Mortgaging the Homestead 1890

Mortgaging the Homestead was the most compositionally powerful and psychologically complex work Reid had produced to that point in his career, and it remains, for many, his most compelling painting. It was also sufficiently famous and timely that it was adapted for use in two federal election campaigns. Produced when Reid had just returned from a sixteen-month stay in Europe, and when he was at the height of his fame as a master of rural genre subjects, it recalled for him the time when he was thirteen years old and his father mortgaged the family farm—a move that risked financial disaster if the family were to default. When Mortgaging the Homestead was exhibited in Montreal and Toronto in 1890, critics were as enthusiastic about its dramatic power and lack of sentimentality  as they were about its social criticism, and they described Reid as “a sympathetic lover of humanity.”  Unsurprisingly, when Reid was elected a full academician of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) in April 1890, he chose Mortgaging the Homestead as the diploma piece he was required to submit to the RCA for donation to the National Gallery of Canada.

As Reid wrote in an article published a quarter century later, the mortgage on his family’s farm “limited my life. When I learned of its existence, some cherished hopes seemed to have gone forever, and the homestead changed its character.”  Reid’s emotional connection to the theme is emphasized above all by the figure of the mother, who by looking directly out at the viewer establishes the most gripping psychological connection yet to appear in Reid’s work. In addition to its personal resonance, the painting commemorated Reid’s alarm at the plight of contemporary farmers in the Dakota Territory of the United States, many of whom, “the worthy as well as the shiftless and profligate,” were being “swept into the vortex of debt” by declining prices for their produce. “Then it was that I became interested in the various movements intended to relieve the inequities which our civilisation is slow to throw off.”

As the curator Charles C. Hill has observed, Mortgaging the Homestead’s relevance to events in the United States was given a Canadian twist during the 1891 federal election campaigns. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald’s Conservative Party favoured tariffs to protect Canadian industries from inexpensive American imports. The Liberal Party under Wilfrid Laurier, on the other hand, proposed a free trade policy. Each party published a cartoon version of Mortgaging the Homestead, warning that the other’s policies would lead to economic disaster and, in the case of the Liberal Party’s cartoon, American annexation of Canada. There is no record of Reid voicing support for one party over the other, though he appears to have authorized his painting’s use by the Liberals (the poster acknowledges him), and he had recently painted portraits of members of highly placed Liberal families, including the granddaughter of Ontario’s premier, Oliver Mowat.

In 1891/92 Reid painted an even larger companion piece, The Foreclosure of the Mortgage, and in 1893 exhibited it at the Chicago World’s Fair, where it won a bronze medal and was reproduced as a full-page illustration in the catalogue.  Yet when it was exhibited in Canada in 1892 and 1893, critics were ambivalent, apparently because its mood was so dark. “Of course, it [The Foreclosure of the Mortgage] possesses many good points,” wrote a Montreal reviewer, “but it is to be regretted that so much time and material should be wasted upon such a subject. As a matter of good taste it has small claim to recognition, and it is difficult to see how such a subject could possibly attract an artist of Mr. Reid’s ability.“