She gained renown as Canada’s first female battlefield artist, pioneering an empathetic style of painting the trenches and ruined towns of Belgium and France in the immediate aftermath of the Great War.

[4] This early style is best represented by her oil painting Easter Morning, La Petite Penitente (c. 1906) and her watercolour Young Girl in Blue Dress (1911).

[10] In her work, Hamilton embraced the perspective of the underdog, showing sympathy for the socially underprivileged and the suffering, while being bold in transgressing constraining institutional boundaries.

Suffering setbacks when the farm burnt down, the Riter family showed collective resilience, eventually building a new life as homesteaders in Manitoba, where Mary lived for a few years as a teenager.

[14] In 1901, she sailed overseas to study in Berlin, Germany, taking private lessons from renowned Secession painter Franz Skarbina, as well as in Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and France.

[15] In Paris, at the Académie Vitti, she took a portraiture class with Jacques-Émile Blanche, and studied with Luc-Olivier Merson and Paul Gervais, while taking private lessons from Claudio Castelucho.

During this time, she was extremely prolific, producing some 150 paintings and drawings including many scenes from Holland, Italy, Spain, and Brittany, France.

This was followed by a highly successful exhibition tour of her work in Ottawa, Montreal, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Victoria, where she settled to paint, supporting herself by taking on portrait commissions.

Like the Group of Seven painters, who returned to Canada around the same time, to focus their eye on Northern Ontario, Hamilton had a patriotic vision for Canadian art.

To have been able to preserve some memory of what this consecrated corner of the world looked like after the storm is a great privilege and all the reward an artist could hope for.

For two and a half years, Hamilton lived in primitive huts and tents with a Canadian army contingent at Vimy Ridge and from late 1919 on her own.

Between 1919 and 1922, Hamilton painted with whatever materials came to hand, recording the destruction left by the war, the commemorations of those lost and the celebrations of the return to normal life.

These letters, held today at the archives of the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre testify to the hardships of the experience and the physical and emotional demands of the expedition.

In 1926, she donated 227 of her battlefield works to the Dominion Archives, paying homage to the wounded and the dead Canadian soldiers of the First World War.

She had planned her funeral and instructed her executor, her nephew Frank Riter, to have her ashes transported to Port Arthur, Ontario, to be buried beside her husband.

[28] In 2020, Canada Post saluted the country's unofficial first woman battlefield artist by issuing a stamp for Remembrance Day featuring her work, Trenches on the Somme, (1919).