Born
Efa Prudence Heward in
Montreal, Heward was the sixth of eight children and was educated at private schools. She showed an interest in art at a young age, possibly encouraged by her artistically-inclined mother and sister Dorothy, and started drawing lessons at age twelve at the
Art Association of Montreal school with
William Brymner and
Maurice Cullen. During
World War I, Heward lived in
England where her brothers served in the
Canadian Army while she served as a volunteer with the
Red Cross. Returning to Canada at war's end, she continued her painting, studying at the
Art Association of Montreal. As a student in the advanced class, in 1924, she won the Women's Art Society Prize for painting and her work was given its first public showing at the
Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in
Toronto,
Ontario. However, it was still an era when women artists were given little credibility and it wasn't until 1932 that Heward's first solo exhibition came at the W. Scott & Sons Gallery in Montreal. Wanting to refine her skills, and drawn to the great gathering of creative genius in the
Montparnasse Quarter of
Paris, France, between 1925 and 1926 Prudence Heward lived and painted in Paris. While studying at the
Académie Colarossi, she frequented Le Dome Café in Montparnasse, the favorite haunt of
North American writers and artists and the place where Canadian writer
Morley Callaghan came with his friends
Ernest Hemingway and
F. Scott Fitzgerald. In 1929, in Paris, Heward met
Ontario painter
Isabel McLaughlin with whom she became friends She was invited to exhibit with the
Group of Seven and through it became friends with
A. Y. Jackson with whom she would go on sketching excursions along the
Saint Lawrence River. She did a number of landscapes, with a particular attachment for Quebec's
Eastern Townships. She joined the executive committee of "The Atelier: A School of Drawing Painting Sculpture" in 1931. During the Second World War she designed war posters. but her struggle with
asthma and other health problems eventually slowed her down. A 1939 automobile accident curtailed her abilities further but she still produced some outstanding portraits until 1945 when her health had deteriorated to the point where she had to give up painting. She died two years later, while seeking medical treatment in
Los Angeles,
California. ==Work==