A War Artist with Chutzpah: Molly Lamb Bobak

War Artist: Did you know the first woman war artist is from Vancouver? Molly Lamb Bobak joined the Canadian Women's Army Corps in 1942. Her mentors included A.Y. Jackson and Jack Shadbolt.

"You joined the navy if you wanted to be chic because they had the nicest uniforms, but I preferred the army,'' she says. " My mother drove me to the old Vancouver Hotel at the intersection of Georgia and Granville, and waited outside while I signed up."

After washing dishes and other menial chores for three years she had the moxy to hitchhike to Ottawa to convince the director of the National Gallery to get her a job as a war artist.

"I was an optimist more than a feminist, and I had to work very hard to become a war artist, to the point of making a damn nuisance of myself,'' she says.

She sketched and painted her fellow officers in Canada during the war and was sent to post-war Holland. She made sketches in the field and then was set up in a studio she was supposed to share with another war artist, Bruno Bobak. He wasn't happy about having to share a studio with a woman and said they'd divide the studio down the middle to avoid one another. However, the two ended up sharing the rest of their lives together they still live in Fredricton New Brunswick.

I highly recommend this article by Marty Klinkenberg from the Telegraph Journal (which I sourced the quotes from above) on Molly Lamb Bobak and Bruno Bobak, particularly the story of the meeting with Lord Beaverbrooke. The article also states:

"Bruno Bobak and Molly Lamb were engaged through a similar government initiative three decades later, and most of their works are now part of the collection at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. In all, Canada enlisted 32 official artists in the Second World War, and between them they produced approximately 5,000 drawings.

Together, the Bobaks accounted for 241."

Their work from the war is in several collections around Canada and you can buy some of their recent war from their website. One of my favorite of Molly's paintings is an image of one of her fellow CWACs, Private Roy.

The description of the work from the Canadian War Museum website states:

"Bobak sketched Private Roy several times in a canteen in Halifax, Nova Scotia, before undertaking the finished portrait. In a 1985 interview the artist commented: 'The painting has caught her at a point in time; she'll always be young and she'll always be Private Roy to those who see her.'"