The Bridge Builders, Construction, Bloor Street Viaduct, 1915

A massive reinforced concrete structure, its upper edges still clad in wooden forms, occupies the centre of this remarkable painting. An elevator tower connects the cables carrying concrete-filled hoppers at the centre of the composition and rises to the blue sky breaking through the clouds. The blue sky in turn creates a diagonal movement to the blue shadows lower left and to the principal subject of the painting, the workers pulling cables. If the massive structure fills most of the composition, it is the workers, the “bridge builders”, who animate the scene. 

The bridge being built was in fact one of the most ambitious municipal projects undertaken by the city of Toronto, the Bloor Street Viaduct that would link Bloor Street in the west to Danforth Avenue in the east. The Don Valley and River had long posed severe problems in cross-city transportation, especially after Toronto annexed Riverdale in 1884 and East Toronto, north of the Danforth, in 1908. The only bridges crossing the Don were further south between Gerrard Street and the lake and were subject to destruction by flooding. In 1904 Owen Staples, artist for the Toronto Telegram, began construction of a beautiful Arts and Crafts home near Danforth and Broadview (now 69 Hogarth Avenue) and experienced the challenges faced by workers having to cross the Don. In 1910 he drew the new bridge being built to link Wilton Avenue (now Dundas) to the east side of the river. 

The proposed viaduct had been the subject of repeated debates and its construction was voted down in municipal elections in 1910 and 1912. One issue focused on the route of the connecting roads. At this time Bloor Street only ran east to Sherbourne Street and critics, opposed to the “exaggerated importance of the straight line,” argued that the viaduct should connect to Howard and Parliament streets directing traffic down to Wellesley Street to cut costs and avoid having to connect Bloor Street to Castle Frank. Finally in January 1913 the Toronto electorate approved a three-part construction: a bridge over the Don Valley from Danforth Avenue to Castle Frank Crescent, another bridge over the Rosedale Ravine, and earth fill to connect Bloor and Parliament streets. The Don section would require six concrete piers and the Rosedale section four, lettered from east to west, A through F over the Don Valley, and H through J over the Rosedale Valley Road. Construction started with Pier D, located on the west side of the Don River, the pier depicted in Peter Sheppard’s painting. Construction began in January 1915 and advanced rapidly as seen in photographs taken that fall. Attracted by the ambition and scale of this massive project, Sheppard painted oil sketches on site as work progressed. In one sketch, reproduced by Tom Smart in his monograph on Peter Sheppard (p. 104), railway tracks occupy the foreground in front of a recently raised elevator tower, while in a later sketch (p. 106) the pier rises almost to future road level. Construction of the viaduct was extensively documented in photographs and Sheppard undoubtedly had access to them. 

Smart reproduces a photograph of Pier D taken on 22 September 1915 from approximately the same angle as Sheppard’s large canvas. However, in the canvas Sheppard dramatizes the scene by elevating the north end of the pier left foreground, and enlarges what is possibly a concrete mixer at the south end below the rising smoke. This is merely glimpsed in the September photograph but more clearly seen at the foot of the hill in a photo of piers B, C, and D, taken on 21 October 1915. In the canvas the foreground workers, absent in the photographs, animate the scene and evoke the vast human effort of the viaduct’s construction. Born in Toronto Peter Sheppard, like many of his contemporaries, began his career working for a commercial art firm and studied at the Central Ontario School of Art and Design (from 1912 the Ontario College of Art), graduating in December 1914. 

In March 1916 he submitted his large canvas Construction, Bloor St. Viaduct for exhibition with the Ontario Society of Artists. Even amidst all the journalistic fury over J.E.H. MacDonald’s "Tangled Garden" in the same exhibition, critics praised Sheppard’s ambitious canvas. In "The Mail and Empire", the writer noted the uniqueness of the subject matter. “A number of American artists have seen the dramatic power of these engineering enterprises, and Mr. Sheppard has attacked this subject from the same angle that they have treated it. He shows the men toiling at the construction work, a vital moving scene...” The same writer noted Owen Staples’ treatment of the same subject “but in a more remote and less compelling manner. His painting is a view of the valley, with signs in the distance that the work is going forward.” And Margaret Fairbairn wrote the "Toronto Daily Star", “Mr. Staples gives a distant view of construction work on the Bloor Street viaduct, while Mr. Peter C. Sheppard, under the same title, gives a near view of the enterprise that carries with it an impression of vastness and labor involved that raises it to the level of a great epic.” Sheppard exhibited the canvas, now titled The Bridge Builders, Construction (Bloor Street Viaduct) with the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in Montreal the following November. The new title changed the focus of the subject from the more abstract construction to the heroism of the workers as earlier observed by the Toronto critics. The Montreal critic and pictorialist photographer Harold Mortimer-Lamb, praised the “ambitious picture” in the pages of the London periodical The Studio while the editor of the "Canadian Courier", Augustus Bridle, reproduced the canvas, retitled The Concrete Bridge, beside Early Spring by Sheppard’s former teacher J.W. Beatty. Extrapolating on the importance or lack of importance of Canadian subject matter in art, Bridle wrote, “In the cement picture by Mr. Shepherd (sic), there is no lack of subject. You understand at once that by no kind of brain-twisting could it be considered a picture of sheep, or of twilight, or of the morning after. It is as realistic as a photograph. And it’s considerably, though not typically, a Canadian subject. Other countries build bridges and cement structures. Also one might imagine that the Beatty picture was painted in the State of Maine. To build a national line fence in art is foolishly impossible. We must give the artist room.” T

he Rosedale bridge opened for traffic on 29 October 1917 and the Don Section on 18 October 1918. The entire project was completed on 23 August 1919 and was renamed the Prince Edward Viaduct following Prince Edward’s 1919 visit to Toronto. It is more familiarly known today as the Bloor Street Viaduct and is so memorialized in this magnificent painting by Peter Sheppard. We extend our thanks to Charles Hill, Canadian art historian, former Curator of Canadian Art at the National Gallery of Canada and author of The Group of Seven‒Art for a Nation (1995), for contributing the preceding essay.