$10K painting hangs in the balance
After being damaged, TDSB-owned artwork found a temporary home — in the principal’s washroom
A $10,000 painting by a Canadian artist had an exclusive showing for a restricted audience: anyone who had access to the principal’s private washroom at Humberside Collegiate Institute.
In a photo provided to the Star by Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation Toronto district president Doug Jolliffe, a painting by Canadian landscape artist Herbert S. Palmer, The Fairy Month of May, is seen hanging in a single-stall washroom just above a toilet paper roll. A toilet is visible in the lower left corner.
Jolliffe said the photo was taken by an OSSTF member on March 15 but he declined to identify that person, concerned he or she could be reprimanded. The member thought the situation was “funny,” Jolliffe said, but the photo made him raise an eyebrow.
“Unless it is personal property, which I seriously doubt, I think the Toronto District School Board could find a more instructive use of a work of art than hanging it next to a school principal’s personal toilet,” he said.
But there was a reason behind the crappy placement, Toronto District School Board spokesperson Ryan Bird told the Star Thursday.
The painting, part of the TDSB’s art collection, was damaged while on display at Humberside and, given its worth, needed to be moved to a more secure location while it awaited pickup from the board’s museum and archives department, he explained.
“(A washroom is) not the best place, obviously, for art but, in this case, it was thought to be one of the more secure places in that building. So that’s why it was up in the principal’s office (and), in that case, in that room,” Bird said. “It was because it was a secure location.”
Bird said a “number of pieces of art” are displayed at TDSB schools and buildings.
Where they are displayed depends on which tier they occupy.
Paintings worth more than $15,000 are Tier 1 and kept either at the AGO or TDSB headquarters, while artworks in Tiers 2 to 4 are displayed in schools.
The Palmer painting, which Bird said had been appraised at about $10,000, is a Tier 2 work.
The painting has since been picked up and is in the queue for restoration, he added.
According to an obituary published in the Star on Nov. 30, 1970, Palmer, who lived to 90, “devoted most of his life to painting Canadian scenes.”
He was the former secretary of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts and the Ontario Society of Artists, and a teacher at the Ontario College of Art.
He was also received the Baxter Foundation Award for distinguished service to art in1960 and a Centennial Medal in 1967.
As a young man, the obituary continues, Palmer sang in a choir but “soon was devoting all his attention to painting, often in the company of the artists who later formed the Group of Seven.”
Three of Palmer’s paintings are on display at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Several are listed on the website for art auction house Heffel, with pieces having sold for $2,300 to $4,680.
Palmer is also listed on Heffel’s website under “Canadian Historical Artists of special interest” whose works are wanted for upcoming auctions. Another auction site, Invaluable, lists prices from $650 to $5,900 and worth estimates up to $7,000.
The Star tried to reach Humberside principal Lorraine Linton by calling the school twice on Thursday, but was told she was busy with preparations for the school’s commencement ceremony and Terry Fox Run. She did not respond to an email sent to her TDSB account or to a voicemail.
Linton’s assistant, Isabel Rodrigues, declined to confirm that there was a private principal’s washroom at Humberside.
Three of Palmer’s paintings are on display at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa