The Prospectors 1935

The Prospectors is almost unique among Reid’s postwar prints because it is dominated not by landscape but by human figures: three men seen from close up. This compositional strategy reprises Reid’s earlier commitment to large-scale human figures in paintings such as The Call to Dinner, 1886–87, The Story, 1890, and Hail to the Pioneers, 1898–99. The Prospectors is also one of the most ambitious and visually complex of the many prints Reid produced between the end of the First World War and the early 1940s, and it demonstrates his enthusiastic late-career embrace of an artistic medium—printmaking—that had previously been a minor and sporadic part of his practice. The importance he attached to the composition is evident not only in the fact that he exhibited the print in 1940 with the Society of Canadian Painter-Etchers and Engravers (CPE), but also in his production of a 76.2 x 101.6 cm oil painting that established the composition of the subsequent print version of the theme.

Reid’s earliest experiments in printmaking probably date to his first weeks at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he may have attended lecture-demonstrations by the British printmaker Francis Seymour Haden (1818–1910).  In 1885, Reid was a member of the recently founded Association of Canadian Etchers (restructured in 1916 as the CPE), and from about 1883 to 1893 he is known to have made five prints. But although he exhibited two monotypes in the 1912 Royal Canadian Academy of Arts’ annual exhibition, it was not until 1919, when he was fifty-eight years old and a central figure in Canadian art, that he turned his attention to making and exhibiting etchings, drypoints, and monotypes in a sustained way. He showed his prints most years from 1919 to 1942, especially in the annual exhibitions of the CPE.

The overwhelming majority of Reid’s prints after 1919 are landscapes, especially of the northeastern Ontario wilderness vistas that he visited with his second wife, Mary Wrinch Reid (1877–1969), in the 1920s and 1930s, and that he initially documented in situ as small oil-on-board sketches. Although he was generally dismissive of the art of the Group of Seven, his practice of making sketches of sparsely populated landscapes and then working those sketches up into more finished images overlapped the group’s work with similar motifs in the 1920s and 1930s.