Hail to the Pioneers, Their Names and Deeds Remembered and Forgotten We Honour Here 1898–99, restored in 1929

Reid’s murals for the entrance hallway of what is now Toronto’s Old City Hall—his first murals executed for a public space and the most widely admired of all his extant mural cycles—consist of three parts. The Arrival of the Pioneers is to the left of the three entry arches, Staking a Pioneer Farm is to the right, and the winged allegorical figures Discovery, Fame, Fortune, and Adventure are in the spandrels of the arches leading to the entrance on Queen Street. The two main panels deal with rural settlement in Ontario and echo the subjects of murals Reid had admired in the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, showing the history of the French capital. The four allegorical figures represent Toronto’s history and aspirations.

Byron (later Sir Edmund) Walker (1848–1924), speaking as president of the Toronto Guild of Civic Art, saw these murals as first steps in the development of “a great national school of wall painting.”  Other reactions varied, however. One, published in The Canadian Architect and Builder, complained that the ensemble “falls very far short of what may reasonably be expected in monumental work of this kind”; characterized the conception, composition, drawing, and colouring as “tame”; and objected that the figures’ clothing gave no sense of the physicality of their bodies.  A few months later, city councillors declined to approve spending for the additional murals proposed for the same venue, pleading a lack of funding. It is not known whether reservations about the quality of Hail to the Pioneers played any role in that decision.

The curator Rosalind Pepall has demonstrated how thoroughly these murals attest to Reid’s admiration of the Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898) murals he had studied in Paris and at the Musée de Picardie in Amiens in 1888, 1889, and 1896. The mother and child in The Arrival of the Pioneers recall comparable figures in such Puvis murals as Ave Picardia Nutrix, 1864, at the Musée de Picardie. Reid similarly followed Puvis’s example by simplifying his forms, favouring a limited range of muted and unmodulated colours, and presenting a matte surface to approximate the appearance of frescoes. Reid also preferred to represent relatively static, silhouette-like figures that are unlike those in his earlier easel paintings, where subtle tonal transitions convey the full roundedness of bodies.

Reid additionally learned from how Puvis harmonized his murals with the architecture that surrounded them. The strong horizontal emphasis of the walls on which the rectangular panels are mounted is repeated in the even height of all the standing settlers, as well as the left-to-right movement from figure to figure. Such movement recognizes that the murals are in an entryway: a space not intended for stationary contemplation. The tree trunks in Staking a Pioneer Farm and the standing figures in both panels echo the flanking pilasters and the nearby free-standing columns. Reid also chose colours shared by the architecture: grey-brown clothing responds to the similarly toned sandstone, and subdued pinks match the bases of the columns and the floor mosaic. When Puvis was working on murals for the Boston Public Library staircase, he had arranged for stone from the site to be shipped to his Paris studio so he could select similar colours. Reid did the same, setting samples of the Municipal Buildings’s stone next to his canvases as he painted them.