Significance & Critical Issues

George Agnew Reid displayed his commitment to Canada in easel paintings and murals that explored Canadian history and identity during decades when debate was raging about how the country could distinguish itself on the world stage. One aspect of that concern involved the portrayal of Indigenous people and subjects in Reid’s art. He was also one of Canada’s most active and influential proponents of the belief that creativity and beauty should permeate all public and private environments to enhance everyone’s life. As part of that conviction, he was an industrious builder and reformer of art infrastructure and institutions, while also training generations of students as an art teacher.

Painting Canada

The question of how to define “Canadian art” occupied many artists in the years around the turn of the twentieth century, three and four decades after Confederation. Some argued that Canada as a political entity was still too young to differentiate its art from that of older countries. Others identified specifically Canadian motifs, including landscapes, flora, fauna, and Indigenous populations. For his part, Reid was committed to making work that was as reflective as possible of his homeland. “Canadian art,” he wrote, “should represent the idea of nationality and development.”

In 1886, J.E. Hodgson, secretary of the British Royal Academy of Arts, stated that a key marker of Canadian identity was its relatively recent history of European settlement.  Reid, himself a son of immigrant parents, agreed, and he hoped his rural genre scenes—including Forbidden Fruit, 1889; The Story, 1890; and Mortgaging the Homestead, 1890—would express important aspects of Canadian identity and character.

However, by the 1890s, genre subjects had become the lingua franca of European and American artists such as Jules Breton (1827–1906) and Jean Geoffroy (1853–1924) of France, and Daniel Ridgway Knight (1839–1924), Anna E. Klumpke (1856–1942), Elizabeth Nourse (1859–1938), and Gari Melchers (1860–1932) of the United States. These and other like-minded artists hoped that genre subjects would bring them success at major international exhibitions, especially the Paris Salon, where such themes were popular with critics and audiences. That degree of international approval made it difficult to cast genre images as statements of a specific nationality. As a prominent British critic contended, Canadian art needed to be “Canadian to the backbone,”  rather than link itself with French subjects and techniques. Interestingly, within a decade of that statement, in the 1890s, Reid’s production of large-scale easel paintings on rural themes had declined sharply. By the middle of the 1890s, he was reorienting his exploration of Canadianness from easel genre paintings to murals.

An essential aspect of this transition was Reid’s exposure in 1888 and 1889 to French mural painting in buildings of national importance, such as the Paris Hôtel de Ville. Under that stimulus, his first public murals, for the Toronto Municipal Buildings, continued his interest in rural history, but their location in the city hall made them a readily visible statement not only about local history (The Arrival of the Pioneers and Staking a Pioneer Farm, 1898–99) but also about communal aspirations for the future as embodied in the four allegorical figures of Discovery, Fame, Fortune, and Adventure. For Reid, the city hall afforded a forum that implied a broad public consensus about the murals’ depicted themes: “a stimulation to achievement to commemorate noble ideals” in the pursuit of an “ideal which makes life truly worth living.” But his hope of adding another fourteen scenes came to naught.

In 1904, Reid organized a seven-artist proposal (not realized) to decorate the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, thereby moving from portraying Canada on municipal and provincial levels to a national one. In the final scheme, his contribution was to have been a 21.3-metre-long panel dominating the entrance hallway of the Centre Block, on the theme of Canada Receiving the Homage of Her Children. To convey this abstract theme, he adopted an entirely allegorical approach: a rhetorical device he had admired in painted and sculpted adornment at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. By the late 1890s, his friend James Mavor, professor of political economy at the University of Toronto, had already criticized allegorical and classical imagery for not being relevant or readable to contemporary viewers,  but Reid was undeterred. Instead, his plan (never realized) included allegorical female figures representing Canada and the provinces, with other figures symbolizing various arts, industries, and periods of Canadian history.

Reid’s commitment to painting the nation took a new form in 1908 and 1909. Samuel de Champlain had founded Quebec City near the Iroquoian settlement of Kanata (Stadacona) in 1608, and he reached what is now Lake Champlain in 1609. Reid attended the lavish tercentenary ceremonies—held in Quebec City and New York State—that marked this moment in the colonial history of the New World. In Quebec, he witnessed extravagant multidisciplinary re-enactments and other presentations of historical events performed on the Plains of Abraham by four thousand actors accompanied by an orchestra and a flotilla of ships on the St. Lawrence River. He and the artists Charles Huot (1855–1930), Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté (1869–1937), Henri Julien (1852–1908), and C.W. Jefferys (1869–1951), a former Reid student with an intense interest in Canadian history, recorded what they saw. The tercentenary stimulated Reid to explore Canada’s past in painted reconstructions of specific historical episodes, rather than the generic events shown in most of his canvases of rural scenes and in the Municipal Buildings murals. He began with two nearly identical 1909 depictions of Arrival of Champlain at Quebec, which his biographer Muriel Miller plausibly characterized as the first of his several paintings of clearly defined historical happenings.

Throughout such experiments, however, Reid remained convinced that patriotic sentiment and good citizenship could be most effectively promoted through the medium of public mural painting. This assumption is apparent in a 1914 Ontario Department of Education pamphlet, of which he was the principal author; it devoted an entire chapter to the promotion of murals in public schools.  In 1928, he finally got his chance to pursue the link between murals, education, and the exploration of Canadian identity. In that year, he was contracted to paint murals for an actual school: Jarvis Collegiate Institute in Toronto. Those murals ultimately occupied all four walls of the school auditorium and, except for the commemoration-themed panels Sacrifice and Patriotism, were dedicated almost entirely to European explorers, including Leif Erikson, John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), Jacques Cartier, Samuel de Champlain, and Alexander Mackenzie. Also featured are views of the founding of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670 and the arrival in Canada of United Empire Loyalists in the 1780s.

Soon before Reid began the Jarvis Collegiate murals, his lifelong thematic interest in Canada took a final and rather surprising form, one that obsessed him for the rest of his career. Placid Ontario and New York landscapes had constituted a major portion of his work since the mid-1890s. As he told an interviewer in 1913, “My first artistic efforts came out as landscapes—the noble unspoiled nature of Canada, with its grand horizon and clear air, its fine rolling country, and well grown trees, and its noble lakes and rivers. You would be astonished if you knew the number of my landscape studies and compositions.”  After his second marriage, however, Reid and his wife, Mary Wrinch (1877–1969), began to explore the more rugged Algoma and Temagami regions of northeastern Ontario.

Members of the Group of Seven (1920–33) had painted the Algoma region from 1918 to 1921, and their art promoted those landscapes as popular symbols of Canada. Reid adopted the same stance. He produced oil sketches and canvases of northeastern Ontario landscapes, as well as large numbers of prints, including monotypes of Agawa Canyon that he exhibited with the Society of Canadian Painter-Etchers and Engravers and the Canadian Society of Graphic Art in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Reid, who had always admired what, in 1913, he had called “the noble unspoiled nature of Canada,” found himself at the end of his career being compared to the Group of Seven: artists whose work he had often criticized for being crude, but with whom he shared a commitment to painting Canada.

Indigeneity, Canadian History, and Canadian Identity

One of the first Indigenous figures in Reid’s art appears in Staking a Pioneer Farm, one of the two narrative panels of his project Hail to the Pioneers—Their Names and Deeds Remembered and Forgotten We Honour Here, 1898–99, in the Toronto Municipal Buildings. Staking a Pioneer Farm shows eight sturdy Euro-Canadian men surveying land that will soon be repurposed as a farm. There is also, though, a smaller ninth figure. Pushed into the background, a single Indigenous man stands beside a tree and warily watches the foreground activity. Reid may have borrowed him from a similar figure peering from behind a tree in Saint Geneviève as a Child in Prayer, c.1876, by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), which he had seen in the Church of Sainte-Geneviève (now the Panthéon) in Paris.

The Indigenous man is represented as a creature of nature, part of a landscape that he (unlike the foreground men) supposedly does not use for “practical” purposes. His way of life seems as threatened as the tree he stands beside but that will soon be felled by the foreground men, most of whom have axes. The art historian Marylin McKay has documented how images such as Staking a Pioneer Farm were part of a larger pattern of contemporaneous Canadian art that cast Euro-Canadians and Indigenous peoples into binary relationships: advanced versus primitive, active versus passive, and future-oriented versus doomed.

Indigenous figures recur in Reid’s subsequent art, including Arrival of Champlain at Quebec, 1909, and especially his 1928–30 Jarvis Collegiate murals. The compositional dominance of Europeans in those murals contrasts with the passivity of almost all the Indigenous observers. In addition, only two panels—Patriotism and Sacrifice—do not include First Nations characters. As McKay observes, those are the sole images in the project that deal with a subject, the First World War (1914–18), that postdates the eighteenth century. The absence of First Nations figures in them removes Indigenous peoples from twentieth-century Canadian history, despite some four thousand of them having served during the First World War, the conflict that instigated the Jarvis Collegiate mural project in the first place.

Reid’s prioritization of European explorers reflected attitudes held by a majority of his settler contemporaries. These included the sculptor Hamilton MacCarthy (1846–1939), whose monument to Samuel de Champlain was commissioned on the three hundredth anniversary of the explorer’s arrival at what is now Ottawa, in Algonquin territory. MacCarthy’s statue was erected in 1910 and stood for nearly a century at the edge of Nepean Point, silhouetted high above the Ottawa River, before both the statue and its plinth were removed during a redevelopment project that began in 2019.

 

The Iroquois photographer Jeff Thomas (b.1956) based his 2000–11 Champlain series on MacCarthy’s monument. Champlain was a heroic figure for MacCarthy, as he was for Reid, who painted him several times, not only at Jarvis Collegiate but also in oils and pastels, and even as one of the figures adorning an Arts and Crafts–inspired wooden chest. In contrast, Thomas’s photographs omit the figure of Champlain and instead show contemporary Indigenous and non-Indigenous people posing at the foot of the monument. That was the original location of MacCarthy’s Anishinabe Scout, which was added to the ensemble in 1918 but removed in the 1990s at the urging of Ovide Mercredi, chief of the Assembly of First Nations, on the grounds that the figure’s position kneeling at the base of the monument was degrading.

Attitudes have changed so substantially over the century since Reid began painting Champlain that in 2022, the National Capital Commission (NCC) decided not to return the explorer’s statue to his former elevated position on a plinth above the Ottawa River. Instead, the NCC repositioned him at ground level and renamed Nepean Point, the site of his former monument, Kiweki (Algonquin for “returning to one’s homeland”) Point.

“Art for Life’s Sake”: The Union of the Arts

“The useful arts are not separate from the fine arts,” Reid insisted in an 1898 journal article.  With an artistic practice that ranged from easel painting to mural decoration, architecture, and the applied arts, Reid held that visual arts media should not be considered in isolation from each other. Nor should they exist within a hierarchical ranking. Good art was not the purview of those who could afford to buy or commission expensive paintings and sculptures. Instead, everyone should have the right to access good design and beautiful objects on a daily basis in their private and public lives: everything from door latches to furniture, and from private houses to public murals. More than any other Canadian artist of his time, Reid lobbied in print and speeches to win over ordinary citizens, institutions, and government officials to this point of view.

The idea of a union of the arts had an international following in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and manifested itself in multiple ways.  Reid’s interest in it had diverse sources. Among them was the City Beautiful doctrine that he saw at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where the architect Daniel Burnham (1846–1912) brought together painters, sculptors, architects, and landscape designers to create an aesthetically unified and grandly inspiring urban environment.

Another inspiration was Reid’s understanding of how civic mural paintings in Europe and the United States were conceived by their sponsors and their makers as intimately bound up with the spatial organization, construction materials, and purposes of the buildings in which they were installed. This approach reached an early peak in his 1898–99 Hail to the Pioneers murals in Toronto’s Municipal Buildings. The most important influence on Reid’s thinking about a union of the arts, however, was the Arts and Crafts movement, with which he was involved beginning in the 1880s.

Reid’s conviction that excellent design in all the visual arts contributed to individual enrichment and public betterment boiled down to a basic question about the purposes of—and therefore the audiences for—art. He rejected the topical phrase “art for art’s sake,” as espoused by the Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde and others rebelling against the cloying moralism to which art was often yoked during the Victorian era. Reid equated art for art’s sake with elitism and with the sterility of “technique for technique’s sake.” He instead preferred the term “art for life’s sake” or “art as an expression of the life of mankind.”

Among his colleagues who shared that commitment were the textile designer and interior decorator Candace Wheeler (1827–1923), the muralist, designer, and interior decorator Gustav Hahn (1866–1962), and the decorative painter Frederick Challener (1869–1959), who designed murals for both government buildings and such popular venues as hotels, restaurants, theatres, and even steamships. Another close colleague and friend of Reid’s, Eden Smith (1858–1949), was president of the Toronto Architectural Eighteen Club. As the club’s president, Smith led its opposition to the accreditation of architects by professional examinations, contending instead that architecture was most productively understood as “the harmonious association of all the crafts.”  Reid himself was the dominant figure in founding the Society of Mural Decorators (1894) and the Arts and Crafts Society of Canada (1903), both dedicated to promoting a union of the arts.

Reid faced an uphill battle, though, against uninterested, cash-strapped, or parsimonious institutions. Municipal, provincial, and federal governments all declined to fund his mural projects. But his activism in promoting good design for like-minded figures in the private sector was more successful. He designed houses, murals, and accessories for several friends at the Onteora colony in New York State. For the actress Maude Adams, for example, he designed not only the plan, the exterior elevations, and the interior of her Onteora home (including a mural), but also its furniture. The most active and influential of his private clients was the banker and arts patron Byron (later Sir Edmund) Walker (1848–1924), whose public collaboration with Reid began in 1897, when both were members of the Toronto Guild of Civic Art, and who commissioned a mural by Reid for his library, which is no longer extant.

The most inclusive and ambitious examples of Reid’s union of the arts, however, were the three homes (one in Onteora and two in Toronto) he designed for himself and his first wife, Mary Hiester Reid (1854–1921), along with All Souls Church in Onteora. He drafted the plans for all four buildings, chose the construction materials, incorporated murals painted by either himself or his wife, and designed most of the furniture, fixtures, and fittings. All these buildings were permeated with Reid’s conviction about the centrality to his creative process of prioritizing a thoroughgoing union of the arts.

Building Infrastructures for Art

More than perhaps any other artist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Reid was instrumental in building and supporting institutions and infrastructures that underpinned Canadian art production and display. Aside from being the principal founder of the Society of Mural Decorators and the founding vice-president of the Arts and Crafts Society of Canada (soon renamed the Canadian Society of Applied Art), he was a founding member of the Associated Watercolour Painters (1912) and the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour (1925), and he had close connections with the wealthy and influential lay members of the executive of the Toronto Guild of Civic Art.

Reid initiated exhibitions and regularly contributed to the annual shows of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA), the Ontario Society of Artists (OSA), the Art Association of Montreal, and the Canadian National Exhibition. He also participated in applied art exhibitions staged by the Toronto Architectural Eighteen Club and the Arts and Crafts Society of Canada / Canadian Society of Applied Art. In so doing, he made an important point of straddling the categories of the fine and applied arts.

As president of the OSA from 1897 to 1901, Reid led the process of revising its constitution to specify that the society would encourage art that addressed Canadian themes and iconography. As noted above, this was a crucial initiative at a time when many institutions were attempting to identify specifically Canadian cultural characteristics to distinguish the young country at home and abroad. As the art historian Joan Murray has stated, by 1901 (the final year of Reid’s OSA presidency), “the creation of a living Canadian art was accepted as the foremost aim of the Society.”  As president, Reid also led the OSA in organizing and hosting the groundbreaking 1900 Exhibition of Applied Art. Under his leadership, the OSA created a travelling exhibitions program that took art displays to Ontario towns that lacked exhibition facilities. He also worked with the Guild of Civic Art to create the Public School Art League, which made recommendations for educational murals in schools.

Equally impressive was Reid’s tenure as president of the RCA (1906–9). As he had done at the OSA, he both oversaw revisions to the RCA constitution and instituted what he intended to be a series of touring exhibitions, on the theory that building interest in Canadian art required giving as many people as possible the opportunity to see it. To that end, he sent a large show to Halifax and another to Sherbrooke, although difficulties with the RCA’s executive council ended the project at that point.

During his RCA presidency, Reid was also involved in reviving the fortunes of the National Gallery of Canada (NGC). Founded by the RCA in 1880, the gallery had since languished as a largely neglected section of the federal Department of Public Works, surviving on a derisively inadequate budget. Adopting a more interventionist role than previous RCA presidents, Reid in 1907 petitioned both the governor general, Lord Grey (the NGC’s patron), and Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier to create a new management structure to “systemize and control all efforts on the part of the Federal Government in connection with the Fine Arts,” including supervision of the National Gallery.

That same year, the government established a modified version of Reid’s proposal: a three-man Advisory Arts Council headed initially by Montreal businessman and senator George Drummond and, following his death in February 1910, by Byron Walker, Reid’s most stalwart and influential supporter. The council proved to be highly effective at reforming the NGC. Under its stewardship, the gallery’s funding to buy art increased almost immediately to $10,000 per year, and by 1913, its annual budget had reached $100,000—several times what it had been before the inception of the council. Reid was not a member of the Advisory Arts Council, but he was its indispensable midwife. He also made recommendations to the council’s members, especially Walker, with whom he had an exceptionally strong working relationship.

Unfortunately, several of Reid’s colleagues in the RCA felt that he acted with too little deference to the academy’s executive, and the membership took the unprecedented and remarkably short-sighted step of ending his term after three years instead of the usual five. But as the artist Fred Brigden (1871–1956) accurately remarked in 1929, “When one sees the place the National Gallery fills today in the life of Canada, we realize how great a debt we owe to… [Reid] for this alone.” Even in that year, two decades after he had ceased being the RCA president, Reid was advocating for revisions to the academy’s constitution that would eventually lead to associate academicians having voting privileges.

Reid also assumed an important role in the creation of the Art Museum of Toronto (the Art Gallery of Toronto from 1919 to 1966 and the Art Gallery of Ontario thereafter). It was under his presidency that the OSA published On the Need of an Art Museum in Toronto (1899). He and Walker were the most active members (honorary secretary and president, respectively) of a provisional council that drafted a constitution for the projected museum and raised enough public interest and funding to convince the provincial government to incorporate it in 1900.

A decade later, the Grange—the home of the journalist and historian Goldwin Smith and his wife, Harriet Boulton Smith—was left in Smith’s will to the then homeless museum. Reid, though, continued to campaign for a purpose-built art gallery. He was successful: construction of a new building, annexed to the Grange and designed by Darling and Pearson Architects, was completed in 1918.

The Art Teacher

Reid’s commitment to forming the next generations of artists was also long-lasting and profound. In 1929, he described teaching as “an intense part of my life. It has been an interest in a cause which has not been less to me than any cause can be to the spirit of man.” Many of his students had fond memories of his empathy and insights. Carl Schaefer (1903–1995), for example, recalled Reid as a patient, helpful, inspiring instructor.  The future Group of Seven member J.E.H. MacDonald (1873–1932), who was twenty-five years old when he began lessons under Reid in 1898, described him as “a good teacher, careful, ample in explanation, ready to demonstrate anything he says, with his brush. I see now the reason of the importance given to ‘technique’ by artists.”  Mary Wrinch remembered Reid as “a born teacher” who “worked by telling, not doing, so that we didn’t copy his palette.”

Reid’s nearly half-century career as a teacher began with his giving private lessons in the mid-1880s. When oversight of the original Ontario School of Art was returned to the Ontario Society of Artists by the provincial government in 1890, he was hired as a painting instructor. He retained that position until 1912, when the school was incorporated as the Ontario College of Art (OCA; now OCAD University), with the goals of training professional fine artists, commercial artists, and teachers. In that year, Reid became the OCA’s founding principal, a position he held until 1929.

Intriguingly, as the OCA’s first principal, Reid—despite his training under Thomas Eakins (1844–1916)—did not introduce anatomy classes until 1912, and even then on a much smaller scale than he had enjoyed at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In his classes, he taught the importance of using pencil or charcoal for preliminary drawings, whereas he had been excited by Eakins’s preference for working directly with the paintbrush without relying on preparatory drawings. Reid also placed more emphasis on the antique class than Eakins had done. Finally, in a nod to social expectations of sexual modesty, the models for life classes at the OCA were still partially draped as late as 1924.

Reid’s tenure as the OCA’s president was nonetheless transformational. He oversaw the college’s six departments and revised curriculum, hired additional staff, and instituted an outdoor summer school. Working with Horwood and White Architects, he drafted plans for a new building that allowed the college to move out of its cramped quarters in the Toronto Normal School and into its first purpose-built home in 1920. Enrolment grew by 230 percent, from 180 to 410, during his first twelve years as principal.  As senior officers of the OCA council wrote to Reid in 1928, “We wish to put on record our formal recognition of the way you carried the school year after year as practically a private burden on your own shoulders.”  The next year, the formal event marking his retirement was filled with tributes from colleagues and students. “One can hardly speak of art in Ontario without speaking of George Reid,” declared J.E.H. MacDonald, Reid’s former student and his successor as the OCA principal.