The Call to Dinner 1886–87

The Call to Dinner is Reid’s earliest traceable large-scale painting showing the rural Ontario genre themes that established his critical and popular reputation in the 1880s and 1890s. His only previous large genre painting was From the Milking (location unknown), which was exhibited in 1885 but for which there are no known images or descriptions. But its asking price of $300 indicates that it must have been of substantial size.

Reid began The Call to Dinner in the summer of 1886, while visiting his widowed father at the Reid farm in Wingham. The landscape is known to have been painted outdoors, from a vantage point in front of the family house. By 1886, Reid already had experience as a landscape artist. He had trained in the outdoor sketching classes of Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and exhibited his first landscape oil (In the Gloaming, 1883 or 1884; location unknown) in the 1884 Ontario Society of Artists (OSA) annual exhibition. The figure calling the field workers home for a meal is Reid’s sister Susan, but her unconvincing physical connection to the landscape—as if she were posing in front of a pre-existing image—suggests that she most likely modelled indoors for Reid.

The Call to Dinner may have been inspired by The Dinner Horn, an engraving by the American artist Winslow Homer (1836–1910), reproduced in the June 11, 1870, issue of the popular magazine Harper’s Weekly. Reid could not have seen Homer’s 1873 painting of the same name because it was in private hands prior to its 1947 acquisition by the Detroit Institute of Arts. But his choice of theme and his decision to focus attention on a seen-from-behind figure who dominates the composition are traits that also characterize Homer’s print. Homer’s work in general likely had strong appeal for Reid because the Canadian artist shared the American’s dedication to empathetic interpretations of rural life.

The Call to Dinner’s large size is emphasized by its heavy gilt frame, which Reid had acquired from the OSA before beginning the painting. The OSA had received the frame as a donation from the Montreal businessman Sir George Drummond when he removed it from a Gabriel Max (1840–1915) painting in his collection: The Raising of Jairus’s Daughter, 1878.  The two canvases are almost exactly the same size.

The Call to Dinner, complete with the frame, was first exhibited in the 1887 Toronto Industrial Exhibition, where it was offered for sale at $200. By the time it was seen in the expansive display of work that George and Mary Hiester Reid (1854–1921) mounted in Toronto the next year, it was in the collection of Dr. J.F.W. Ross, a noted gynecologist and abdominal surgeon at the University of Toronto. Ross—one of the wealthy collectors who admired Reid’s rural genre canvases—also owned Gossip, 1888 (now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario), another of the artist’s large bucolic visions of the Ontario countryside.