Laura Muntz Lyall (June 18, 1860 – December 9, 1930) was a Canadian Impressionist painter, known for her sympathetic portrayal of women and children. Life and work Laura Adeline Muntz was born at Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England in 1860, but her family emigrated to Canada when she was a child. She grew up on a farm in the Muskoka District of Ontario. As a young woman, Muntz's interest in art led to her take lessons in painting from William Charles Forster of Hamilton and to live and work at his school. Starting in 1882, she began to take classes at the Ontario School of Art in Toronto where she studied with Lucius Richard O'Brien, and later with George Agnew Reid. She studied briefly at the South Kensington School of Art in 1887, then returned to Canada to continue her studies with Reid. In 1891, she embarked on a seven-year period of study in Paris, attending the renowned Académie Colarossi. Her preferred subject was children. From 1893 on, her handling of paint was Impressionist. To stretch her limited financial resources, she gave private English lessons, and shared various apartments in Paris from 1893 to 1897 with another student-teacher at the Académie, the American painter, Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley (1860-1958). Hawley likely taught Muntz her watercolour and pastel technique, and they travelled together in 1893 to Rijsoord in the southern Netherlands where they painted. Muntz's work, exhibited at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois as well as at various French exhibitions such as the Société des Artistes Français, resulted in her paintings being reproduced in periodicals such as L'Illustration, and reviewed in Toronto`s Saturday Night, and in England`s the Studio, and in many other magazines and newspapers which gave her increased prestige and successful sales. But, in 1895, while she was still in Paris, the unmarried Muntz was called home from a triumphant year abroad to look after an ailing relative. Upon her return, in 1896, the Académie Colarossi, in recognition of her diligence and talent, made her "massière" or studio head. Muntz decided to return to Canada in 1898 and set up a studio in Toronto to teach and paint. In the decade at the beginning of the new century, she was said to be the artist with the greatest versatility among women painters because she painted such a wide variety of subjects. When, in 1906, she moved to