A giant of our past is remembered - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

An item in a recent Farmtario column reminded me of how a native of our county played a part in our country’s history and culture.

 

Sarah McGoldrick discussed seeing a painting by East Wawanosh painter George Agnew Reid while touring the Ontario Legislature building. Entitled “Mortgaging the Homestead”, the oil painting was a preliminary work for Reid’s larger painting, given the same name, that is part of the National Gallery of Canada’s collection.

 

I must admit I was ignorant of Reid’s work before Blyth Festival Artistic Director Peter Smith chose his 1890 painting “The Story” for his 1992 Blyth Festival poster. If I remember correctly, there was also a touring exhibition of Reid’s work in the Bainton Gallery that year.

 

What is unusual about Reid’s work is that, at the time he was growing up on a farm, south of Wingham and north of Belgrave, he would be inspired to paint and not to farm. But he had other ambitions and briefly apprenticed with an architect before attending the Ontario School of Art, graduating in 1879. 

 

Afterwards, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1882 to 1885. While there he met artist Mary Heister and married her in 1885. They remained married until she died in 1921. The couple studied in Paris and Madrid and travelled in France, Italy, Spain and Portugal.

 

Reid made his reputation with narrative pictures to which he applied his training in Paris which included works such as “The Foreclosure of the Mortgage” (1893). After a 1896 trip to Spain and France, he painted or used pastel to create scenes of Canadian nature or of  figures in nature, espousing a modified form of Impressionism, having studied it in Paris.

 

He was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1889, was President of the Ontario Society of Artists in 1897, President of the Royal Canadian Academy from 1906 to 1909, one of the founders of the Associated Watercolour Painters in 1912, and, having taught at the Central Ontario School of Art since 1890, became the first principal of its successor, the Ontario College of Art from 1912 to 1929.

 

During World War I, he was commissioned by the Canadian War Records department to create works in 1917 and 1918.
After his first wife died, he married fellow artist Mary E. Wrinch and, with her, he explored and painted the Canadian north, beginning in 1925. He died in 1947. He donated 400 of his own works to the province for distribution to schools to inspire students and 175 of his works remain in the Government of Ontario art collection today.

 

Reid is a reminder that Huron County, proud as it is of its world-leading farmers, is more than just farmers. It also gave birth to ground-breaking broadcaster “Doc” Cruickshank, whose life is the basis of the play Radio Town: The Doc Cruickshank Story to be premiered at the Blyth Festival in August and September.

 

And the Blyth Festival itself, now famous across Ontario as a producer of new Canadian plays, is proof that this mostly farm country can produce, and more importantly support, important Canadian work such as Anne Chislett’s groundbreaking Quiet in the Land, produced across North America since it premiered in Blyth in 1981 and at the Festival this weekend.

 

Likewise, my own Powers and Gloria, at the Festival in late July, celebrates a man who kept his furniture-making factory going when all the other furniture plants, in towns all over Western Ontario, closed and moved to more welcoming areas in the southern U.S.

 

The closure of those signature businesses shows things change. In many ways, we are in a reverse of George Agnew Reid’s time when the majority of the population still lived on the farm and a rare few, like Reid, did something very different. 

 

Today is the opposite, as we have fewer people living on farms because modern machinery means we need fewer hands to raise our food, but we have millions living in cities. This past weekend, hundreds of thousands would be travelling to a cottage or resort north of Toronto in Muskoka, the Kawarthas, Georgian Bay or the shores of Lake Huron, journeying mile after mile through fertile farmland and not understanding what crops were growing in the fields.

 

Food, for most of the population, is something that is always available at supermarkets, but is too darned expensive, since they’d rather spend their money on something else. Our governments, like the provincial government, think nothing of having thousands of acres of prime farmland lost to housing developments.

 

A healthy society should value farmland and not want it wasted, while at the same time, enjoying the talents of George Agnew Reid and his successors. We need both.