United by the symbols of spring at home
It’s a Victoria Day long weekend tradition. Traffic jams up highways 400 or 35. Overflowing parking lots at the Bruce Trail or Algonquin Park. Things will be a little less crowded this year, more people staying put as we stay at home, still encouraged to practise social distancing.
But life — and spring and traditions — of course, goes on. Together we’ll spend this long weekend taking walks, something COVID-19 has provided the incentive for more of us to do each day, looking for and enjoying the first signs of spring — budding flowers; newly born birds — as have generations of Ontarians before us. There’s a comfort in that.
It’s a point that’s made quite beautifully with this watercolour of trilliums, our province’s official flower, painted by Robert Holmes, an artist and teacher who was born in Cannington, Ont., in 1861 and died in 1930.
Almost 100 years ago, just as we will this weekend, Holmes was traipsing through some part of the Ontario landscape. He taught at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD), and so most of his watercolours were completed when school was out and he could wander the woods and wilds of the province. Apparently, the AGO tells us, his passion for painting wildflowers stemmed from a desire to interest his students in their natural surroundings.
“Mr. Holmes’ flowers have the appearance of being caught unawares in the woods. This is indeed the case. He knows all the wooded nooks in and around Toronto for many miles.
Between the painter and the flowers, there is a real affinity,” Gertrude Pringle wrote in Saturday Night magazine in 1928.
His paintings were popular and shown across the continent; he was one of few Canadian artists whose obituary appeared in the New York Times — he died in May 1930. The Times noted that he died suddenly after giving a humorous address in which he likened his students to the “wildflowers of which he knew so much.”
Even if we don’t travel to wooded nooks ourselves this long weekend, we can travel in our imaginations, our memories evoked by Holmes’ nearly 100-year-old painting, to get a glimpse of the trilliums that are or soon will be carpeting the forest floor. Sharing an emblem that unites us all.
Explore more of Holmes’ work at ago.ca.