Defiant Spirits by Ross King Page A

Liberals, opposed the deal, which would have seen farmers in the West able to buy more affordable farm machinery.
    If MacDonald’s work for Grip Limited involved him in the design of publicity for steamship lines and ambitious new Toronto subdivisions, Harris had already done his own hymn to industrial endeavour and commercial abundance. In 1911 he painted The Eaton Manufacturing Building. This twelve-storey factory on Queen Street West was built two years earlier, the latest addition to the handful of skyscrapers on the urban landscape and a glass-and-steel testimony to Toronto’s prosperity and modernity. Harris produced a remarkable picture in which the Eaton building looms like an apparition over the Ward’s nondescript houses and sheds. Chimney smoke, shadows and industrial steam are set off by an ethereal sunset shimmering in the monolith’s windows.
    Harris was no doubt hoping for a similar evocation of the city’s industrial sublime when he and MacDonald set up their easels in the snow beside the lakefront. They were probably accompanied by another Toronto painter, thirty-year-old Peter Clapham Sheppard, a graphic designer and a student of Cruikshank (MacDonald’s former teacher) at the Central Ontario School of Art and Industrial Design. Each produced a painting of a gasometer, concentrating on the interactions of atmosphere and colour to create Canadian versions of the “tinted steam” paintings of nineteenth-century landscapists such as J.M.W. Turner and Claude Monet. 42 The example of Skarbina, at least for Harris, was paramount. For Skarbina railway tracks and chimney stacks were motifs by which the brutality of the modern metropolis, mercilessly shaped by industry and hostile to its inhabitants, was most graphically expressed. 43 Skarbina, however, was also mesmerized by the visual effects of the bustling metropolis—its electric light, its swirling smoke and rising steam. Railway Tracks in North Berlin was a Stimmungsbild, or “atmosphere painting,” intended to capture the spectacle of the metropolis and evoke a mood of reverie. 44
    The Toronto painters likewise beautified their city’s industrialized urban landscape. Sheppard’s Toronto Gasworks with Locomotives, a fifteen-by-twenty-centimetre oil sketch (no doubt painted on the spot), and MacDonald’s finished painting, Tracks and Traffic,
both showed a black cpr locomotive powering through the snow-
covered premises of the Consumers Gas Company, steam billowing from the smokestack into an overcast sky. Harris’s The Gas Works approached the subject from a different angle. Unlike MacDonald, who painted the gasholders from the south, he positioned himself on their north side, in what appears to be a vacant lot overlooking the backs of houses on Niagara Street. From this vantage point he concentrated on the larger of the two gasometers, a monstrous, rust-brown shadow. Only MacDonald offered a human touch: two workmen, one with a shovel slung over his shoulder, crossing the cedar-block pavement that stretches through the foreground.
    Already the differences in MacDonald’s and Harris’s approaches are evident. MacDonald added a profusion of distracting detail—a caboose, stacks of lumber in the yard, telephone poles—and gave volume to the locomotive steam through an intricate manipulation of light and shade. Harris simplified his composition: detail was eliminated and forms flattened as he concentrated on the profile of the gasometer, which he turned into the kind of distant but looming presence that would appear in so many of his later paintings of mountains. His interest in geometric forms indicates his movement away from Impressionism and its transient effects in search of more solid volumes.
    Anyone seeing these paintings in 1912 could have believed an urban realist school, mixed with tinctures of French Impressionism and German Stimmungsbild, was on the brink of developing in