Piano and Piano Bench 1900 and Music Cabinet 1905

Music was a popular theme in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century visual art, especially in the context of the Arts and Crafts movement’s emphasis on the interrelatedness and equal importance of all the visual and performing arts. Reid himself was an exponent of Arts and Crafts theories and aesthetics, as well as an amateur singer and instrumentalist, and he included depictions of music-making in his easel paintings and murals. This piano and bench were made by the Reid Brothers Manufacturing Company (no relation to the artist) in Toronto. The music cabinet was made by Edwin Challener (1843–1914), the woodworker father of Frederick Challener (1869–1959), Reid’s first painting student and a lifelong friend and colleague.

All three objects display aspects associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, including the use of an unexotic wood (oak), clean and simple lines, a foregrounding of traditional construction techniques, and an avoidance of excessive or inappropriate ornament. Reid’s decision to decorate the piano and cabinet with his own paintings may well have been a nod to the painted furniture that was produced by the Arts and Crafts firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. in England, as well as by its successor, Morris & Co. An equally plausible prototype is a magnificent grand piano decorated by Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898)—an artist affiliated with William Morris (1834–1896) and much admired by Reid—who based that work on a poem by Morris about the mythical Greek musician Orpheus and his wife, Eurydice.

The paintings on Reid’s piano depict outdoor scenes. Music (front left) shows a young man playing a lute for five listeners. Dance (front right) shows a couple dancing while others watch. Adagio (left side) is a sunset landscape, and Largo (right side) counters with a moonlit landscape. The music cabinet also has four paintings set outdoors. Adagio shows a male figure playing a flute. Largo is a moonrise scene. Allegro depicts a woman with her hair blowing in the wind, and Andante is an image of the same woman seated in a pensive attitude. The titles are all terms describing tempo in music performance.

Reid’s scrapbooks contain sketches and photographs of this piano, including a drawing with an inscription dating its production to 1900.  That was the year he showed it in the Applied Art Exhibition organized by the Ontario Society of Artists. One reviewer described it as made of black walnut, but that was almost certainly an error as no other Reid piano is known to have existed.  A Toronto Star reviewer of the same exhibition went into raptures, describing the instrument as “a dream of uniqueness, simplicity and strength” in comparison to the “hideous, bulky things [that] most pianos are.”  The notions of fitness for purpose and avoidance of unnecessary ornamentation were touchstones of the Arts and Crafts movement.

Reid showed the piano again in the 1904 annual display organized by the Arts and Crafts Society of Canada (later the Canadian Society of Applied Art). Priced at $500, it apparently failed to sell because it appeared later in a photograph of the Reids’ house on Indian Road,  and a photograph of it in one of the artist’s scrapbooks is inscribed with his Wychwood Park address. Reid additionally displayed the music cabinet in the 1905 exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society of Canada, describing it in the catalogue as “Music Cabinet with Painted Decorations. Made by E. Challener.”