Mildred Valley Thornton (1890–1967)

When Mildred Valley Thornton exhibited her work in Regina in 1921, a reporter for The Morning Leader cautioned readers that “Mrs. Thornton is not an extremist, although her work inclines towards the modern school of painting.”  The vibrant colours and bold brushwork seen in The Touchwood Hills and Thornton’s other early works, including Fireguard, c.1929, were unusual in Regina, reflecting the influence of the Group of Seven and her instructor at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), J.W. Beatty (1869–1941). Thornton received confirmation that she was on the right path when, in 1932, The Touchwood Hills became the first work by a Saskatchewan woman artist to be included in an annual exhibition of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) in Ottawa.

Born in Dresden, Ontario, Thornton developed an interest in art at an early age, in part through her aunt Evelyn Beatrice Longman (1874–1954), a renowned American sculptor. In 1911, after completing a three-year program in art at Olivet College in Michigan, Thornton moved to Regina, where she taught art and art history privately until 1915, when she married John Henry Thornton, a baker. After briefly studying at the Ontario College of Art, where she was drawn to the work of Tom Thomson (1877–1917), praising “his perfectly arranged compositions, his keen perception and unerring precision with subjects, his clear bars of prismatic purity and careful analysis of tone,”  Thornton replaced Inglis Sheldon-Williams (1870–1940) as an art instructor at Regina College, continuing to teach painting and drawing there until the early 1930s.

In 1921, Thornton’s watercolours and oils were featured in a solo exhibition sponsored by the Local Council of Women’s Fine and Applied Arts Committee. In addition to landscapes, Thornton painted portraits, including one of her Regina College colleague Joseph Henry Lee-Grayson (1875–1953). She regularly exhibited in Regina throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. A major exhibition of more than forty of her paintings, mainly Saskatchewan subjects, was presented at the Hotel Saskatchewan in 1930. After achieving local recognition, Thornton would exhibit works at the Art Association of Montreal and the Ontario Society of Artists in 1933. Two paintings, Foreclosed, c.1934, and Bulwarks of the Prairie, c.1934, were included in the 1934 RCA exhibition.

Thornton first painted Indigenous people at the Regina Fair in 1928. Soon afterward, she began travelling throughout the province, sketching her models from life and usually completing portraits in one sitting. Unlike the romanticized Indigenous portraits of James Henderson (1871–1951), Thornton’s portraits, such as Cree Child, 1929 (later dated 1934 by Thornton), reflect an ethnographical interest more akin to the work of Edmund Montague Morris (1871–1913) and Wilfred Langdon Kihn (1898–1957) as she engaged more closely with the subjects of her works.

Thornton left Regina in 1934 after her husband’s business went bankrupt. She continued to paint Indigenous subjects throughout Western Canada, amassing a large collection of more than two hundred works, which she attempted without success to donate in its entirety to a Canadian museum. The collection was sold off piecemeal following her death in 1967.