Style & Technique

George Agnew Reid employed a range of media, themes, styles, and techniques during his career. As a student of Robert Harris (1849–1919) and especially of Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), he adopted the direct, or “French,” painting method, using his brush to block in large areas of form, colour, and light. He embraced the practice of painting outdoors, en plein air, which led him to experiment with Impressionism. Reid was also a leading proponent of the Arts and Crafts movement. Under this influence, he became a key figure in bringing together painting, architecture, and the applied arts as a way to enhance personal and social fulfillment.

The “French Method” of Painting

As an art student, Reid specialized in the human figure, and it was his figure paintings of the late 1880s and early 1890s that established his reputation as an important Canadian artist. The Ontario School of Art (now OCAD University), which he entered in 1878, did not have a life class. But Reid did learn something crucial for his later work in the antique class taught by the rising star Robert Harris (1849–1919), whose large 1883 painting The Fathers of Confederation (destroyed by fire in 1916) made him Canada’s best-known portraitist.

The antique class, in which students drew copies of plaster casts of classical sculptures, was a standard feature of art schools. Students took this class until they mastered draftsmanship skills. Harris, however, took a different approach. Instead of seeing the casts in terms of line, the traditional method, he taught students to look at them as consisting of broad planes of light and dark. Once students had grasped the overall construction of a form, they could begin to refine their work, incorporating more and more middle tones without sacrificing their original perception of broad areas of light and dark.

Reid wrote that under Harris’s guidance, “[I] began to build my work from the antique in solid planes and masses, not overworked, Harris preaching that the masses were everything.” Harris had learned this approach during his studies with Léon Bonnat (1833–1922) in Paris, and Reid later recalled being immediately enthusiastic about it.  “In later years, when I went to Paris to study, I recognized this as the French method, as the professors constantly used the expressions ‘Les valeurs’ [lights and darks], ‘Le ton vaste’ [broad tonal areas], ‘Dessinée par la masse [draw by mass].’”  Outside the antique class, Reid applied the French method when he made a copy of Harris’s The Newsboy, 1879: a replica admired by Harris.

Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), where Reid studied from 1882 to 1884, offered him something the Ontario School of Art could not: life classes. His attendance records at PAFA show he spent most of his time in those classes. Thomas Eakins (1844–1916)—who, like Harris, had studied with Bonnat—eschewed preparatory pencil and charcoal studies in favour of the loaded paintbrush because, as he said in an 1879 interview, “The main thing the brush secures is the instant grasp of the grand construction of a figure. There are no lines in nature.”  Eakins systematically applied this technique to painting from the live model rather than drawing from immobile casts. Reid recorded that he was particularly interested in this aspect of Eakins’s lessons, and this is evident in sketches such as Study of a Woman with Arms on Head, 1884.

In 1888 and 1889, Reid and his wife, Mary Hiester Reid (1854–1921), spent a year in Europe, much of it in Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi. At the Julian, Reid worked under the French portraitist and muralist Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant (1845–1902), an artist “poised halfway between academic traditions and modern audacity.” Benjamin-Constant’s most important impact on Reid was his preference for quickly establishing the principal aspects not just of the human figures in his work (an idea with which Reid was familiar because of his studies with Harris and Eakins) but also of the overall tonal and light/dark structure that underpinned its composition. Under Benjamin-Constant, Reid worked on a painting’s foreground figure(s) and the background simultaneously rather than in separate stages.

The results were sketches such as The Sword of Damocles, 1888–89, made while Reid was at the Académie Julian, that are characterized by a pleasing sense of pictorial unity and cohesion. Benjamin-Constant’s lessons are also evident in Reid’s finished canvases, such as Family Prayer, 1890, painted the year after Reid returned from Paris. Family Prayer achieves an overall unity—a pervasive sense of an enveloping atmosphere that ties everything together—through an emphasis on broad planes of tone and of light and dark, a corresponding blurring of potentially distracting details, and consistently fluid brushwork that permeates the entire canvas. A comparable technique defines such genre paintings as Forbidden Fruit, 1889; The Story, 1890; Mortgaging the Homestead, 1890; and The Other Side of the Question, 1890. In contrast, the woman in the earlier painting The Call to Dinner, 1886–87, begun the year after Reid left Philadelphia, is successfully rendered as a three-dimensional form, but she is not convincingly integrated into the landscape, which appears to have been painted before the woman’s body was superimposed onto it. Reid’s studies under Benjamin-Constant can be credited with helping resolve that problem.

Lucius O’Brien (1832–1899), a senior figure in Canadian art at the time, was not pleased with Reid’s blurring of detail in canvases such as Family Prayer. O’Brien described Reid as “one of the eliminators.”  “He could easily ruin Canadian art,” O’Brien grumbled, “but, there’s one thing, no one will ever want to buy his pictures.” The popularity of Reid’s large genre images in Canada, and his success in showing six of them in Salon exhibitions in Paris between 1889 and 1894, proved O’Brien wrong.

Plein Air and Impressionist Painting

During the 1890s, Reid’s paintings took on plein air qualities. Describing works created outdoors rather than in a studio, plein air painting had been popular with French artists since the 1830s. But it was most firmly established in the 1870s and 1880s by Impressionists, who valued this practice because it captured ephemeral effects of light and weather, imparted a sense of spontaneity and immediacy, and implied the use of bright colours—all of which encouraged the generalization of form rather than a reliance on detailed realism.

Reid was so interested in plein air work that he instituted outdoor sketching classes for his private pupils in Toronto and Onteora, as well as for students at the Ontario School of Art (and subsequently, the Ontario College of Art) (now OCAD University). His own output also shows a plein air influence, for various reasons. First, he was painting landscapes more frequently from the early 1890s onwards. Second, the mural art he admired in Europe in the late 1880s coincidentally echoed characteristics of plein air work, such as reduced detail, simplified forms, and suppression of three-dimensional recession, as well as its reduction of narrative complexity and its greater emphasis on all-over surface patterning.

A third factor in Reid’s embrace of plein air painting was the popularity of Impressionism, which made plein air work especially attractive for young artists. By the time George and Mary Hiester Reid visited Paris in 1888 and 1889, the influence of the movement had so permeated the French art world that juste milieu (middle of the road) artists, such as Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884) and the Canadian Paul Peel (1860–1892), were supplementing their academic canvases with modified plein air characteristics. Even Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), whose classicizing murals Reid much admired, employed a palette and paint application that grew increasingly light and broad, respectively, as a result of his awareness of Impressionism.

Reid’s Impressionism-influenced canvases of the 1890s are among his freshest. Idling, 1892, and City and Country, 1893, have sun-dappled outdoor settings, relatively loose brushwork, reduced detail, and sunny colours—including, in City and Country, the bluish shadows favoured by fully Impressionist artists. Yet these canvases stop short of the movement’s goal of seeing the world purely in terms of coloured light rather than solid forms. In contrast, Claude Monet (1840–1926), in his series of eminently impressionist views of Rouen Cathedral from 1892 to 1894, reduces the massive solidity of the architecture to physically insubstantial, shimmering curtains of light. Both Idling and City and Country retain a respect for the underlying sturdiness of the children’s bodies and for carefully structured compositions.

In 1896, three years after painting City and Country, Reid was back in Paris, exploring Impressionism in greater depth. Yet although he considered it “worthy of respect,” it was for him “only a phase.”  In addition, Toronto audiences and critics were generally ill-informed about, and lukewarm towards, impressionist art until the early twentieth century. “His [Reid’s] ‘Berry Pickers’ is interesting in incident,” wrote an 1892 reviewer of another plein air painting, “[but] a little woolly in execution, and shows not unusual carelessness in drawing.” “My mild effort at an impressionist experiment seems to have worked havoc with some critics,” Reid wrote the next year.

Reid’s ambivalent attitude to Impressionism was evidence of his lifelong belief in the value and flexibility of the academic tradition. All his most influential teachers—Robert Harris, Thomas Eakins, and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant—had combined their traditional academic training with more modernist techniques, but they had never sacrificed the former to the latter. Hence Reid’s conviction about the inherent flexibility of academic training. “I am both a believer in the academic and in modernism,” he stated in 1929. “I claim for the academic the power to grow, because it has the power to assimilate all good thought through research and experiment. The academic was never static, although at times it may appear so.”

This attitude was accompanied by a suspicion of what Reid took to be innovation for the sake of novelty. “Post Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism, Expressionism,” he proclaimed, “have arisen… as efforts to cast off the academic…. All that is named modernism is not necessarily modern, but only the old cry for something new at any cost.”  Even as late as the early 1930s, he signed a petition circulated by the Vancouver firebrand architect John Radford (1860–1940) alleging that the National Gallery of Canada was engaging in “flagrant partisanship” and the organization of exhibitions that did “not represent the best in Canadian art.”  The National Gallery came under fire when, for example, in 1926 it offended conservative sensibilities by purchasing A September Gale, Georgian Bay, 1921, by Arthur Lismer (1885–1969).

In his later life, Reid admitted that he had begun “as a radical in art and a devotee of Eakins of Philadelphia, who… broke the hard and fast rule that drawing should precede painting…. I came to realize, however, that this break with tradition was only a trifling matter, and, while a great truth, was only a part of the greater one that no one way to do things is the only right way.”  His dedication to plein air painting and his flirtation with Impressionism reinforced key modernist aspects of what Reid had learned from Eakins and Benjamin-Constant about how to construct unified pictorial compositions. At the same time, though, he remained cautious about abandoning the safety of the academic tradition. Adherence to that tradition ultimately distanced him from the more radical forms of modernism that came to characterize international and Canadian art beginning in the early twentieth century.

Mural Painting

Reid argued that a mural “is not an easel painting on a large scale, painted without reference, either in technical treatment or subject, to its future destination.” It should not “require much verbal explanation; it must not force itself upon the attention of the viewer as though it, and not the object it beautifies, were the main consideration. If it does give the impression that it is the raison d’être for the building then it helps to perpetuate an architectural falsehood.”

From 1896 to 1910, Reid executed murals for “at least five drawing rooms, painted twenty over-mantel subjects—single panels or triptychs—and at least a dozen single-figure panels, as well as decorating the Toronto city hall entrance, and working out a sustained scheme in the [All Souls] Onteora Church.”  The locations of many of these murals are not recorded in Reid’s catalogue raisonné, compiled by his biographer, Muriel Miller, because it lists only works that were extant at the time of publication. Others had been covered up, removed, lost, or destroyed.

Like most of his contemporaries, Reid did not paint his murals directly onto wet or dry plaster (buon fresco and fresco secco, respectively), which would have made removing and relocating them extremely difficult and expensive. Instead, he employed the marouflage technique of painting on canvas in his studio and then affixing his murals to walls using an adhesive mixture of thick white lead, oil, and resin. Such murals can be removed from their walls to be put into storage, which means they can easily be lost, as happened with, for example, the scene Reid painted to go above the stage at Toronto’s Arts and Letters Club in the early 1920s. That canvas was detached from the wall and put into storage a mere ten years after its installation, when alterations were being made to the building. It has not been located since.

Reid’s murals for private residences in Onteora and Ontario are mostly landscapes. In comparison, the ones he planned or executed for public spaces usually dealt with historical, patriotic, religious, or education-related themes appropriate to the buildings for which they were designed. In Toronto, these included completed projects at the city hall in the Municipal Buildings, the Earlscourt Library (today the Dufferin/St. Clair branch of the Toronto Public Library), and Jarvis Collegiate Institute. At the Earlscourt Library, for example, he provided a continuous frieze on the four upper walls of the general reading room. The frieze, painted in 1925–26, consists of five groups: The Family, The Community, The Story Hour, Philosophy, and Nature Study, with each group linked thematically to the others by the act of reading, and formally by the pastoral settings they share.

Reid’s ideal situation was to paint murals in buildings for which he had drawn the plans. This was the case with the houses and church he designed and decorated at Onteora, as well as The Studio and Upland Cottage, the two homes he designed for himself and his first wife in Toronto. In the case of the Municipal Buildings, Reid consulted with the architect, E.J. Lennox (1854–1933), when planning his murals so that they enhanced the architecture. He even had samples of the marble Lennox used transported to his studio while he was painting the panels, to make sure that the murals’ colours and the balance of lights and darks would agree with those of the surrounding architectural materials.

Arts and Crafts

Britain’s Arts and Crafts movement and its dynamic leader, William Morris (1834–1896), argued that mechanized mass production had reduced designer-craftspeople to the status of cogs in factory assembly lines, thus degrading the design quality of everything from the humblest of everyday objects to the practice of architecture. The movement was as much a program of social reform as design reform, and it saw the latter as dependent on a rethinking of the former. Raising the applied arts to the level of aesthetic respectability and importance enjoyed by the traditional fine arts was an integral part of Arts and Crafts ideology.

Reid was well aware of the Arts and Crafts movement from his reading, his travels, and his University of Toronto supporter James Mavor, who was Morris’s close friend from the mid-1880s until Morris’s death.  Fabrics, tapestries, wallpapers, furniture, and stained glass produced by Morris & Co. were at a peak of popularity and influence in Britain when the Reids—whose busy travel itineraries prioritized visits to museums and commercial galleries—were in Europe. Excerpts from Morris’s writings were available in Canadian journals such as The Week (Toronto) and Arcadia (Montreal), and in imported British publications such as The Art Journal and especially The Studio.

Like Morris, Reid was distrustful of mass production and, in his words, “the consequent loss of individuality in design and workmanship in every field of art activity.”  He also shared the commitment to social justice that Morris exemplified in his utopian novel News from Nowhere (1893), even if he did not endorse Morris’s advocacy of socialism. Reid’s essay on his paintings Mortgaging the Homestead, 1890, and The Foreclosure of the Mortgage, 1893, attacked economic practices that resulted in farming families losing their livelihoods: “When the artist sees that our vaunted progress not only offers no adequate relief, but seems to aggravate sorrow and suffering, he must express himself… for his desire that life should be made to develop all its noblest possibilities.”  Also like Morris, Reid rejected the “monopoly of art by a few” in favour of people of all social and economic situations having a right to well-designed surroundings. If an artist did not believe “that the aspiration towards the beautiful is eventually an ethical quality, he would adopt the profession of the cold calculator of forms.”

Reid’s interest in the Arts and Crafts movement went well beyond social concerns. It had an especially strong impact on formal aspects of his artistic practice. As an architect, he applied Arts and Crafts principles to the many buildings he designed for himself and others, starting with Bonnie Brae, his home-studio at Onteora. Bonnie Brae was constructed of unadorned natural materials, especially local timber and native fieldstone, and emphasized rather than disguised the materials’ inherent qualities. It also incorporated such Arts and Crafts features as a large verandah as a transition between the house and the natural environment.

The two Toronto homes Reid planned for himself and his wife in 1900 and 1906 modified the rusticity of Bonnie Brae into more sophisticated urban structures, but they also repeated numerous aspects of Arts and Crafts visual syntax made famous in Red House, which Philip Webb and William Morris had designed for Morris in 1859. These features include shingled and steeply pitched roofs, prominent gables, picturesquely asymmetrical facades, and irregular roof lines because, in Reid’s words, “the architect who draws his inspiration from nature recognizes that perfect symmetry is as much abhorred by nature as a vacuum.” The interiors of both houses incorporated Arts and Crafts elements, such as exposed rafters, a gallery at the second-floor level, and an inglenook (seating on either side of a fireplace).

Buildings, however, were evidence of only half of the Arts and Crafts formal influence on Reid’s art. He approvingly quoted Morris’s definition of architecture as comprising not only the building itself but also all its furnishings, fittings, and fixtures, “from mere mouldings or abstract lines to the great epical works of sculpture or painting…. A work of architecture is a harmonious, co-operative work of art inclusive of all the serious arts.”  This—a pithy distillation of the union-of-the-arts ideal promoted by the Arts and Crafts movement—made a profound impact on Reid’s production, just as it did on Morris’s.

Thus, beginning in the early 1890s, Reid began to paint murals and then to design household items, especially metal objects such as fireplace implements and door handles and hinges, as well as wood furniture. He estimated that at Onteora alone, he designed more than one hundred such objects.  In keeping with Arts and Crafts standards, he ensured that everything he created was useful, simple in design and decoration, and transparently suited to its purpose.  To that end, Reid made his furniture from common types of wood, especially oak or pine. Construction techniques were rudimentary, often with exposed joints and always an avoidance of excessive and inappropriate ornamentation, with a preference for such Arts and Crafts motifs as the heart shapes he carved into chairs for his home on Indian Road. Even a premade piano that he decorated and exhibited in the early 1900s was described by the Toronto Globe newspaper critic as having “very simple… lines, with no carving and few curves”—qualities that came as “a vast relief after the regulation highly polished affair of conventional ornament with which our homes are supplied.”

The widespread popularity of the Arts and Crafts movement ensured that critics understood and sympathized with Reid’s aesthetic. One such commentator was Jean Grant of Toronto Saturday Night, who favourably reviewed the 1900 Applied Art Exhibition that had been largely initiated by Reid. Grant praised “art applied to the beautifying of the ordinary objects of everyday life” and regretted that this “has not been thus far the form our activities have assumed…. One of the mentally paralyzing influences we contend with always is the contemplation of manufactures monotonous in design, entirely lacking in individuality, and often in excellence of finish. The usual accompaniment of crudeness is exaggeration, over-decoration, and this we have also.” Reid must have been gratified.