GLR May-June 2025

through their artistic practices. Put otherwise, their works of art, often accomplishing what language could not, enabled their makers to say the unsayable. Please note that my focus on lesbian artists and their erased histories is not necessarily a feminist choice on my part. The queer artists that we know of working in Canada during this pe riod simply happen to be lesbians. This is probably due to the paucity of research on queer art history in Canada before World War II, or to the fact that lesbian relationships were not crimi nalized to the degree that male homosexual relations were. Same-sex intimacy between women was less of a public con cern, and female homosexuality was not added to the Canadian Criminal Code until 1953. In the first decades of the 20th cen tury, it was still possible for women’s intimacy to be catego rized as “romantic friendship,” a relatively normative model that enabled some same-sex couples to live together and share a bed over an extended period, effectively cohabitating as a mar ried couple without legal recognition (Faderman, 1991). The Impressionist painter Florence Carlyle (1864–1923) is the first homosexual artist on record in Canadian history. Her œuvre reveals an unrelenting interest in the erotic and emotional lives of women, especially of her lover Judith Hastings. Take, for instance, The Threshold of 1912 (Figure 1), a chef-d’œuvre of Canadian Impressionism. The canvas portrays Hastings in the traditional garb of a bride during a moment of quiet intro spection, clutching her hands to her chest with her eyes solemnly shut. In a marital context, the “threshold” refers to the act of the groom carrying his bride over the threshold of a door way to their new home, symbolizing the dawn of a new stage in life. Carlyle had met Hastings a year earlier during a trip to Wimbledon, England, to visit her brother. Hastings, a woman she described as “pink as a rose,” was her brother’s neighbor, and when they met the pair became immediately infatuated with one another. They would remain together for the rest of Car lyle’s life, and Hastings quickly became the artist’s preferred model and muse. When Hastings came to visit Carlyle in On tario at her family’s home the following year, she painted Hast ings as her bride, signifying the very threshold of their life together. In my research, I discovered that the nature and significance of their relationship had been bowdlerized by art historian Susan Butlin in The Practice of Her Profession (2009). Butlin didn’t even mention the possibility that the two women could have been lovers. Feminist art history has at times failed to ac knowledge the possibility of women’s love for other women, perpetuating an unfortunate framework of lesbian erasure. When justification for this expungement is provided, the lack of documented sexual activity is nearly always cited. On this si lence in lesbian history, gender historian Martha Vicinus puts it best: “Silence is not empty, nor is absence invisible.” What Vici nus means, of course, is that lesbians often strategically em ployed silence for safety, and that our historiographical methods should in turn reflect this fact. As one journalist quoted in But lin’s text commented: “[Of] Florence Carlyle herself little has been written. The reason is ... she has not permitted it.” The Toronto-based sculptors and life-long partners Frances Loring (1887–1968) and Florence Wyle (1881–1968) similarly shielded themselves from biographical investigation, and fur ther ensured that no letters were left behind. Loring and Wyle May–June 2025

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