Defiant Spirits by Ross King Read Free Book Online Page B

inspiration in the “squalid” and “contemptible” parts of Toronto. Although he was raised in a stately late-Victorian mansion on St. George Street, and although Toronto’s finest architect, Eden Smith, was building a large and comfortable Arts and Crafts house for him on Clarendon Avenue, it was districts such as the Ward, a notoriously poor enclave immediately south of Queen’s Park, that held a special fascination for him.
    The Ward was home to many Jewish and Italian immigrants who ran small businesses or worked in the sweatshops along Spadina Avenue. It was bounded on the east by Yonge Street and on the south by City Hall. In 1909 Augustus Bridle called it “the most cosmopolitan part of Toronto,” with “rows of blinking little modern shops” and “everywhere the shuffling, gabbling crowd.” A report in the Toronto Daily Star described it less appealingly as a place of “filth and disorder.” 31 Another writer remarked that it was “generally regarded by the respectable citizens of Toronto as a strange and fearful place into which it is unwise to enter even in daylight.” 32 The neighbourhood had long attracted the attention of social reformers—though never before that of an artist.
    In a reprise of his Berlin experiments, Harris made pencil sketches and paintings in the Ward. Urban painters such as The Eight, a group of American artists who specialized in gritty New York street scenes, used plunging perspectives and strong diagonals to emphasize the speed and vitality of the large modern metropolis. Harris, however, approached his subject differently. He depicted Toronto’s terraces of houses flat to the picture plane, with no swirling crowds and no slashing perspectives. Toronto certainly possessed little of the dash and vitality of either New York or European capitals, and Harris was interested in offering a more intimate, meditative view of streets all but empty of traffic and inhabitants. The shuffling crowd mentioned by Bridle was absent, along with any social comment it might have broached. His interest, at least at this stage, was primarily aesthetic. In a work such as A Row of Houses, Wellington Street, he was merely attempting, he explained, “to depict the clear, hard sunlight of a Canadian noon in winter.” 33
    THE RENDERING OF the transient effects of these impalpable phenomena such as sunlight and shadows, together with their “Canadian tang,” was what had apparently attracted Harris to MacDonald’s paintings at the Arts and Letters Club. Harris was greatly exaggerating when he claimed that MacDonald’s works at this point showed “something new in painting in Canada.” For the past two decades, many Canadian artists (especially those who spent time in Paris) had been sketching out of doors and depicting the Canadian landscape in an Impressionistic style. 34 But his admiration for MacDonald clearly extended to the personal level, and the two men quickly became friends. They already had a number of mutual acquaintances, since Harris knew Grip employees such as Fergus Kyle and J.W. “Bill” Beatty. Harris had previously gone on sketching expeditions with both Kyle and Beatty, and so it was natural that he and MacDonald should likewise begin working together.
    The two men’s first expedition, sometime early in 1912, appears to have been one to the Toronto waterfront near the foot of Bathurst Street, near Fort York. This industrial zone, bisected by the railway and its sidings, was home to a silver-plate company and a stove foundry. Nearby, on land where Lake Ontario had been infilled, were lumberyards, a cattle market and the premises of Consumers Gas Company, with its two gasometers. These great cylindrical monoliths distilled and stored coal gas.
    MacDonald had no real enthusiasm for urban scenes, least of all ones of Toronto, which he disparaged as “this grey town.” 35 The choice