The Valley of the Agawa 1932

The Valley of the Agawa is typical of the paintings that dominated Reid’s artistic output from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s, in sharp contrast to his focus on placid, domesticated scenery in his earlier landscapes. Painted in Toronto but based on sketches done in the geologically harsh Algoma region of Ontario, The Valley of the Agawa presents a landscape of natural grandeur and dramatic lighting. In images such as this one, Reid—who since his earliest rural genre canvases had been interested in art as an expression of Canadian identity—shows that he was as captivated by Algoma as the nationalist Group of Seven members had been in the late 1910s and early 1920s. He was, though, generally hostile to much of what he regarded as the group’s slapdash modernist techniques.

Reid’s first wife, Mary Hiester Reid (1854–1921), died in October 1921. A year later, he married his former student Mary Wrinch (1877–1969), a professional artist seventeen years his junior. Wrinch had first visited Muskoka, on the southeast coast of Georgian Bay, in 1906, returning frequently in later years. By the time she married Reid, she was regularly exhibiting Ontario and Quebec landscapes, often richly coloured and vigorously painted. She and Reid went to northeastern Ontario for the first time in 1925, travelling from Sault Ste. Marie into the Algoma region. Both were enthralled by the unforgiving landscapes they saw there.

The Reids’ northbound trips coincided with Canadians’ growing familiarity with the Group of Seven’s post-1917 promotion of the inhospitable landscapes of the Algoma region and elsewhere. The Valley of the Agawa is, however, markedly different from views such as Beaver Swamp, Algoma, 1920, by Lawren S. Harris (1885–1970). The two paintings are compositionally similar, with dark foregrounds and trees on either side opening onto a brighter vista. But there are also significant differences. Reid’s canvas lacks the brooding disquiet of Harris’s, as well as its richness of colour and its thickness of paint application in the sky. Whereas the Harris painting conjures a visceral experience of rough terrain, Reid’s picture is more illustrational in effect.

A similar comparison between Algoma images was made by a 1928 British critic, who contrasted Reid’s evocation of an “atmosphere of seclusion and mystery but of light instead of gloom” to the Group of Seven’s “bold decorative style.”  A 1926 critic described Reid’s northern landscapes as “a new departure for him, and one in which he has not failed to win distinction.”  Newspaper commentators, however, rarely gave these paintings more than a passing mention, probably because of the reputational dominance of the Group of Seven when it came to images of harsh terrain. Tellingly, when Reid showed three northern landscapes alongside Champlain Dreams of the Way to Cathay at the 1931 Royal Canadian Academy of Arts exhibition, reviewers devoted considerable attention to the Champlain canvas but passed over the three landscapes in silence.