Prudence Heward (July 5, 1896 – March 19, 1947) was a Canadian figure painter, known for using acidic colour, a sculptural treatment, and giving an intense brooding quality to her subjects. She was a charter member of the Canadian Group of Painters, the Contemporary Arts Society and the Federation of Canadian Artists. Although she did not show her work with the Beaver Hall Group, she was allied with many of its artists in her aesthetic aims and through friendships. Biography Born Efa Prudence Heward in Montreal, Heward was the sixth of eight children and was educated at private schools. She showed an interest in art at a young age, possibly encouraged by her artistically-inclined mother and sister Dorothy, and started drawing lessons at age twelve at the Art Association of Montreal school with William Brymner and Maurice Cullen. During World War I, Heward lived in England where her brothers served in the Canadian Army while she served as a volunteer with the Red Cross. Returning to Canada at war's end, she continued her painting. In 1924, her works were given their first public showing at the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in Toronto, Ontario. However, it was still an era when women artists were given little credibility and it wasn't until 1932 that Heward's first solo exhibition came at the Scott & Sons Gallery in Montreal. Wanting to refine her skills, and drawn to the great gathering of creative genius in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris, France, between 1925 and 1926 Prudence Heward lived and painted in Paris. While studying at the Académie Colarossi, she frequented Le Dome Café in Montparnasse, the favorite haunt of North American writers and artists and the place where Canadian writer Morley Callaghan came with his friends Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In 1929, in Paris, Heward met Ontario painter Isabel McLaughlin with whom she became friends and upon her return to Canada, would join with her and other artists on nature painting trips. In the same year 1929 her career got a major boost when her painting, Girl on a Hill, won the top prize in the Governor General Willingdon competition organized by the National Gallery of Canada. She was invited to exhibit with the Group of Seven and through it became friends with A. Y. Jackson with whom she would go on sketching excursions along the Saint Lawrence River. She did a