Women Operators 1919

Women Operators depicts First World War factory employees producing shells for use overseas. Although the canvas is Reid’s only wartime factory subject in which women predominate, it is otherwise entirely representative of his war paintings. Its large size, soft colouring, and depiction of human figures working within a cavernous space are all qualities repeated in his five other canvases showing factory subjects.

When Great Britain declared war on Germany on August 4, 1914, Canada—as a British Dominion subject to British foreign policy—entered the war on the same day. Although Reid’s age made him ineligible for active military duty, he and his wife, Mary Hiester Reid (1854–1921), supported the war effort in other ways. Then, in November 1916, the Canadian-born Max Aitken (1st Baron Beaverbrook as of January 1917 and later Britain’s first minister of information) established the Canadian War Memorials Fund (CWMF) to record Canada’s involvement in the conflict. Initially the CWMF concentrated on European subjects, for which it employed first British and then Canadian artists such as Augustus John (1878–1961), William Orpen (1878–1931), James Wilson Morrice (1865–1924), Maurice Cullen (1866–1934), and A.Y. Jackson (1882–1974)

Later in the war, Eric Brown, director of the National Gallery of Canada, obtained CWMF funding to commission artists to make records of war-related work within Canada. In the spring of 1918, George Agnew Reid’s old friend and patron Sir Edmund Walker agreed to advise on artists appropriate to receive CWMF contracts. Unsurprisingly, Reid was offered a commission a few months later “to make drawings in connection with the various works carried on for Canada’s Imperial Munitions Board.”  The result was eighteen medium-sized pastel drawings and six large oil canvases of munitions production, including Women Operators, as well as an even larger painting (244.5 x 182.5 cm) showing Armistice Day celebrations in downtown Toronto.

Women Operators is unique among Reid’s factory canvases because almost all the figures in it are female. Some twelve thousand women took on dangerous work in Canadian munitions plants during the war, replacing men who had left to enter the armed forces. Public interest in these women was high, and the CWMF responded by issuing contracts not only to Reid but also to the painters Henrietta Mabel May (1877–1971) and Dorothy Stevens (1888–1966), and the sculptors Frances Loring (1887–1968) and Florence Wyle (1881–1968).

May’s Women Making Shells, 1919, deals with the same subject as Women Operators, but it features many more figures than are seen in Reid’s comparatively uncluttered view. Although Reid’s large painting is only half the size of May’s (182.7 x 214.9 cm), Women Operators remains the sole significant image of First World War Canadian female munitions workers produced by a male artist. It is also—along with Reid’s other munitions pictures—one of his final attempts at a contemporary human subject. After this, he would turn increasingly to historical themes and landscapes.