1904-1989 → Bettina Somers’ fascination with bodies in motion is best represented in a series of paintings she created while watching the rehearsals of the National Ballet of Canada and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. She preferred working with watercolours and ink, often sketching on site at local hockey games. Her painting Hockey, the Toronto Maple Leafs vs. the Chicago Blackhawks was shortlisted for the international painting competition hosted by the Summer Olympics in London, England, 1948. It hung at Maple Leaf Gardens for a number of years afterwards and now belongs to the Permanent Collection of the International Hockey Hall of Fame and Museum in Kingston, Ontario.
Somers was born in South Africa and immigrated to Canada in 1913. She began studying art at Toronto Central Technical School in 1917 under the direction of Samuel Stevenson Finlay, a contemporary of the Group of Seven.
Her career as an artist was postponed by two World Wars and nurse’s training at the Hospital for Sick Children which she completed in 1928. In 1940, she was sent to Egypt by the British High Command to spy on the Germans in preparation for the invasion of El-Alamein. Somers’s sister and renowned Egyptologist Amice Calverley lived there at that time, and Somers was able to send maps and data to Calverley through her work on the top secret “Synthetic Data Generator”, the world’s first computer. The complicated device hid information in the background noise of various signals and the information was reconstructed when it arrived at its destination.
After the war, Somers returned to Canada, living in Toronto where she studied under Carl Schaefer prior to moving west. She exhibited as an invited contributor with the Canadian Group of Painters in 1947. Her work was featured regularly in exhibitions held by the Canadian Society of Painters, the Graphic Arts Society, and in a number of National Gallery of Canada touring exhibitions.
She moved to Summerland, BC in 1975. A permanent collection of her work was placed in the Art Gallery of the South Okanagan in 1987. Bettina Somers died in 1989 at the age of 84.
For all you deep art divers out there.
Samuel Stevenson Finlay Obituary, Watercolour Painting
If you have some time to spare: Invasion of El-Alamein, Wars of the World Documentary Video
More information on Bettina’s sister Amice Calverley, as well as an episode from The Eternal Feminine Podcast Series which can be found on The Art Song Podcast
More information on Carl Schaefer
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