number of landscapes, with a particular attachment for Quebec's Eastern Townships. She joined the executive committee of "The Atelier: A School of Drawing Painting Sculpture" in 1931. During the Second World War she designed war posters. In 1933, Prudence Heward was a charter member of the Canadian Group of Painters, but her struggle with asthma and other health problems eventually slowed her down. A 1939 automobile accident curtailed her abilities further but she still produced some outstanding portraits until 1945 when her health had deteriorated to the point where she had to give up painting. She died two years later, while seeking medical treatment in Los Angeles, California. Works Though Heward also painted landscapes and still lifes, she was primarily a painter of human subjects. As Julia Skelly points out in Prudence Heward: Life & Work, Heward preferred the term "figures" to portraits, and most of her figurative paintings are of women who often return the viewer's gaze, and who are "realistically rendered rather than unrealistically idealized". These include nude subjects which was sometimes controversial in the 1930s. Art historian Charmaine Nelson has critically examined Heward’s depictions of black women she painted. Her work was influenced by schools of European modernism and her application of these principles and styles was more than merely formal. They provided her "with a dynamic visual vocabulary for depicting modern Canadian women in both rural and urban contexts". Works by Prudence Heward can be found in the collections of several Canadian galleries including the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa and the National Gallery of Canada. After her death In 1996, her cousin, politician Heward Grafftey, wrote "Chapter Four: Prudence Heward" for the book Portraits of a Life. By Woman's Hand (1994), a National Film Board documentary film by Pepita Ferrari, examines her life and that of two fellow painters, Anne Savage and Sarah Robertson. On July 2, 2010, Canada Post released a commemorative stamp and a souvenir sheet in honour of Heward as part of its Art Canada collection. The two paintings featured were At the Theatre (1928) and Rollande (1929). In 2021, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection organized Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment and included eight of her paintings. References Further reading Julia Skelly. Prudence Heward: Life & Work. Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2015.