Mary E. Wrinch

In 1893 Mary Wrinch showed early promise by starting studies at the Ontario Central School of Art and Design (since 1996, Ontario College of Art & Design) when she was sixteen years old. There, she studied under Robert Holmes (1861-1930), Laura Muntz (1860-1930, after 1915, Laura Muntz Lyall), and George Reid (Canadian, 1860-1947), with whom she would study privately in 1895-1897, and whom she would marry in 1922. Wrinch was based in Toronto from 1889 until her death in 1969, and took part in her first public exhibition when she was a student at the Ontario Central School of Art and Design when her Decorative Panel was included in the twenty-third Annual Exhibition of the Ontario Society of Artists in 1894 (no. 92). She exhibited actively in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa in the first decade of the twentieth century. She exhibited more than eighty-five works on forty-one occasions at the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts from 1895 to 1941. She also exhibited one-hundred, twenty-two works on thirty-eight occasions at the Ontario Society of Artists from 1894 to 1943, and at the Art Association of Montreal five times between 1903 and 1909. As a Torontonian with an extensive local and provincial exhibition history, and a prolonged commitment to teaching art at the Bishop Strachan School (Toronto), the artist and the work are part of the history of Ontario's art during a period of significant development.