Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Toronto, ON

Note:

The rare beauty of Christie Pits, Toronto is what makes Peter Clapham Sheppard singular in Canadian art. Within a composition of horizontals, verticals, and diagonals rendered in tints of green, soft browns, and accented by brisk reds, Sheppard presents a sophisticated vignette of Depression-era Toronto with the humanity he consistently and uniquely brought to his urban scenes.

Sheppard’s work parallels an increasing interest in humanism and urban content in Toronto painting starting in the late 1920s.[1] Beautiful and provocative, his luminous images are striking contrasts to the dour images of many of his Toronto contemporaries.

The view of the south end of Willowvale Park (as Christie Pits was called until 1983) shows the working classes of west end Toronto and was less than a thirty minute walk from Sheppard’s residence at the time. A pair of down-at-the-heel men occupy the foreground. Behind them a quartet, possibly a young family, relax in the shade. The arrangement of the figures on the hillside, and particularly the man reclining on his elbows, conjure Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884/86).[2] Here and in other paintings, Sheppard scrutinized shared public spaces, codes of behaviour, and decorum that T. J. Clark would explore in his defining reading of Impressionism and the Grande Jatte fifty years later.[3] In Christie Pits, Toronto, Sheppard’s sophistication and subtlety compels the viewer to contemplate our shared humanity.

The above essay was contributed by Gregory Humeniuk. Humeniuk is an art historian, consultant, writer, and curator based in Toronto.

[1] Anna Victoria Hudson, “Art and Social Progress: The Toronto community of Painters, 1933-1950,” Ph.D. diss., (University of Toronto, 1997), 2-3, 178-179, 188-190.
[2] Georges Seurat (French, 1859-1891), A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884/86, oil on canvas, 207.5 x 308.1 cm (81-3/4 x 121-1/4 in.), The Art Institute of Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, acc. no. 1926.224.
[3] T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 261, 263-267.