BACK TO COLLECTION

The Honourable Marianna Beauchamp Jodoin

Donated to the Senate of Canada by the Quebec chapter of the Voice of Women.

In 1965, Quebec artist Sylvia Daoust (1902-2004) was commissioned to create a portrait bust of former senator the Honourable Marianna Beauchamp Jodoin, M.B.E (1881-1980). As it depicts just the Honourable Jodoin’s head and shoulders, it is at once life-sized and modestly scaled. The textured surface of the sculpture gives the appearance of hand modelling, although it is in fact cast in bronze. Traditional in material and process, despite the artist’s adherence to the long-established conventions of bronze portraiture, the depiction is intimate and vivid and represents a modern interpretation of the sitter.

The creation of this work of art brought two barrier-breaking women into relation: the artist, Daoust, who was born in Montréal in 1902, is recognized as Quebec’s first professional female sculptor and had a nearly four-decade long teaching career in Québec City and Montréal, thus influencing generations of artists. Jodoin, born in Montréal 21 years before Daoust, was appointed to the Senate for the Saurel, Quebec, division on May 19, 1953, following her nomination by former prime minister Louis St. Laurent. Jodoin was the first francophone woman and the first woman from Quebec named to the Senate, and she held the role until her resignation on June 1, 1966. That the work was donated to the Senate by the Quebec chapter of the Voice of Women, Canada’s oldest feminist national peace group, closes the loop on a creative initiative driven by strong, visionary women.

Daoust’s inclination for the three-dimensional form was evident early on, in her childhood penchant for making small figures in clay. Starting in her teenage years, she studied in Montréal at the Conseil des arts et manufactures and at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal. After study in Europe, Daoust returned to Canada in 1930, and for the next 13 years she taught drawing, anatomy and sculpture at the École des beaux-arts de Québec. At the end of this tenure, she moved back to her birth city to become professor of wood and stone sculpting at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal, a position that she held until 1968. Daoust was one of the original founding members of the Retable, an organization that advocated and promoted the standards of religious art within the Roman Catholic churches in Quebec, but her practice was diverse, and at times she created work using the language of abstraction. Her work in portraiture, such as this portrait bust of Jodoin, often represented a merging of her classical and modernist inclinations.

At this moment in history, bronze commemorations of questionable heroes are being removed from view, sometimes quietly, and sometimes in loud protest. The relevance of the monument is under profound scrutiny, and many argue that it is a form too tied to legacies of empire, capitalism and patriarchy to have a place in our changing world. With this quiet bronze portrait of Jodoin, commissioned and executed in the context of early feminist enterprise, we are reminded that language, even that of the monument, is open and available to reinterpretation and new, meaningful expression.

---

Michelle Jacques was the Chief Curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia from 2012-2021. As of March 2021, she works at Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.