Chris Kasabov, a painter relatively new to the Toronto arts scene, recently asked me about other artists who have interpreted the city’s waterfront.
Elizabeth Simcoe, wife of the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, John Graves Simcoe, immediately comes to mind. Mrs. Simcoe was an avid diarist who left us with an engaging account of the social and natural history of Upper and Lower Canada in the late eighteenth century. She was also a talented artist. Her watercolours and sketches provide us with a fascinating visual record of these early days, and include many renderings of Toronto, then called York.
The image below, painted near present day Fort York, is Mrs. Simcoe’s View From York Barracks, 1796, Archives of Ontario, I0006353.
Skipping ahead more than one hundred and fifty years is William Kurelek, an artist not normally associated with the Toronto shore. Kurelek lived in the Beach in the 1960s and 1970s, and is best known for his rural landscapes and prairie paintings. It is little known that many of these works, along with scenes of Toronto and its waterfront, were painted from his Balsam Avenue studio in the Beach.
Below is Kurelek’s Board Walk at Toronto’s Beaches, privately held.
I’ll be featuring a number of other renderings of the Toronto shore on the Along the Shore Facebook page over the coming weeks, see: www.facebook.com/janefairburnalongtheshore.
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These are absolutely beautiful images, how interesting! Can hardly wait to see more…