Practice by George Agnew Reid

Provenance:
Private Collection
Ward-Price, Toronto, 10 June 1977, lot 817d
McCready Gallery, Toronto
Acquired by the present Private Collection, 1977

Exhibited:
“17th Annual Spring Exhibition”, Art Association of Montreal, 1 April 1897, no. 109 as “Old Musician”
“18th Annual Exhibition, Royal Canadian Academy of Arts,” National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 9 March 1897, no. 118 as “Old Musician”
“Collector's Canada: Selections from a Toronto Private Collection”, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; travelling to Musée du Quebec, Quebec City; Vancouver Art Gallery; Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, 14 May 1988‒7 May 1989, no. 36

Literature:
Muriel Miller‒Miner, “G.A. Reid Canadian Artist”, Toronto, 1946, page 184
Dennis Reid, “Collector's Canada: Selections from a Toronto Private Collection”, Toronto, 1988, no. 36, reproduced page 45
A.K. Prakash, “Impressionism in Canada: A Journey of Rediscovery”, Stuttgart, 2015, page 658

George Reid’s academic realist style of the 1880s and 1890s, influenced by his teachers Robert Harris and Thomas Eakins, began to shift and evolve as a result of his first two trips to France. The impressionists had held the last of their eight exhibitions two years before he and his wife, Mary Hiester, arrived in Paris for a fifteen‒month stay in 1888‒89. By that time even the “juste milieu” artists that Reid emulated were incorporating impressionist elements into their canvases. Also during that trip, Reid saw Puvis de Chavannes’s recent murals in Amiens and Paris, admiring their non‒perspectival space and simplification of detail: two traits that made him receptive to similar qualities in impressionist art. In 1896 the Reids returned to Paris, partly, he recalled, to learn more about Impressionism. Reid stated four decades later that “When Impressionism came I experimented with it, and found it both, as to vision and technique, worthy of respect.”

“Practice” dates to the same year that the Reids took their second trip to Paris. The light colours and fairly monochromatic palette, blurred outlines and details, and broken brushwork demonstrate Impressionism’s influence. Reid later noted, however, that this approach had been for him “only a phase”, and in any case there was little support for it in Toronto prior to the First World War. This intimate and charming work, depicting an older man at home practicing his tenor horn, is therefore rare in Reid’s artistic oeuvre, as it represents a temporary shift in his stylistic approach.