War bride portraits capture ‘strength, frailty’ of women who left home for love
For Bev Tosh, it began as a labour of love: creating a portrait of her mother as a 1940s war bride on the occasion of her 80th birthday, a likeness rendered in oil from a decades-old photo. But that single painting took the Calgary artist down a path she could never have foreseen.
Eighteen years later, Tosh has amassed more than 150 portraits of women from around the world who married Second World War airmen, soldiers and sailors and left their home countries to start new lives with men they often barely knew.
“So I did this painting, never really thinking it would go anywhere because it was for me, it was not for my mom,” says Tosh, 70, whose parents met at a 1944 New Year’s dance in Saskatchewan, where her mother lived and her father, a Royal New Zealand Air Force pilot, was stationed as a flight training officer.
“That was going to be it.”