Vaughan curator wants Peter Sheppard to be part of Canada’s art history

50 years after his death, a story of a Canadian artist, Peter Sheppard, is set to change Canada’s art history

Yorkregion.com
November 8, 2018
Dina Al-Shibeeb

In 1965, Peter Clapham Sheppard, a “master draughtsman, lithographer, and painter,” from Toronto died at the age of 86. Despite his gleaming talent, “he went to his grave, poor and forgotten.”

Unlike the Group of Seven, also known as the Algonquin School, a group of Canadian landscape painters, who not only dominated the scene at the time from 1920 to 1933 but were supported by the Canadian government, Sheppard was a lone wolf.

Dubbed as “radical” in his early career, Sheppard had his inspiration go beyond his Group of Seven contemporaries, instead, he looked to the New York painters of urban and industrial scene.

But the stars are changing for Sheppard, well, more than 50 years after his death when Louis Gagliardi, a recent elementary school teacher retiree, became obsessed with Sheppard’s “forgotten story.”

The 60-year-old Gagliardi, an art connoisseur, discovered the initial thread about Sheppard when he saw one of the late artist’s paintings in a gallery in 1987. “It just spoke to me” as the saying goes.

But somehow, the painting led Gagliardi to the “Salvation Army Lodge and Bernice Fenwick Martin.”

Martin, Sheppard’s “last friend and support,” was the receiver of the late artists only asset; his lifetime artwork. As Martin was descending from “riches to rags,” she attempted to sell some of the artist’s pieces to survive. “I began to regularly visit Bernice at the Salvation Army and soon the humanity of her story and condition cemented a friendship despite the 50 years that separated us in age,” he said.

Ever since the encounter, Gagliardi, who has studied art history and criticism from the University of Western Ontario, made the cause to bring Sheppard’s art to the public fore his earnest duty.

“My 30-year curatorship of this collection also parallels with my teaching career,” Gagliardi said. “While I was salvaging, curating the collection, a lot of these paints were discovered in foul conditions. A lot of them were bug infested and in terrible conditions.”

But after all these years of work and more than 19 years after Martin’s death, Gagliardi is coming much closer to his goal: The inclusion of the “erased” Sheppard to be part of Canada’s art history.

Gagliardi, a widower with two children, collaborated with Tom Smart, an award-winning author on Canadian artists and currently the executive director and CEO of the prestigious Beaverbrook Art Gallery, to publish Peter Clapham Sheppard, His Life and Work.

The book’s official launch was on Friday at the Arts and Letters club in Toronto.

“Sheppard is rich in another kind of history, that’s history of the cities at the dawn of the 20th century,” Gagliardi said. “For example, the cover of the book is a masterpiece; a major landmark, it was built in the 1915.”

The painting The Bridge Builders at Bloor Street Viaduct, shows labourers being industrious, gives a window into Canada’s history and the changes happening at the time.

“This painting Tom Smart names as national monument. Why? It’s a window into the past,” adding that “it is critical to our discussion today” of who we are amid increasing growth and new waves of immigration.

“While he painted (the piece) there was a war across the Atlantic, Canadians have duly scarified in that war and they come out with a new sense of pride and sense of identity.”

International exhibitions but no recognition

The “irony” is that Sheppard’s work in the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s were exhibited in “all the important shows along the famous work of the Group of Seven where he stood as an equal, but after they were showcased, they returned quietly to his studios,” lamented Gagliardi.

In 1925, Sheppard’s impressionist painting --Early Snow, Montreal --was shown in 1925 at the British Empire Exhibition held in Wembley, England, together with other 215 Canadian paintings. At the time, Eric Brown, director of the National Gallery of Canada, pronounced the exhibition “the most exhibition of Canadian art ever held outside the Dominion.”

“That was the first time Canadian art appeared internationally,” said Gagliardi.

“The dilemma now is that we are crying out now for a public place to take a survey of his work and his life and to open up a new page in Canadian art history,” he added.

To make that happen, Gagliardi has “just engaged a doctoral student in art history to be the assistant curator of the exhibition, she is very gifted.”

“Her name is Natalie Hume, so I am hoping that she will be prepare exhibition proposals for important venues,” he said in hopes of Canadians to start revising their art history.

“My appeal is not only rediscover this great artist but it is a clarion call for other artists male and female that were written from history unfairly. It was unfair over what had happened.”

Gagliardi doesn't want to disclose how many Sheppard's paintings he, nor expected value, saying the "monetary value" are "irrelevant" at this point.