Emily Geraldine Coonan was born in the Pointe St. Charles district of Montreal. Coonan began her art studies at the age of thirteen, at Montreal’s Conseil des arts et manufactures. She studied at the Art Association of Montreal with William Brymner (1905-09), winning first prize in 1907. She exhibited at the Art Association of Montreal from 1907-33, and in 1910 at the Royal Canadian Academy. She traveled to France, Belgium and Holland in 1912 with her contemporary, Henrietta Mabel May. Coonan was the first artist to receive a traveling grant from the National Gallery of Canada (1914). She also won the Montreal Women’s Art Society scholarship (1916), and the money allowed her to travel to Europe a second time following World War I (1920). Coonan was a member of the Beaver Hall Group, a group of thirty Montreal artists who exhibited together around 1921-22. Coonan painted throughout her life, but it seems she stopped participating in public art exhibitions after 1933. She died in the Cote St. Luc district of Montreal, where she had lived the last two years of her life with a niece.

(Canadian Women’s Art History Initiative)