Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Ontario

Literature:

Ontario Society of Artists: Forty-Seventh Annual Exhibition (exh. cat.) (Toronto: Ontario Society of Artists, 1919): p12, no. 168, as, Sketch, Horticultural Bldg., C.N.E.
Catalogue of Paintings by Canadian Artists (exh. cat.) (Toronto, ON: Canadian National Exhibition, 1919): p. 29, no. 152, as, Sketch, Horticultural Building, C.N.E.
Tom Smart, Peter Clapham Sheppard: His Life and Work (Richmond Hill, ON: Firefly Books, 2018): pp. 116-117, reproduced, p. 232, as, Horticultural Building, Canadian National Exhibition.

Exhibited:

Ontario Society of Artists Forty-Seventh Annual Exhibition, Art Museum of Toronto, Toronto, ON, 8 Mar - 5 Apr 1919, no. 168, as, Sketch, Horticultural Bldg, C.N.E.;
Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, ON, 23 Aug - 6 Sept 1919, no. 152, as, Sketch, Horticultural Building, C.N.E.;
Le Petit Salon: Canadian Artists and Impressionism, Helson Gallery, Halton Hills, 27 Apr - 23 Jul 2022

Note:

Peter Clapham Sheppard’s Horticultural Building, Canadian National Exhibition (1919) is a beautiful urban landscape of Toronto’s Canadian National Exhibition’s grounds that shows his distinct sensibility and sensitivity. Be it Montreal, New York or Toronto, he painted the city as a living place whose inhabitants gave it life.

Compounding Sheppard's first-hand awareness of New York and its contemporary art scene, New York also came to Toronto and the CNE. As early as 1913, by which time Sheppard had already exhibited at the Ontario Society of Artists (OSA), the American section of the CNE’s art exhibition included George Bellows’ The Circus and Colin Campbell Cooper’s Bowling Green among urban views that presented the city in its bustling and teeming humanity.

The sketch’s first known exhibition was at the 47th annual exhibition of the OSA in Toronto in March 1919. Most likely, the crowded view of the CNE’s Horticultural Building festooned with flags was conceived the previous summer. In late August and early September 1918, the First World War was turning decisively in favour of the Allied Armies, and by the last day of the exhibition, after weeks of success for the Allies, the headline of The Globe (Toronto) boldly declared, “British and French Join Forces in Great Sweep East of the Somme River,”[1] In Horticultural Building, Canadian National Exhibition Sheppard shows a prosperous city at leisure and in relief. His staccato handling of paint across the bottom foreground has visitors in motion, some picnicking, others possibly attending a wedding, all part of a prosperous city on the move after four gruelling, nation-defining, years.[2]

[1] “British and French Join Forces in Great Sweep East of the Somme River,” The Globe (Toronto) (7 September 1918): 1.
[2] Tom Smart, Peter Clapham Sheppard: His Life and Work (Richmond Hill, ON / Buffalo: Firefly Books, 2018): 116.