Portrait of Gustav Hahn 1906

Reid’s portrait of Gustav Hahn (1866–1962) employs a sombre palette. The sitter wears a correspondingly serious expression and does not look at the viewer. Yet this was a portrayal of a close friend, colleague, and neighbour, and someone who shared Reid’s dedication to William Morris (1834–1896) and the Arts and Crafts movement.

Hahn was born in Germany, where he trained as a designer. He moved to Toronto in 1888, working from 1892 until 1916 for Elliott & Son, the city’s leading interior decorating company, as a muralist and a designer of stained glass, furniture, metalwork, and leatherwork. Like Reid, with whom he taught at the Central Ontario School of Art and Industrial Design from 1895 to 1902, Hahn was a dedicated mural painter. In 1892, he was contracted to decorate the main chamber of the recently constructed Ontario Legislative Building at Queen’s Park with the allegorical figures Moderation, Justice, Power, and Wisdom. He was also one of six artists who joined Reid in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to provide murals for the federal Parliament Buildings, where his contribution was to have been a series of allegorical figures representing Canada’s national virtues. In 1908, Hahn painted Truth and Justice in the council chamber of Toronto’s city hall. This was the same building where Reid had installed his Hail to the Pioneers murals in 1899, and then tried but failed to interest the councillors in decorations for the council chamber itself.

Like Reid, Hahn was a co-founder in 1903 of the Arts and Crafts Society of Canada (later the Canadian Society of Applied Art). He and his wife, Ellen Smith (1869–1965), a craftsperson specializing in leatherwork, lived in a house designed by the Arts and Crafts architect Eden Smith (1858–1949) in Toronto’s High Park, near the Reids’ home on Indian Road. The Hahns later followed the Reids in moving from High Park to Wychwood Park. The close friendship between the two couples would continue after Hahn left Toronto to farm in Brooklin (today part of Whitby) because of anti-German sentiment during the First World War.