O-1009

•

painting (portrait)

•

The Honourable Jeanne Sauvé

Portrait of Speaker Jeanne Sauvé

Jeanne Sauvé’s political career was a series of firsts. Born in Saskatchewan in 1922, she became a journalist with the CBC and was among the first women to fill a prominent role in the male bastion of political commentary. When elected to Parliament in 1972 in the Montreal riding of Ahuntsic, she became the first female Quebec MP to be appointed to the federal cabinet. In 1980 she was the first woman elected Speaker in the House of Commons, and in 1984, the year Brenda Bury painted her portrait, she was the first woman appointed to the role of governor-general of Canada. Sauvé died in 1993.

Brenda Bury

Brenda Bury was Born in England but lives and works in Toronto. She has spent most of her life in Canada, and on both sides of the ocean has painted portraits of many leading figures, including Queen Elizabeth II, Margaret Thatcher, Lord Mounbatten, John Diefenbaker, and her own husband, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist John Polanyi.

She studied in England, and her work is deeply influenced by the great names of European portraiture, such as Van Dyck, Reynolds and Sargeant. She has said that portraits are about “representing the internal being of an individual.”