayne aboard the surveying vessel Royal Navy vessel H.M.S. Plumper, in 1857. Of note, during the mid and later 1800s, Mayne Island was a hub of activity due to its location midway between Victoria and the gold rush in the Caribou, and in the early 1900s became the Pacific Northwest destination for adventurous tourists.Made/Created
Artist Information
Artist
Mabel Foster (1877-1964)Role
PainterDate made
n.d.Time Period
20th CenturyNotes
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Born in Oporto, Portugal, Mabel Foster was a Canadian artist noted for her atmospheric landscape watercolours of the B.C. Gulf Islands. She spent her childhood in Portugal, moving to Sardis in the Fraser Valley in 1908, and later to homestead with her family on Mayne Island. She exhibited with the Island Arts and Crafts Society from 1925 to 1931, and was a member of the Victoria Sketch Club. She exhibited work at the Vancouver Art Gallery in the 1933 B.C. Artists Christmas exhibition and the 12th Annual exhibition in 1943.
Of note, in the 1920s Foster started weaving at which she became so skilled she taught on adjacent islands and also demonstrated at folk festivals in Vancouver. An embroidered quilt, conceived and guided to completion by Foster was raffled off in 1958 to fund the first printing of “A Gulf Islands Patchwork: Stories of Canada's Beautiful Western Islands” (1961). The actual quilt went to Newfoundland, back to Victoria, and some 30 years later returned home. "The Gulf Islands Patchwork Quilt' is now on display at the Pender Islands Museum.
Photography was also a hobby for both Foster and her husband Herbert, a civil engineer, who had worked with "Lafayette" of London. Lafayette is the pseudonym of James Stack Lauder, a successful Irish late Victorian and Edwardian photographer whose business was founded in Dublin. Foster died in Victoria, B.C.Inscription/Signature/Marks
Type
Signature, Inscription, LabelLocation
Signed lower left: Mabel FosterTranscription
In file: Pen and ink inscription cut from verso original paper dust cover :
With our love from Mabel & Bert
View from our house
Mayne Island, B.C.
In file: Pen and ink inscription on damaged paper label with decorative border cut from frame backing:
Mabel Foster
Mayne Island B.C.
"Briggs Landing Mayne...
$....Dimensions
Dimension Description
Visible imageHeight
16.5 cmWidth
25.4 cm
