Mabel Killam Day

Artist Bio: Mabel Killam Day (1884 – 1960)

Mabel Killam Day was born in Yarmouth in 1884 to a prosperous family. She began her formal training under John Hammond at Mount Allison Ladies College in Sackville, NB, graduating in 1904. In New York, she studied under Robert Henri at the Art Students League along with fellow students, Edward Hopper and George Bellows. In 1910, Killam married Frank Parker Day, a Rhodes Scholar, and moved to Pittsburg. There Mabel Killam Day became involved in the artistic community and joined a group of women artists named the Experimentalists. The group valued tradition and academic training yet sought to place essence before object, expression before representation, and interpretation before imitation. Her husband’s declining health prompted a return to Nova Scotia in 1933. Mabel continued to paint in her studio at the family property on Lake Annis in Yarmouth County. She died in Yarmouth in 1960.

She has exhibited widely throughout the United States and Canada including the Montreal Museum of Fine Art (1910), and the Art Institute of Chicago (1927). In 1937 a major solo exhibition of her work was organized by Zwicker’s Gallery. It was a retrospective exhibition, including a number of major paintings reflecting her distinguished artistic career. Tragedy struck when the interior of the gallery and Mabel Day’s paintings were gutted by fire.

Day was a woman artist at a time when it was unfashionable. Also, she lived a major part of her life in the Maritime Provinces, also unfashionable at that time. However, the quality of her painting and the significant recognition it received in the United States bears witness to the significant contribution that Day made to the artistic development of Canada in the first half of the twentieth century.