Mary Hiester Reid 1898

This is one of several likenesses Reid painted of his first wife, Mary Hiester Reid (1854–1921). The earliest known dates from 1885, the year the two were married, and shows Hiester Reid in outdoor dress, buttoning her gloves. She was also the model for several of her husband’s non-portrait images, including Dreaming, 1889, one of two canvases he showed at the 1889 Paris Salon.

The 1898 likeness shows Hiester Reid arranging roses. Although she was an accomplished landscape and garden painter, she was best known for her many depictions of cut flowers, and she herself was frequently compared to blooms. “The lovely lady of the flowers, whose memory is as a fragrant rose” was how a Toronto Telegram journalist remembered her after her death in 1921.  In actuality, Hiester Reid was no shrinking violet, but instead systematically built and maintained her career as a professional artist. Her husband, in turn, avoided cloying floral sentimentality in his personal and professional relationships with her and collaborated with his wife to jointly promote their work. The couple held large two-person exhibitions in 1888, 1891, and 1892 and worked together on three journal articles describing their 1896 European travels, with Mary writing the articles and George illustrating them.  Both also taught students at their studios in Toronto and Onteora.

The 1898 portrait reveals the professional respect and the personal closeness that seems to have defined the marriage. Reid’s intimacy with his spouse is captured in the image’s informality and tenderness—qualities that are enhanced by the soft, semi-impressionistic brushwork and atmospheric effect with which he had been experimenting since the early 1890s. At the same time, the activity of arranging flowers draws attention to the respect Hiester Reid enjoyed as a professional artist.

Whether the marriage was affected by George Agnew Reid’s decades-long personal and professional friendship with Mary Wrinch (1877–1969) is unknown. What is known is that Wrinch became Reid’s second wife little more than a year after Mary Hiester’s death. Molly Peacock, in her biographical study of Hiester Reid, has built a credible case for the complexity of Wrinch’s bonds with her “painter-father-teacher-sort-of-lover” and her “painter-mother-teacher-sister-rival-sort-of-beloved.“