Old House, Winter (The Ward, Toronto), circa 1920-21 by Peter Clapham Sheppard

Provenance:
Estate of the Artist
Private Collection, Ontario

Literature:
"Mail and Empire", Toronto, 14 March 1925
Hector Charlesworth, 'Ontario Society of Artists. Brilliant Portraiture the Outstanding Feature of This Year’s Show', "Saturday Night", 14 March 1925, page 3
Tom Smart, "Peter Clapham Sheppard: His Life and Work", Richmond Hill/Buffalo, 2018, reproduced page 142

In a 1925 review in the magazine "Saturday Night" of that year’s Ontario Society of Artists exhibition, the prominent art critic Hector Charlesworth singled out P.C. Sheppard from the crowded field of portrait painters by mentioning that he was the author of “some clever urban studies.” A more vociferous reviewer than Charlesworth, writing of the same exhibition in the rival Toronto "Mail and Empire", declared that, “Peter C. Sheppard is becoming almost entirely an interpreter of cities and crowded commercial centres. There is a certain brutal strength in the colors that he uses which might be regarded as symbolic.” "Old House, Winter (The Ward, Toronto)" interprets a dilapidated, bent and broken house from the downtrodden neighbourhood known as the “Ward”, which was demolished in the 1960s to make way for the construction of the City Hall.

The composition’s open, welcoming nature provides easy visual and imaginative access to the subject. Despite its rundown nature and commonplace features, that no doubt rendered this undistinguished building invisible in its day, and anti-picturesque as a subject to paint, Sheppard gives it an attractive, sympathetic interpretation.

The sketch blends Sheppard’s innate talents as a draftsman with his acutely sharp sensibilities as a colourist. He emphasizes the swaying rhythms of the windows and dormers, and the gentle degradation of the structure, which he sets down in lines that seem anthropomorphic. They appear to breathe and groan, lending the forlorn subject a human spirit. The lyrical foreground passage of a sinuous white and grey wave of snow and slush, and the snow-covered roof in the middle ground, which frame the dull, dreary building, set up a dynamic charge of visual energy that animates the whole painting.

As a colourist, this sketch shows that Sheppard was as interested in capturing in paint the fugitive qualities of light, as he was in using colour as a vehicle for expressing mood and emotion, or for accentuating formal relationships in compositions. In the background of this sketch and of his other cityscapes of Montreal and New York, the optical blending of tinted hues may have been inspired by an Impressionist sensibility. Colour passages in a Sheppard painting are freighted both with the requirement to convey expressions and to capture impressions. By the early 1920s, Sheppard had feet in both camps; he made use of aspects of the Impressionist mode, but also saw colour as an instrument of making visible his feelings.

"Old House, Winter (The Ward, Toronto)" also conveys a sharp social critique, subtly stated, but nevertheless evident in the way Sheppard valorizes what was certainly a marginal, invisible and impoverished segment of the bustling, growing metropolis in the first quarter of the twentieth century. By pointing to the neighbourhood’s harsh living conditions in sketches such as this, Sheppard casts light on the underclass that, while living in the shadows of the city, drives its engines of progress.

We extend our thanks to writer, curator and art gallery director Tom Smart, former Director of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, for contributing the preceding essay. Tom is the author of "Peter Clapham Sheppard: Life and Work" (2018).