Biography

George Agnew Reid (1860–1947) was one of Canada’s most energetic and recognized artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born into a farming family in rural Ontario, he studied art in Toronto, Philadelphia, and Paris, and began his career as a much-admired painter of genre scenes. He was a regular participant in provincial, national, and international exhibitions, a prolific though untrained architect, an influential teacher in Toronto and New York State for more than four decades, an activist president of both the Ontario Society of Artists and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and a tireless promoter of the importance of beauty and good design in daily life. Few figures of his generation made a more profound and wide-ranging impact on Canadian art, artists, and art institutions.

Youth & Training in Ontario

George Agnew Reid, the third of nine children of Eliza and Adam Reid, was born on July 25, 1860, in a log cabin in the small rural Ontario community of Wingham in East Wawanosh Township, Huron County. Located on the traditional territory of the Anishinabewaki, Odawa, and Mississauga Peoples, the site was surveyed six years before Reid’s birth and was reached by the Wellington, Grey and Bruce Railway in 1872. At the time of Reid’s birth, Canada was a British colony known as the Province of Canada, formed from the union of Upper Canada (Ontario) and Lower Canada (Quebec). Seven years later, the British North America Act united Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick as the Dominion of Canada, with a population of 3.4 million people, primarily of British and French extraction. By the time of Reid’s death, in 1947, the country had progressed from a colonial appendage of Great Britain to a self-governing nation of nine provinces and two territories, more economically linked to the United States than to Britain and with an ethnically diverse population in excess of 12 million people.

Reid’s mother, Eliza Jane Agnew (1837–1877), was born in Sligo, Ireland, and immigrated with her family to Canada in 1849. Her father worked as a gardener in Kingston before homesteading on a farm near Goderich. Adam Reid (1827–1914) was also born in Sligo and immigrated to Ontario at the age of twenty-four. Adam journeyed first from Weston to Stratford, then to Goderich, and finally by ox cart to East Wawanosh Township, where he established a farm he named The Homestead.

As a child, Reid’s interest in art was stimulated by the family’s collection of illustrated books and magazines and encouraged by his first schoolteacher, by his grandfather John Reid, and by Jamie Young, an itinerant bookseller who supplied him with volumes about art. When Reid was fifteen, Young also gave him a watercolour kit. As Reid recalled, however, his announcement, at the age of eleven, that he intended to become an artist annoyed his father. “Making pictures,” decreed Adam Reid, “is a girl’s work. Not any kind of occupation for a robust man. The men who came to Canada, men like your grandfather Agnew, were pioneers. They worked hard to make farms, and it is up to the boys of this generation who don’t have such hardships to bear to cultivate that land, not just sit at home doing drawing and colouring.”

Hoping to redirect his son’s visual interests into the useful field of architecture, Adam Reid charged the boy with drawing up plans for a new family home. Based on the quality of the resulting work, he apprenticed seventeen-year-old George to a local architect, J.B. Proctor. That agreement collapsed the following year, when Proctor went bankrupt. This early experience as an architectural draftsman would prove fruitful to Reid in later life but, at the time, the end of the apprenticeship allowed him to move to Toronto to attend the Ontario School of Art (now OCAD University).

At that point, Reid’s only direct exposure to professional painting had been the work of William Cresswell (1818–1888), an English-born landscape and marine painter, whom Reid and a friend had visited once in Seaforth, south of Wingham. Reid recalled that Cresswell was “gruff and kind,” but that he “tried to discourage us from becoming Artists, saying it was a ‘dam [sic] bad trade.’”

Cresswell was right. The professional art scene in Canada was in its infancy. Private patronage networks were small, and although the Catholic Church was an active commissioner of religious art in Quebec, institutional patronage was little developed elsewhere. Art galleries and artist societies were few. The Art Association of Montreal (now the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) was founded in 1860, the year of Reid’s birth, and both the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) and the National Gallery of Canada were formed in 1880. In Toronto, the Ontario School of Art was established in 1876, a mere two years before Reid began studying there, by the Ontario Society of Artists (OSA). The society itself had been created just four years earlier, and its new school fulfilled one of its four founding goals (the others were to foster original art, hold annual exhibitions, and create a museum and art library). Two earlier attempts in Toronto to found artist societies were short-lived,  so the OSA served an important purpose. Beginning in 1873, for example, it rented the first of several spaces for the display of work by its members. These exhibitions were crucial for Reid, as there was otherwise little significant art being shown in Toronto public venues.

A lack of money forced Reid to enrol only in the evening classes at the Ontario School of Art during the autumn session of 1878. He found work at a machine shop in the winter semester of 1879, but the job consumed ten hours each day, restricting him again to evening classes. He was finally able to enrol full-time in the autumn of 1879. His teachers included Henri Perré (c.1824/1825–1890), John Arthur Fraser (1838–1898), Marmaduke Matthews (1837–1913), and Charlotte Schreiber (1834–1922). But it was Robert Harris (1849–1919) who made the greatest impression.

Harris was hired in 1879 to teach the antique class, where students drew copies of plaster casts of classical sculptures. He would soon become Canada’s most prolific and sought-after portraitist, and he would serve as president of the RCA from 1893 to 1906. Reid quickly proved to be a talented student. During the 1880 winter semester, the technical skills evident in his copy of a Harris painting so impressed Schreiber and Harris that it earned him a full-year certificate in oil painting, even though he had enrolled in Schreiber’s oil painting course halfway through the school year.

For most of the next two years, Reid was back in Huron County, earning money by painting portraits in Wingham and the neighbouring town of Kincardine. He did not return to art school until the last two months of the 1882 winter semester. By then, he was eager to pursue studies in drawing and painting from the live model, but such training was not part of the school’s curriculum. The only Canadian options were classes subsidized by the RCA, but registration in these was limited to members of the RCA or the OSA. That meant Reid’s next step was to pursue advanced study outside of Canada.

Philadelphia and Europe

In 1882, Reid enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia, the oldest and one of the most respected art schools and museums in North America. Financial reasons may have played a part in his decision not to follow the example set by Robert Harris and other artists who chose to study in Europe. But Reid later noted that his main motivation for choosing PAFA was a journal article that discussed the school’s thorough and innovative curriculum and described the academy’s Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) as a “radical” teacher.

Eakins was an outstandingly important figure painter and portraitist whose reputation as a radical lay in his emphasis on anatomical knowledge: a belief that led him to use photographs—including nude photographs of himself and his students—as integral elements in his teaching. He was fired from PAFA in 1886 for posing nude male models in women’s life-drawing classes.

Reid took classes at PAFA until April 1884. As was usual with new students, he was first put into the antique class to determine his level of skill. Eakins, however, was wary of students spending too much time in that class, as he felt it discouraged individual development and fostered an idealizing approach in keeping with the exemplary bodies represented by the casts. Reid was quickly promoted to classes in perspective, painting from life, sculptural modelling, and anatomy.

Uniquely among North American art schools of the day, PAFA offered anatomy lessons that went beyond lectures to feature animal and human dissection. Eakins also encouraged painting students to make clay models of the bodies they planned to paint so that they could literally feel their three-dimensional tactility. (Reid evidently continued to make such models in later years, but none are known to have survived.) PAFA students were also urged to attend surgical lecture-demonstrations at the medical clinics of Dr. Samuel David Gross at Jefferson Medical College and Dr. David Hayes Agnew (no relation to Reid) at the University of Pennsylvania. Gross’s teaching clinic had already been commemorated in a major painting by Eakins in 1875, and Agnew’s would follow in 1889. Reid attracted Eakins’s attention enough to be made an anatomy demonstrator (1883–84), a (bashful) subject for nude photographs that Eakins made of several models and students, and the sitter for the guitarist in Eakins’s Professionals at Rehearsal, 1883.

The anatomy lectures at the Pennsylvania Academy were coeducational, as were the costume classes and outdoor sketching trips. It was presumably in those settings that Reid met fellow student Mary Hiester (1854–1921), an American woman six years his senior with a particular interest in still life and landscape painting. Hiester had honed her talent at the Pennsylvania School of Design for Women (1881–83) and was teaching art at a girls’ school and studying part-time at PAFA under Eakins and Thomas Anshutz (1851–1912) when she met Reid.

The pair married in May 1885 in Hiester’s hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania, and almost immediately left for a prolonged European honeymoon. This was the first of six trips Reid would make to Europe—the others took place in 1888 to 1889, 1896, 1902, 1910, and 1924. He and his bride visited museums and architectural highlights in England, France, Spain, and Italy. They had planned to spend several weeks in Madrid to study the work of Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) at the Prado Museum, but a cholera epidemic postponed that visit until 1896.

In the autumn of 1885, the couple settled into a two-room space on Adelaide Street in downtown Toronto. Reid had already attracted the interest of James Spooner,  one of the city’s more active art dealers. In addition, he soon began giving free lessons to the teenaged Frederick Challener (1869–1959), who became a lifelong friend and colleague. Over the next few years, those classes expanded to include instruction in perspective, the antique, and painting from life for more than a dozen other students, and by the early 1890s, they also included plein air classes.

In 1886, the Reids moved to roomier quarters at 31 King Street East because they needed more space to accommodate their students. At the same time, Reid painted The Call to Dinner, 1886–87. This, the second of several large canvases that drew on his memories of growing up in rural Ontario, shows his sister Susan summoning field workers for a meal, and it launched Reid’s reputation as a painter of genre scenes: casual views of daily life. Two years later, in 1888, he was elected an associate academician of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA), becoming a full academician in 1890. Reid was a loyal member of the RCA, contributing work, usually multiple entries, to all its annual exhibitions from 1885 until 1937, and also serving as the academy’s president from 1906 to 1909.

Paris 1888–89

In May 1888, George and Mary Hiester Reid held a joint exhibition of 113 paintings and drawings at the galleries of art dealer Oliver, Coate & Co. The ensuing sale included several of his landscapes, figure studies, genre paintings, depictions from his 1885 visit to Italy and Spain, a canvas of Toronto’s harbour (purchased by Toronto Evening Telegram publisher John Ross Robertson and now in the collection of the Toronto Public Library), and another canvas, Drawing Lots, 1888–1902, that showed boys at play and was the highest-priced item in the show, at $145. Also included, though not for sale, was Reid’s The Call to Dinner, 1886–87, loaned by Dr. J.F.W. Ross of Toronto. The exhibition was successful enough to finance a sixteen-month stay in Europe. Most of the trip was spent in Paris, where the Reids met the expatriate Canadian artist Paul Peel (1860–1892). On Peel’s recommendation, the couple lived at 65 boulevard Arago, an urban artists’ colony where well-lit two-storey apartment-studios faced a shared courtyard, combining privacy with a sense of community.

Peel disparaged Reid’s original intention of enrolling in the Académie Julian, an inexpensive private school that was popular with international art students. It welcomed both men and women, albeit in separate studios because of social anxiety about men and women working side by side to draw and paint nude models, especially male models. Instead, Peel recommended that Reid join him as a student in the atelier of the portraitist and muralist Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant (1845–1902). In October 1888, Reid began frequenting the Académie Julian, but only after Benjamin-Constant was hired there to replace a recently deceased instructor.

Full details about Reid’s time at the Académie Julian are unknown because his student records have been lost,  but what made Benjamin-Constant particularly attractive to him was the French artist’s advocacy of the same direct painting technique (using a loaded paintbrush rather than preliminary drawings to block in areas of form, colour, and light) to which Reid had been introduced at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The Reids also took costume and life classes at another private school, the Académie Colarossi, which, like the Académie Julian and the state-supervised École des Beaux-Arts, emphasized figure painting.

But an even more consequential event of Reid’s 1888–89 European sojourn happened outside the classroom. In 1871, Paris’s city hall, the Hôtel de Ville, was destroyed during the Paris Commune, which had briefly governed the city during the chaotic weeks following the defeat of the French army in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. By the time the Reids had arrived in the city, the twenty-year reconstruction of the Hôtel de Ville was nearly complete, and the Ministry of Fine Arts had engaged more than ninety artists to decorate the building’s interior with a monumental series of murals showing scenes from Parisian life and history. The project aroused intense interest, and Reid was enthralled by how mural painting functioned socially by reaching large audiences, filling their daily lives with beauty in public spaces, and inculcating an interest in social issues and historical themes. Indeed, for the rest of his life he kept a newspaper clipping announcing the Hôtel de Ville competition.

Inspired by the murals he saw in Paris, Reid brought this knowledge with him back to Canada, embarking on a three-year investigation of the medium: an investigation that would change the course of his career. Like many artists and critics, he was especially impressed by the work of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), the best known of the contemporary French muralists, and someone whose work Reid may have been familiar with even before visiting Paris, through articles published in Montreal’s Arcadia magazine by Philip Leslie Hale, the journal’s Paris correspondent.  Puvis had previously completed much-lauded mural cycles in the Church of Sainte-Geneviève (now the Panthéon), and his murals at the Sorbonne were unveiled in 1889, while Reid was still in Paris. “Of the living painters,” Reid wrote in an article published nine years later, “Puvis de Chavannes is regarded by the French as their great decorator, and by a large part of the world as the prophet of modern decoration.“

Genre Painting

Despite Reid’s newfound interest in murals, he also used his time in Paris to continue pursuing genre painting. By far the largest, most intricate, and most successful of the results is Logging, 1888, which he based on a Paris lumberyard. Reid included several posed models suggestive of pioneers clearing land by uprooting and burning trees. But the trees in the Paris lumberyard were not intended for burning,  so Reid’s addition of a smoky atmosphere downplayed Logging’s Parisian origins in favour of Canadian settler life: a theme he had already exploited in The Call to Dinner, 1886–87, and one that by the 1880s was grounded in nostalgia rather than contemporary practice.

Reid ramped up this exploration of rural genre subjects soon after he and his wife returned from Europe in November 1889 and rented an apartment on the top floor of the Toronto Arcade, which had opened five years earlier and was located on the east side of Yonge Street between Richmond and Adelaide Streets. Essentially Toronto’s first shopping centre, the arcade provided affordable downtown retail space for small businesses, with thirty-two shops on the ground floor, twenty more businesses on the second, and miscellaneous offices as well as artist studios on the third. Toronto city directories of the time indicate that over the next several years, the Reids occupied one or two rooms on the third (top) floor.  But these rooms were too small to serve as living space and studios for two artists, so Reid built himself a studio in the building’s unused central tower, which also had the benefit of a half-moon window.

He divided the studio into two levels and constructed three stages that he rigged out as the settings for the three large, multi-figure genre canvases that he would paint concurrently over the next few months: The Story, Mortgaging the Homestead, and The Other Side of the Question (all 1890). All three works capitalized on the success of The Call to Dinner by portraying scenes of life in rural Ontario. Almost all of Reid’s genre pictures are autobiographical, drawing on events from his boyhood: a happy event in The Story and a stressful one in Mortgaging the Homestead. Moreover, they struck an emotional chord in receptive audiences that had their own family memories of rural pioneer life, or that longed for a past that seemed simpler than contemporary urban life.

By this time, Reid had exhibited his work internationally at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (London, 1886) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’s annual exhibitions (1884, 1887), as well as at the Paris Salon (1889), where he showed two canvases, one of which—Dreaming, 1889—used Mary Hiester Reid as the model. The Story, Mortgaging the Homestead, and The Other Side of the Question confirmed his status as a serious figure on the Canadian art scene. The Story was included in the 1890 Paris Salon (Reid would show there again in 1891, 1892, and 1894), and Mortgaging the Homestead was accepted by the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts as his diploma picture when he was promoted to full academician status in 1890.

Murals for Canada

In the late 1880s and early 1890s, while Reid was establishing himself as a leading painter of genre scenes, he was also digesting what he had learned in Paris from the murals of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and others. The French artists’ cultivation of informed citizenship through the depiction of local and national history and daily life, especially in civic venues such as the Hôtel de Ville, appealed to Reid’s impulse to link art and social issues. This connection was on display not only in canvases such as Mortgaging the Homestead, 1890, but also in Reid’s burgeoning interest in the Arts and Crafts movement’s commitment to the visual and applied arts as tools for personal and social improvement through public and private access to beauty and good design. Reid absorbed Arts and Crafts ideals through multiple channels: his European travels, his friendships with like-minded colleagues and supporters in Canada, and his access to magazines and other publications that fuelled the popularity of the Arts and Crafts movement in the years around the turn of the twentieth century.

The Arts and Crafts influence on Reid would ultimately manifest itself in his work as an architect and a designer of the applied arts. More immediately, however, it informed his newfound commitment to mural painting. Much of Canadian mural production was in churches, especially in Quebec, where there were important cycles by such figures as Napoléon Bourassa (1827–1916), Ozias Leduc (1864–1955), and Charles Huot (1855–1930). There were, however, almost no major secular public murals like the ones Reid had admired in Paris.  His friend Gustav Hahn (1866–1962) had, in 1892, painted decorative allegorical figures, maple leaves, and vine scrolls in the chamber of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, but this work was a pale shadow of the extravagant use of murals that Reid had seen in Europe.

To address this shortfall, Reid played the dominant role in co-founding with six other artists—Frederick Challener, William Cruikshank (1848/49–1922), Harriet Ford (1859–1938), [Edmund] Wyly Grier (1862–1957), Sydney Strickland Tully (1860–1911), and Curtis Williamson (1867–1934)—the Toronto-based Society of Mural Decorators in February 1894. With Reid as its spokesperson, the society proposed to paint a frieze on the theme of the history of transportation in the waiting room of Union Station in late 1894. The scheme came to naught for financial reasons.

The society then turned its attention to Toronto’s Municipal Buildings (now Old City Hall), on which construction had begun in 1889. The strikingly expansive plan was for murals, on the theme of the progress of art and industry in Ontario from pioneer days to the 1890s, to be painted in the entrance hall and the council chamber. Unfortunately, the still-uncompleted building (inaugurated in 1899) was already over budget, and the municipal government declined the society’s proposal.

Reid refused to give up. In 1897, he took the Society of Mural Decorators’ plan to the newly formed Toronto Guild of Civic Art. Whereas the society consisted solely of artists, the guild—an organization that had no formal connection with any artist group—comprised six artists and twelve well-connected laymen, including the University of Toronto professor James Mavor, the lawyer and politician George William Allan, the businessman and politician E.B. Osler, and as president, the banker and arts patron Byron (from 1910 Sir Edmund) Walker. The influence of these figures would feature prominently in Reid’s later life and undertakings. The guild strongly supported the society’s proposal, but to no avail.

Reid’s next move was to offer to paint two murals, without charge and under the supervision of the guild, in the Municipal Buildings’s entrance hall, in the hope that city councillors would reverse their original ruling once they had seen the results. “As I am largely responsible for the movement [of the city hall proposal],” Reid told a journalist, “and have given considerable time to the development of it, I am unwilling that it should fail for want of energy and sacrifice.”  At the same time, he published articles comparing the lamentable state of mural painting in Canada with recent large-scale American projects at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the Boston Public Library, and the new Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

In December 1897, the councillors accepted Reid’s offer. Inspired by the historical subjects painted in Paris’s Hôtel de Ville, he chose Hail to the Pioneers—Their Names and Deeds Remembered and Forgotten We Honour Here as his overall theme and fleshed it out with two large panels: The Arrival of the Pioneers and Staking a Pioneer Farm. Hoping to take advantage of the publicity generated by the murals’ unveiling in May 1899, the Guild of Civic Art presented a maquette of fourteen additional pioneer-related panels for the entrance hall. The city council, however, was still in the grip of fiscal prudence and refused to fund the larger project, which would never be realized.

Anyone less dedicated than Reid would by now have questioned the wisdom of spending time advocating for public murals. He, however, returned to the attack, this time with the federal rather than provincial government. In 1904, he joined six other artists (Challener, Cruikshank, Hahn, William Brymner [1855–1925], Edmond Dyonnet [1859–1954], and Franklin Brownell [1857–1946]) in a Royal Canadian Academy of Arts-backed proposal to adorn the House of Commons, the Senate Chamber, and the Parliamentary Library with murals. Although he scaled back his plans the next year, proposing instead to cover only the main entrance hall of the Parliament Buildings,  a lack of funding again scuttled his hopes. Reid was no more successful with a 1907 proposal for thirty murals in the Ontario legislature or a 1910 plan for a mural in the Archives Building in Ottawa.

After the failure of these projects, Reid finally stopped drawing up complex proposals for government-related buildings. He consoled himself with a handful of modest public murals, including a panel for the reading room of the Arts Building (now Kingston Hall) at Queen’s University (The Homeric Method, 1903; whereabouts unknown). He enjoyed more success with private clients such as Byron Walker (The Scroll of Life, 1899–1901: a frieze of pastoral scenes running along the walls of the library in Walker’s Toronto home), and Adam Shortt, professor of economics at Queen’s University, for whose Ottawa house Reid painted a view of the landscape along the Ottawa River. The murals in Walker’s house were lost when the building was torn down by the University of Toronto. Shortt’s house is today the Embassy of Switzerland, and Reid’s mural is no longer visible.

Onteora

In 1891, George and Mary Hiester Reid made a summer painting trip to the Catskill Mountains of New York. There they discovered the Onteora Club, a summer retreat for visual artists, architects, artisans, writers, musicians, actors, and supporters of the arts. The Reids joined the club on their first visit and bought a piece of land just outside its limits. They would remain members for a quarter century, usually spending four months there each summer. Reid played an active role in the club, becoming its managing director and supervising the installation of a much-needed plumbing system.  His time at Onteora was also crucial for reviving his work in architecture.

Onteora derived its name from the language of the Munsee Indigenous People; it translates as “hills of the sky” or “land in the sky.” It was established in 1887, four years before the Reids’ first visit, and was one of several colonies founded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for well-to-do city dwellers seeking rustic summer residences.  Onteora’s founders were the siblings Francis Thurber and Candace Wheeler (1827–1923). Thurber’s principal contribution was financial, but Wheeler was the heart and soul of Onteora. An interior and textile designer, she was among the first female professional interior designers in the United States. She co-founded the Society of Decorative Art in New York (1877) and the New York Exchange for Women’s Work (1878), and in 1879 she partnered with Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933) to form the Tiffany & Wheeler interior design company, which was absorbed into Louis C. Tiffany & Co., Associated Artists, in 1881.

Wheeler was not best pleased with the growth, modernization, and other changes brought by new residents such as the Reids, “people [who] came and brought their down cushions with them.” As the club’s historian notes, “The Thurber and Wheeler tribe [of family, friends and acquaintances] may have founded Onteora, but it was Reid who shaped the community for the new century.”  In 1892, he designed Bonnie Brae (“pleasant hill” in Gaelic) as a residence-studio for himself and his wife at the Onteora Club. Soon after completing his own house, Reid constructed a larger six-room building to provide living and studio space for ten of the Canadian and American students—including Frederick Challener, Rex Stovel (1874–1931), Harriet Ford, and Mary Wrinch (1877–1969)—who had enrolled in the summer plein air landscape and figure classes the Reids taught beginning in 1894.

Reid also began receiving commissions from other Onteora residents for studios and summer cottages, although the word “cottage” was more appropriate to the colony’s rustic character than to the buildings themselves, many of which are two-storey summer houses of 3,000 to 5,000 square feet. The first cottage Reid designed for a fellow resident was for the New York lawyer Charles H. Russell, although Reid recalled that he accepted the commission “only after much protestation.” He soon became “alarmingly involved” with commissions, ultimately designing twenty-five buildings in and around Onteora, including a library and All Souls Church, although all of this work “did not cost enough to pay on a percentage basis.” Sadly, the church became a point of contention between Reid and Candace Wheeler, who wanted the contract to be given to her son, Dunham Wheeler. The latter had done architectural work at Onteora prior to the Reids’ arrival, but his buildings tended to lack the structural and aesthetic sophistication of George Reid’s designs.

Aside from vastly expanding his architectural career, Reid’s summers at Onteora also gave him the opportunity to discuss mural-painting aesthetics and techniques with such residents as Edwin Blashfield (1848–1936), Carroll Beckwith (1852–1917), and John White Alexander (1856–1915). Blashfield and Beckwith had made murals for the Chicago World’s Fair, and Blashfield and Alexander would contribute to the decoration of the Library of Congress. Reid created his first known mural for the interior of Bonnie Brae: an atmospheric view of the neighbouring apple orchard. He also painted murals for All Souls Church and four other buildings, including landscape views titled Spring, Summer, and Autumn for Charles Russell’s cottage.

In 1916, however, the Reids sold their Onteora property. Whereas traversing the border had previously been a remarkably casual affair, it became fraught after the start of the First World War (1914–18), when anyone trying to cross could be subjected to an intrusive degree of questioning about their ethnicity, their nationality, their finances, and their reasons for spending time—especially prolonged periods of time—in the United States. For George and Mary Hiester Reid, the inconvenience presumably became too great.

Indian Road and Wychwood Park

In 1900, in a decision inspired by their experience of Onteora, the Reids moved from the downtown Toronto Arcade to 435 Indian Road, located in the less urbanized High Park area on Toronto’s western edge.  They were part of a small migration of friends, including the architect Eden Smith (1858–1949) and the Hahn brothers—designer Gustav, sculptor Emanuel (1881–1957), and musician Paul (1875–1962). The design Reid used for his new house, The Studio (later destroyed by fire), struck one journalist as “distinctly Canadian… with weathered oak to remind one of southern Canada, and native pine everywhere.”  The house also included an inglenook (seating on either side of the fireplace), a feature Reid borrowed from Smith, who had derived it from the Arts and Crafts movement.

The semi-rural character of High Park soon attracted the attention of developers. Their aggressive subdividing of lots drove the Reids, along with Smith, Gustav Hahn, and others, to move to Wychwood Park, a nine-hectare (twenty-two-acre) wooded area west of Bathurst Street and north of Davenport Road. It was established in the second half of the nineteenth century by the painter Marmaduke Matthews, a friend of Reid’s and one of his teachers at the Ontario School of Art (now OCAD University), and the businessman Alexander Jardine, with the intention of transforming it into an artist colony.

In 1891, Matthews and Jardine registered a trust deed that divided the park into thirty-eight spacious lots and laid out conditions for future development.  In 1905, the Reids acquired a lot at the park’s northern boundary, on the edge of a ravine with a view looking south. Their lot was the first sold in Wychwood Park since the registration of the 1891 trust deed. Reid immediately began drafting plans for a new house, Upland Cottage, complete with two studios and informed inside and out by Arts and Crafts principles of design and decoration. Construction began in 1906.

Mindful of how the semi-rural character of Indian Road had fallen prey to developers, Reid took an active role on Wychwood Park’s board of trustees. He had a hand in managing property sales and development, the installation of street lighting, and the maintenance of the natural landscape. He even oversaw a project to move rowhouses from the south side of Alcina Avenue (on the northern boundary of Wychwood) to the north side of that street (outside the park), as their small size and their status as rowhouses contradicted the conditions laid out in the 1891 trust deed.

The Twentieth Century: War, Widowhood, and Remarriage

Reid began the twentieth century as president of the Ontario Society of Artists (1897–1901). Five years later, he was elected to the same office at the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) (1906–9). All the while, he continued the teaching career that had begun in 1885 as private lessons. From 1890 to 1912 he held a position at the Central Ontario School of Art and Industrial Design, where he had himself been a student in 1878–79 and 1882, when it was still the Ontario School of Art. In 1912, when the Central School became the Ontario College of Art (OCA; now OCAD University), Reid became the rechristened institution’s founding principal.

He had been in that job for just two years when, in August 1914, Canada entered the First World War. George (too old for active military duty) and Mary Hiester Reid hosted military sewing bees in their home and donated exhibition profits to a wartime charity. It was only in September 1918 that Reid received a letter confirming that on the recommendation of his long-time patron and friend Sir Edmund Walker, he was being offered a contract to make visual records of Canadian factory work being done under the aegis of the Imperial Munitions Board. The money came from the Canadian War Memorials Fund, set up as a charity ten months earlier by the Canadian-born 1st Baron Beaverbrook, Max Aitken, to commission Canadian and European artists to record the Canadian experience of the war. Reid threw himself into the work, producing eighteen medium-sized pastels and six large canvases, along with a view of Armistice Day celebrations in Toronto.

In 1919, Reid’s high public profile and his long-standing (though often frustrated) advocacy of public murals made him a logical choice to serve as chairman of the Ontario Advisory Committee on War Memorials. All war memorials, according to Reid’s report on the matter, should “possess an individual character,” be created by Canadian artists, and “embody and make plain to the present and future generations, that spiritual quality of noble sacrifice which above all else they commemorate.” Unfortunately, the committee proved ineffective, in no small part because it did not include any sculptors: a curious omission, given the predictable postwar demand for sculptural monuments. By the autumn of 1922, it had disbanded.

At the same time, the OCA had come to the belated realization that an about-to-expire provincial grant for technical education could be used to finance a much-needed new building. Reid drafted plans for a 16,000-square-foot neo-Georgian structure. Sir Edmund Walker, president of the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario), found a site adjacent to the gallery, a building that harmonized well with Reid’s OCA design. Following a formal opening ceremony, classes in the new building began in the spring of 1921.

This success, however, was overshadowed by personal tragedy: Hiester Reid developed heart problems in about 1919 and died on October 4, 1921. “She was so much to me that I have scarcely the fortitude to bear the sudden separation,” Reid wrote.  But before her death, Hiester Reid, according to her friend Marion Long (1882–1970), had made an unusual request of Mary Wrinch: “If he [George] should ever ask you to be his wife and you can return his regard, I do not want you to refuse to marry him out of loyalty to me.”

Wrinch was already close to Reid. She had been one of his private students at the Toronto Arcade, where her studio (shared with another student, Henrietta Vickers [1870–1938]) was next to the Reids’ own quarters. She was his student at the Central Ontario School of Art and Industrial Design beginning in 1893, took classes with him at Onteora, and in 1910 moved into a studio-house designed by him and Eden Smith, close to the Reids’ Wychwood Park home. She now assisted him in organizing a memorial exhibition for Hiester Reid at the Art Gallery of Toronto: the first solo show for a woman artist at that institution. George Agnew Reid and Mary Wrinch married at the end of 1922.

Meanwhile, trouble was brewing for Reid as principal of the OCA, where the future Group of Seven member Arthur Lismer (1885–1969) was hired in 1919 as the college’s vice-principal. Lismer, an innovative teacher with strong opinions, was soon at loggerheads with Reid, whom he saw as being too laissez-faire as the principal and as having no vision for the college’s future development. Matters came to a head in 1924, when Reid attempted to hire the conservative former Group of Seven member Frank (later Franz) Johnston (1888–1949)—a move that Lismer interpreted as an attempt to undermine his own status at the OCA.

Lismer responded by encouraging the more aesthetically adventurous A.Y. Jackson (1882–1974) to apply for the position. Jackson’s hiring (although he taught only during the winter of 1924–25, after which he resigned in order to devote more time to sketching trips) led to a further deterioration in Lismer’s relationship with Reid. Convinced that he would be unable to implement his own vision for the OCA as long as Reid remained principal, Lismer resigned in May 1927. Ironically, Reid taught for only one more year, took a sabbatical (1928–29), and then retired.

During the decade after the end of the First World War, Reid obtained contracts to paint three public murals: something he must have seen as overdue compensation for the lack of support for many of his pre-war projects. In 1921, he completed one above the stage in the Toronto Arts and Letters Club on Elm Street. It went into storage in 1931 and its whereabouts are currently unknown. Then, in 1925, he won an RCA-sponsored competition for murals in public buildings. He chose to decorate all four upper walls of the general reading room at the recently opened Earlscourt Library (today the Dufferin/St. Clair branch of the Toronto Public Library) with a frieze on the theme of community life. Although the mural was covered over in the 1960s, it was restored during the first decade of the twenty-first century and is now fully visible.

Finally, from 1928 to 1930, Reid, with some assistance from his former OCA student Lorna Claire, created an ambitious multi-wall mural cycle for Toronto’s Jarvis Collegiate Institute to honour the staff and students killed on active duty during the First World War. This is one of only two Reid public mural programs that has never been covered up, removed, lost, or painted over (the Municipal Buildings is the other).

In 1925, three years before Reid began work on the Jarvis murals, he and Mary Wrinch travelled north from Sault Ste. Marie through Algoma’s Agawa Canyon, where members of the Group of Seven had worked in the late 1910s and first half of the 1920s. In the past, Reid’s paintings had addressed landscape in a domesticated rather than wild state, but he adopted the new terrain with enthusiasm. Until well into the 1930s, summer trips were regular events for him and Wrinch, who both made oil-on-board sketches while on the road and then worked them up into finished canvases during the winter. In 1926, they travelled to Quebec City, Île d’Orléans, and Baie-Saint-Paul. In 1927, they were back in northeastern Ontario, at Algoma and Temagami, a region to which they returned in 1928, 1933, and 1934. They ventured even farther north, to the Abitibi Canyon, in 1929.

Final Years

In 1934, Reid began his last major art project, for the Royal Ontario Museum of Palaeontology (today part of the Royal Ontario Museum). Titled Through the Ages to Primitive Man, it was a thirty-four-panel frieze that spanned roughly 4.5 billion years of prehistory, beginning with the origins of the solar system and culminating in the appearance of the first anatomically modern humans in 300,000 BCE. The frieze ran along the walls of two galleries and, at some 5,000 square feet, was by far the largest of Reid’s completed murals.

Newspaper reports at the time of its installation in July 1938 were enthusiastic, not least because the project’s completion coincided closely with Reid’s seventy-eighth birthday. “I was afraid I wouldn’t live long enough to complete the job,” he told reporters. “It was an enormous work to undertake almost at the end of one’s life.” But like so many of Reid’s mural projects, it is no longer visible. Nineteen of the panels were later removed, and those left in place are inaccessible.

Little is known about Reid’s art practice during his final nine years. He continued to participate in most of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and Ontario Society of Artists annual exhibitions, although his travelling days seem to have ended by the early 1940s. Few of his sketches and canvases of northern Ontario are inscribed with dates after 1936, and the latest known Temagami canvas is signed and dated 1941. He did, though, set about systematically securing his place in Canadian art history. This task was all the more urgent for him because by the early 1940s—when the modernist Group of Seven in Toronto (1920–33) and the Beaver Hall Group in Montreal (1920–23) were both history—his art was substantially out of step with current developments.

To preserve his legacy, Reid compiled two thick scrapbooks of designs, drawings, correspondence, press clippings, and ephemera that are today housed in the Edward P. Taylor Library and Archives at the Art Gallery of Ontario. He engaged Muriel Miller, author of monographs on the landscape painter Homer Watson (1855–1936) and the poet Bliss Carmen, to write his biography and compile a catalogue raisonné of his work. And in 1944, he gave 459 artworks from his studio to the Government of Ontario.

The larger canvases from that gift were put on display in the provincial legislature, medium-sized oils were lent to Ontario secondary and normal (teacher training) schools, and the smaller works were organized into eleven exhibitions that toured to elementary and secondary schools for use in art education classes until 1950. When the provincial government’s entire art collection was catalogued in 1977, almost forty-five per cent of the pieces in Reid’s gift were unlocated. A small number of artworks were subsequently donated to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Nipissing University College, and the Art Gallery of Peterborough. The remaining collection, consisting mostly of oil-on-board sketches and a much smaller number of canvases, pastels, and watercolours, is now held in the Archives of Ontario, with selected works on display at Queen’s Park.

Muriel Miller published Reid’s biography and catalogue raisonné in a single volume in 1946, a year before the eighty-seven-year-old Reid died in Toronto, on August 23, 1947. In his will, he left Upland Cottage and its land to the Ontario College of Art. Mary Wrinch Reid occupied the house until her death in 1969, at which point the OCA, unable to use the building, sold the property. George Agnew Reid is buried with his two wives under a single tombstone in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, northeast of Wychwood Park.