Baldwin, Betty

Betty Baldwin was born in Elizabeth Smiles January 17, 1889, Leeds, Yorkshire, England

She lived in Paris before moving to New York and Portland, Maine. Made quite a few trips to Ogunquit. Married Percy Baldwin the violinist and settle in Quebec City in 1924.

A talented artist, Baldwin was born and grew up in an artistic milieu. She drew her first sketches when she was just six years old. Baldwin got her first real job at the age of ten: she submitted well-liked cartoons to a newspaper. She already had an extremely delicate and complex style, recreating the luxuriant hair of dogs and horses which was all the rage at the time.

In 1924, she settled in Quebec, which she adopted as her country: "This is now my country and I shall never leave it. There is no better place for an artist than Quebec. I adore painting winter scenes and scenes of the Quebec countryside."

No other Quebec artist than Baldwin could have brought picturesque Quebec to the rest of the world with more enthusiasm and introduce the province to the world before the advent of television. Baldwin recounts the history of Old Quebec in hundreds of extraordinary oil paintings and pastels.

A figurative painter, Baldwin painted what she saw, her chosen subject. Her vibrant, airy and radiant paintings depict houses, sites in Old Quebec and the surrounding area in the finest detail.

Not a lot of her paintings are on the Quebec market. In Quebec City, her preferred city, you can find a few in galleries every now and then. For reasons not clear, the best being the period in which she put together her best production, Betty Baldwin never made it big on the market. However, according to her faithful followers it’s only a question of time.

She made more than twentyexhibitions, at the Foyer du Palais Montcalm de Québec.