The Story 1890

The Story is one of the handful of large, multi-figure genre canvases that established Reid as an important and admired artist. He created it in late 1889 and early 1890, in the studio he had constructed in the Toronto Arcade after he and his wife, Mary Hiester Reid (1854–1921), returned to Canada from Paris. This work draws on his memories of his youth in rural Ontario, a theme it shares with other Reid canvases of the time. Forbidden Fruit, 1889, for example, shows Reid in the hayloft of the family barn reading The Arabian Nights in secret, even though he was forbidden to do so.

The rural-idyll character of Reid’s early paintings does much to explain their popularity with critics and audiences alike. During the late nineteenth century, the rapid growth of Toronto and other cities led to an increase in urban poverty. Poor urbanites faced overcrowding and uncleanliness resulting in disease, as well as grim conditions in the factories and sweatshops that employed many of them. In contrast, images such as The Story offered reassuring concepts of the simplicity and wholesomeness of country life.

This work also shows how Reid was improving in his abilities to combine his figures with their surroundings. The boys are enveloped in a tangible atmosphere. In comparison, the woman in The Call to Dinner, 1886–87, painted three years earlier, feels separated from the landscape into which she should be more skilfully integrated. The psychological interaction between the storytelling boy and his four listeners establishes a level of human engagement well beyond that achieved in The Call to Dinner. Even so, a small number of anomalies in The Story, such as the too-long left arm of the storytelling boy, contradict the emphasis on anatomical precision that Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) had preached in classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

From the first day it was seen in public in February 1890, The Story was a success. Reid intended to exhibit it that spring at the Paris Salon, where he had shown two paintings the year before. While Toronto’s Matthew Brothers art dealers were building a Paris-bound shipping crate, they put the painting on display in their street-front window. There it was seen and purchased for $1,000 by the businessman and politician E.B. Osler.  Weeks later, when it was hung in the Salon exhibition, The Story’s appealing subject, the sophistication of its technique, and the popularity that large genre paintings usually enjoyed in that venue combined to cement Reid’s reputation as an important painter of such Canadian scenes.