Scraping Seal Skins

Anna Noëh was a Hungarian-born Canadian painter and muralist known for her depictions of the Canadian Arctic and Inuit daily life. Born in Debrecen, Hungary, she studied drawing, painting, mosaic, and mural techniques at the Academy of Applied Arts in Budapest from 1952 to 1956. In 1956, she received a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria.

Noëh immigrated to Canada in 1957 and established her studio in Montreal, Quebec. During the 1960s, she worked on various decorative and architectural commissions, including public mural works displayed at Expo 67 in Montreal.

Beginning in 1970, Noëh made numerous trips to Northern Canada, focusing primarily on Baffin Island and regions across the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. Working in oil, acrylic, watercolour, and graphite, she documented community life, family relationships, hunting, and land activities of the local Inuit populations through drawings, field sketches, and studio paintings.

Her paintings and drawings were acquired by major public museum collections across Canada, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and the Musée d'art de Joliette. She lived and worked in Montreal until her death in 2016.