Maxwell Bates is widely considered one of western Canada’s most important modernist artists. Bates’s early biography is characterized by both ambition and adversity. Born in Calgary in 1906, Bates was observant and introspective from a young age; he worked at his father’s architecture firm and developed his art practice whenever possible. Finding the Calgary arts community restrictive and unreceptive, in 1931, Bates moved to the UK, where he engaged with modernist artists and ideas. In 1939, Bates joined the British Territorial Army, a volunteer reserve force, and he would ultimately spend the remainder of the war as a prisoner of war in Germany. Freed in 1945, Bates returned home to Calgary. The body of work he developed after the war demonstrates a deep sense of empathy and heightened intensity. With its naive renderings, Bates’s work is void of sentimentality, instead expressing the human condition with raw, unapologetic directness.

Prairie Woman, painted two years after Bates returned to Canada, is a masterful example of the artist’s deeply empathetic interest in the human experience of survival. Biographer Kathleen Snow remarked that Prairie Woman captures the “intensity of the shock Max experienced on his return to the expanse of the prairies.” Bates found the bright and arid prairie an essentially unforgiving environment, and in Prairie Woman, he observes the toll prairie life takes on the form and spirit of its inhabitants. The woman’s clothes are tattered, her hair windswept and her face coarsely wrinkled. She stares unwavering from the canvas, raising her gnarled, working hand in a confronting gesture. Toughened and aged by the harshness of prairie life, she is an image of resilience, an icon of survival—meeting her daily tasks with steady and calm resolve. Bates has used the same gestural paint application throughout the work; the angular forms of the woman’s skirt and apron are subtly mirrored in the clouds and chickens. Even as the figure stands in stark solitude, there is a sense of synthesis and acceptance of the environment.

Note: Bates painted two versions of Prairie Woman. Both paintings are dated 1947 and are comparable in size, with only subtle differences in the handling of paint. The version in Heffel’s current sale was included in the Art Gallery of Victoria’s 1982 exhibition Maxwell Bates: A Retrospective and is reproduced in the accompanying catalogue as well as in the catalogue of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s 1973 retrospective and in Kathleen Snow’s biography. The other version of Prairie Woman is held in the collection of the Glenbow Museum and was used as the catalogue cover image for the Art Gallery of Alberta’s exhibition Maxwell Bates: A Canadian Expressionist (2004).

Maxwell Bates (December 14, 1906-September 14 1980) was a Canadian architect and Expressionist painter. Born in Calgary, Alberta in 1906, Bates started painting at an early age; his piece ''In the Kitchen'' was painted when he was 15 years old. As a young adult, he worked for his father's architecture firm. His father, William Stanley Bates, was himself a prominent architect in early Calgary; he designed the Burns Building (1912) and the Grain Exchange (1909). In 1931, Bates moved to England. Along with spending some time as a door-to-door vacuum salesman, he did have pieces showing in several exhibits at the Wertheim Gallery. In England he joined a group of promising young artists that included Barbara Hepworth and Victor Pasmore. As a member of the British Territorial Army in 1940, Bates was captured in France and became a prisoner of war in Thuringia. He remained a POW until 1945. This experience was captured in his 1978 book ''A Wilderness of Days''. Bates returned to Calgary in 1946 to work with his father's architectural firm again. His first wife May Watson, whom he married in 1949, died in 1952. He then married Charlotte Kintzle in 1954. In 1949, Bates studied at the Brooklyn Museum with artist Max Beckmann. As an architect, his most notable work was St. Mary's Cathedral, which was consecrated in 1957. Bates moved from Calgary to Victoria, British Columbia in 1962 after suffering his first stroke in 1961. He suffered a second stroke in 1978 and died in Victoria on September 14, 1980. His work has been showcased at art galleries worldwide and retrospective exhibitions have been shown in galleries such as the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Vancouver Art Gallery. In 1971 he received and honorary doctorate from the University of Calgary. In 1980, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada.