About this work
A woman sits for the only portrait Franklin Carmichael ever painted. *Woman in Black Hat* is a rendering of an unidentified subject from 1939, executed in oil on canvas — a medium Carmichael largely reserved for his landscape work. The subject's face is composed and self-contained beneath the commanding presence of the black hat, which anchors and darkens the upper half of the composition. Carmichael brought a softer palette and more decorative sensibility to this work than his Group of Seven peers might have mustered — there is no rugged nationalism here, but something quieter and more inward: the studied attention of a designer's eye turned, at last, toward the human face.
Besides a few studies in his notes, Carmichael produced only this single portrait in oil on canvas in his entire career, and art historian David Silcox praised the painting, writing that it "makes one wish that [Carmichael] had tackled more." Painted in 1939, the work sits late in Carmichael's career — well after the Group of Seven had disbanded, and during a period when he had left commercial art to head the Graphic Design and Commercial Art Department at the Ontario College of Art, and had helped found the Canadian Group of Painters. That *Woman in a Black Hat* emerged from this phase makes it feel like an act of private curiosity — a painter known for skylines and shorelines turning his formal rigour toward a single human presence. His final painting, *Gambit No. 1* (1945), was his only abstract work , suggesting these late years were ones of genuine artistic restlessness.
This is a painting for those drawn to restraint over spectacle. It would settle well in a reading room, a study, or any space furnished with quiet intention — somewhere that rewards looking rather than glancing. The dark tones of the hat pull the eye in, and the composition holds it. For collectors drawn to Canadian modernism but curious about its edges and anomalies, this is exactly that: a singular departure, complete in itself.
