A Toronto native, Peter Clapham Sheppard found his artistic inspiration in a broad range of subject matter, including landscapes, portraits, still lifes, city and harbour scenes. The painter bore witness to the steady construction and urbanization that took place in Canadian and American cities during the first half of the twentieth century, which inspired much of his artistic oeuvre. In this regard, Sheppard saw himself as best aligned with the contemporaneous American society of artists known as the Eight, and later the Ashcan School, rather than Canadian art movements of the time.
A documentarian of sorts, Sheppard recorded scenes of daily life which are largely extinct today. In “The General Store”, we see a wooden building on a body of water that presumably functions as a mill and a general store. In the lower right corner is a pair of horses pulling a cart. Executed in a bright colour palette, Sheppard employed his impressionistic treatment of light, favouring blues, greens and violets delineating the long shadows cast by the setting afternoon sun. This luminous and charming oil painting serves as a snapshot into a past era, prior to the urbanization that swept through Canada and Sheppard’s surrounding environment.
