Toronto Waterfront, 1886 by George Agnew Reid

Provenance:
Kaspar Gallery, Montreal
Brian Ayer, Guelph
Joyner-Waddington’s, auction, Toronto, 30 May 2006, lot 70
Mr. and Mrs. Ken Thomson
Acquired by the present Private Collection, November 2008

Exhibited:
“Embracing Canada: Landscapes from Krieghoff to the Group of Seven”, Vancouver Art Gallery; traveling to Glenbow Museum, Calgary; Art Gallery of Hamilton, 29 October 2015–25 September 2016

Literature:
Christine Boyanoski, “Sympathetic Realism: George A. Reid and the Academic Tradition”, Toronto, 1986, pages 15-17
Rob Cowley, ‘The Urban Toronto Landscape in Art’, “Arabella 2,” no.1 (Spring 2009), pages 69-70, reproduced page 71
Christine Boyanoski, ‘Figures in the Landscape en plein air’, in Ian Thom, ed., “Embracing Canada: Landscapes from Krieghoff to the Group of Seven”, Vancouver, 2015, page 61, reproduced pages 68-69

In the summer of 1886 George Reid and his wife, Mary Hiester, moved from a two‒room apartment‒studio on Toronto’s Adelaide Street to bigger quarters at 31 King Street East, where George had more space to make the sizeable paintings appropriate to his ambition to become a recognized artist. “Toronto Waterfront” dates from that summer and is one of his earliest large canvases. A few months later he reprised the subject as “Toronto Bay”, 1887 (Toronto Public Library, J. Ross Robertson Collection), his only other known version of the subject. “Toronto Waterfront” encompasses a panorama that includes a sky with richly textured clouds, a sprawling city skyline that is more than twice as extensive than the one in “Toronto Bay”, and a lower half filled with the water’s convincingly rendered ripples and reflections. Despite its breadth and its variety of incident, “Toronto Waterfront” coheres well, thanks in part to the small but crucial fulcrum figure of the rower whose body occupies the exact centre of the canvas. The focal point of imaginary horizontal lines emanating from the two rowboats on either side of him, and additional lines originating in the channel markers and in the rowboat in the right foreground, he is the anchor around which the rest of the sprawling painting revolves.

Toronto’s Inner Harbour, on the doorstep of the city’s downtown, was a popular locale both for pleasure boating as seen in the various two‒person vessels in “Toronto Waterfront”, and for racing. The most socially prominent clubs were the Toronto Boat Club (today the Royal Canadian Yacht Club), the Argonaut Rowing Club, and the Toronto Canoe Club (today the Toronto Sailing and Canoe Club). The subject may be a hommage to Thomas Eakins, Reid’s principal professor and mentor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1882‒84). Reid had been close to Eakins, who appointed him a demonstrator in anatomy classes and who used him and another favourite pupil, J. Laurie Wallace, as the models for his 1883 canvas “Professionals at Rehearsal” (Philadelphia Museum of Art). During the 1870s Eakins made a number of oils and watercolours of racing sailboats and of scullers. “Toronto Waterfront” includes several sailboats scattered across its breadth, and, near the left edge, a single sculler. That figure was perhaps intended to evoke Edward (Ned) Hanlan, the local rower who captured Torontonians’ admiration when he catapulted to international fame by holding the single sculls world championship from 1880 to 1884.

Eakins’s influence on Reid is also apparent in “Toronto Waterfront’s” city skyline. As a teacher, Eakins stressed the importance of optical veracity and detail. Although a dozen years later Reid would move away from those lessons, in 1886 he was still under the sway of Eakins’s aesthetic. This is apparent in his depiction of the skyline where, despite their distance from Reid’s presumed vantage point on one of the Inner Harbour islands, several of the buildings are identifiable.

In the centre are the three domed towers of the second (1873‒1927) Union Station, designed by Thomas Seaton Scott and located at the water’s edge between Simcoe and York streets. To its left, on Simcoe Street, is William George Storm’s Romanesque Revival St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, completed in 1876 and identifiable by its four pinnacles. Midway between Union Station and the first of two large brown waterfront warehouses is the tower of the first John Street Pumping Station (demolished in circa 1904). Conspicuous on the right side of the canvas is the spire of the Cathedral Church of St James, at the time the tallest structure in Canada, and slightly to the right of that is St Lawrence Hall (constructed in 1850 and located at 157 King Street East).

In 1886, the same year Reid painted “Toronto Waterfront”, he began “The Call to Dinner” (Art Gallery of Hamilton), the first of a series of major canvases inspired not by Toronto but by his memories of growing up in rural Ontario. Then, beginning at the end of the 1880s, Reid’s burgeoning interest in mural painting turned him away from both perspectival depth and the depiction of detail. Toronto Waterfront, with its generous depth and breadth, its focus on detail, narrative incident, and its theme of social life in a modern city, is thus a swan song rather than the groundwork for what was yet to come in Reid’s career.

We extend our thanks to Brian Foss, Carleton University Chancellor’s Professor of Art & Architectural History, and co‒curator of “1920s Modernism in Montreal: The Beaver Hall Group” for his assistance in researching this artwork and for contributing the preceding essay.