George Agnew Reid

Who was George Agnew Reid?

George Agnew Reid was a Canadian artist and painter and is best known as a genre painter.

Trained at the Central Ontario School of Art, Toronto in 1879, where he studied with Robert Harris; studied at the Pennsylvania Academy from 1882 to 1885 where he was a protégé of Thomas Eakins and met his future wife Mary Hiester Reid. He also studied at the Julian, with Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, and at the Colarossi Academies in Paris, and the Prado in Madrid. He made a number of study trips to Europe, during which he visited France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. It was during this time that Reid turned from portraiture to genre, as in The Foreclosure of the Mortgage, making his name with narrative pictures. Reid brought Parisian Academy precision to emotional genre paintings of Ontario.

He was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1889, and was principal of the Central Ontario School of Art and Design 1912-18. He also did murals and private and public commissions, including one for Toronto's Third City Hall.