Florence Carlyle was one of the prominent women artists in Canada throughout the late 19th c and early 20th c, during a period that saw the emergence of significant number of professionally trained women artists. Travelling from Woodstock, Ontario, where she grew up, to France, Great Britain, the United States and Italy, with periodic visits home for long periods of time, she settled in Great Britain in 1913 and died in Crowborough, East Sussex, not far from London. Although she was a versatile artist, she particularly enjoyed turning her brush to depicting the fugitive moods of women; her warm and sensitive genre subjects, based on observation and her interpretation of Victorian society, sensibility, costume and the stuffs and textures of Victorian taste, are among the best of her works. What unites them, early and late, is an ability to seize the momentary but telling gesture, and great technical brilliance in the portrayal of light, particularly the ruddy glow of firelight.