Les Bouquins, Quai Malaquais, Paris

Caroline Armington

This composition features the booksellers along the Seine, these on th Quai Malaquais, located in the 6th district of Paris, between the quays Conti and Voltaire. Customers browse through the used books and prints in the booths, looking for something they just have to have or an undiscovered treasure.

Caroline Armington, née Caroline Helena Wilkinson, painter and printmaker, was born on 11 September 1875 in rural Brampton, Ontario, Canada to William and Mary Wilkinson. She began to paint as a teenager and studied painting under John Wycliffe Lowes Forster. Wilkinson also studied nursing and in 1899 she worked as a nurse in New York. The following year she sailed to Europe where she married fellow artist Frank Milton Armington on September 6, 1900. After their honeymoon, they returned to live in Canada.

Frank and Caroline Armington returned to Paris in 1905 for formal training at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and Académie Julian and they remained in Paris for three decades. A number of her etchings were displayed in the 1913 Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and seven years later she was elected to membership.

During the First World War Caroline worked as a nurse and Frank as an orderly at the American Ambulance Hospital in Paris. In 1919, she won a silver medal for etchings at the Société des amis des arts de Seine et Oise in Versailles. In 1924, a solo exhibition of her paintings and etchings is shown at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., and a joint exhibition of works by Frank and Caroline Armington was mounted in 1929 at the Art Gallery of Toronto.

The Armingtons left Paris for New York in 1939 and Caroline died there on 25 October 1939.