Lot 134: Peter Clapham Sheppard 1882 - 1965 Canadian oil on

Peter Clapham Sheppard 1882 - 1965 Canadian oil on canvas Cabstand, Winter, Dominion Square, Montreal 20 1/4 x 24 1/2 inches 51.4 x 62.2 centimeters signed Provenance:Private Collection, Ontario Peter Clapham Sheppard was born in Toronto in 1882, the son of a brickmaker. He began work at age 16 as a commercial illustrator for the lithographers Barclay, Clark & Co. (later Rolf-Clark-Stone Limited), with whom he stayed for most of his working life. He studied at the Central Ontario School of Art and Industrial Design (rechristened the Ontario College of Art in 1912), where his teachers included the two doyens of art instruction in Toronto, George A. Reid and William Cruikshank. Another instructor was J.W. Beatty, at the time the studio-mate and mentor of J.E.H. MacDonald. Sheppard proved an outstanding pupil at the OCA, winning major prizes such as the Sir Edmund Walker Scholarship and earning nine honours diplomas. His artistic practice was undoubtedly also stimulated by his work in comm rcial illustration. Toronto's lithography companies, notably Grip Ltd., where Tom Thomson and five charter members of the Group of Seven earned their livings, were cradles of artistic invention. After spending their weekdays producing pamphlets and posters for the advertising industry, these men expended their leisure time on painting excursions into the Ontario hinterlands. This combination of commercial craft and backwoods exploration helped produce the intense colours and energetic patterns denounced in 1913 by the Toronto Daily Star as the "Hot Mush School". Sheppard quickly proved adept at the ""Hot Mush"" style. Like so many of his contemporaries, he used his time away from the workbench to stalk the popular painting grounds of rural Ontario, producing vivid landscapes that combined a fiery palette with robust brushwork in the cause of the vibrant and distinctively Canadian style of art of which his old teacher, Beatty, was an enthusiastic proponent. He exhibited extensively, including at Wembley n 1925, the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1927 and the World's Fair in New York in 1939. He became a member of the Ontario Society of Artists in 1918 and was made an Associate of the Royal Canadian Academy in 1929. However, naturally reclusive and publicity-shy, he lacked the flair for loquacious self-promotion that distinguished a number of his contemporaries. An exceptionally versatile painter, Sheppard was capable of both sensitive figure studies and what seems to have been his greatest passion - urban and industrial scenes featuring bridges, locomotives, tramp steamers and lake freighters. These steely monuments to Canada's commercial progress were always offered as the handiwork of vigorous and even heroic human effort, with the figures of toiling workmen giving both scale and a sense of empathy. Sheppard was painting Montreal's docks and historic houses by the early 1920s. In 1928, his scene of Dominion Square in a snowstorm, Midwinter, was purchased by the National Gallery of Canada, the second of his works to enter their collection. Midwinter was the product of at least two studies, one a rapidly brushed plein air watercolour, the other this careful oil sketch, Cabstand, Winter, Dominion Square, Montreal. This work shows the cab horses and the Boer War monument in tighter focus and from a less oblique angle, and features Sheppard's combination of confident brushwork and, in the figure of the horse and its sleigh, a delicate linear grace. Cabstand, Winter, Dominion Square, Montreal beautifully evokes the enticing gloom of a heavy snowfall, with the bold curves and brick red of the sleigh standing out against the snow piled at the foot of the war memorial. The painting is striking above all for the wonderful contrast between the placid cab horses, with their blinkers, blankets and nosebags, and the bronze warhorse rearing heroically on its plinth. The cab horses display their own modest heroism, Sheppard suggests, by enduring the rigours of a Canadian snowstorm. We thank Ross King, author of Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven, for contributing the above essay.