TORONTO'S 80TH BIRTHDAY

Artists and Entertainers

Anna Brownell Jameson

1794-1860

An early feminist, Brownell Jameson came to Toronto from Britain to join her husband, Robert, who was attorney general of Upper Canada. Her book, Winter Studies and Sum

mer Rambles in Canada, published in Britain in 1838, presents an early view of the city, and it’s not flattering. The book’s first entry, dated Dec. 20, described Toronto as “a little ill-built town on low land, at the bottom of a frozen bay ... I did not expect much; but for this I was not prepared.” She left her husband in September 1839, and returned to Britain.

Sarah Anne Curzon

1833-1898

Curzon is best known for commemorating Laura Secord — who warned the British of an impending American attack — in her verse drama

Laura Secord, the Heroine of 1812. But Curzon, a lifelong feminist, played a key role on several fronts after her arrival in Toronto from Birmingham in 1862 — as a member of the Toronto Women’s Literary Club (which kick-started Canada’s suffrage movement); as president of the Women’s Canadian Historical Society; and as a supporter of the campaign to found Women’s Medical College in Toronto. She was also an outspoken member on behalf of the temperance movement.

Owen Staples

1866-1949

He came to Toronto from Britain at age 4, and would become one of the best chroniclers of the city’s buildings through his sketches and paintings, preserved in public and private collections even today. A skilled etcher, he was also an illustrator and cartoonist for the Toronto Telegram. The newspaper’s owner, John Ross Robertson, commissioned seven large paintings depicting the city’s past and the six-volume Land

marks of Toronto, depicting the city from 1872 to 1914.

Boris Volkoff

1900-1974

The Russian émigré, known as the “father of Canadian ballet,” arrived in Toronto in 1929 after apparently being smuggled across the U.S. border. He opened a ballet school in 1930 and two years later began choreographing ice ballets. In 1938, he founded the Volkoff Canadian Ballet, the country’s first ballet company; in 1948 he co-founded the Canadian Ballet Festival. Volkoff, suffering financial difficulties, closed his company in 1949, offering his dancers and studio to the fledgling National Ballet of Canada.

Paul Kane

1810-1871

The self-taught artist derived much of his inspiration from his two trips to the Canadian West in the 1840s, particularly in his depictions of First Nations People. Kane settled permanently in Toronto in 1848. He was one of the first Canadian artists to support himself solely from his art.

Frederick Torrington

1836-1917

The musician and conductor came to Toronto from Boston in 1873 to be organist and choirmaster at the Metropolitan Methodist Church. He opened the Toronto College of Music in 1888, which was soon affiliated with the U of T’s music department. The college’s high standards were adopted from Quebec to British Columbia. It was Torrington who was chosen to direct the festival that opened Massey Hall in 1894.

Charles Trick Currelly

1876-1957

Currelly, a native Torontonian, studied the lives of First Nations peoples and journeyed to the pyramids. He was appointed the official collector for the U of T in 1905 and nine years later director of the Royal Ontario Museum, a post he held until 1946. Currelly is credited with acquiring a substantial portion of the museum’s ancient Chinese collection, including a Ming tomb.

Morley Callaghan

1903-1990

The Toronto-born writer wrote 18 novels and more than 100 short stories, many set in the city where he spent most of his life. His time with the likes of James Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, whom he met as a reporter at the Toronto Star, has been much documented.

Henry Scadding

1813-1901

Regarded as Toronto’s first historian, Scadding was also the first student enrolled at Upper Canada College in 1830. He later served as rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity from 1847 to 1875 and wrote several books on city history, including Toronto of Old (1873) and The Four Decades of York, Upper Canada (1884).

Isabella Valancy Crawford

1850-1887

Crawford is often called Canada’s first major poet. The Irish-born writer arrived in 1858, settling in Toronto following her father’s death in 1876. Unusual for the time (it is unusual even today), Crawford was able to support herself and her mother as a freelance writer, selling her work to major Canadian and U.S. newspapers. She self-published one book of poetry and her verse received acclaim only after her death.

Lawren Harris

1885-1970

Considered by fellow Group of Seven member A.Y. Jackson to be the key player in the formation of Canada’s most important cadre of artists, Harris — a founding member of Toronto’s Arts and Letters Club in 1908 — ensured through the creation of the Group of Seven in 1920 that Toronto would be the focal point of the country’s artistic community. In addition to nature-oriented works, Harris also depicted working-class Toronto homes in his work. His paintings have sold in recent years in the range of $1 to $2.2 million.

Marshall McLuhan

1911-1980

McLuhan spent much of his career at the U of T, writing and lecturing about the effects of media and technology on society. In 1963, the university created the Centre for Culture and Technology to teach and expand on his work. He coined such terms as “the media is the message” and “global village” and is credited with predicting the Internet almost three decades before it arrived. McLuhan also used his celebrity status as presiding public intellectual to stop the Spadina Expressway and to protect Wychwood Park and St. Michael’s College.

Alexander Muir

1830-1906

Muir’s brief stint as a soldier inspired his enduring composition,

The Maple Leaf Forever, briefly Canada’s unofficial national anthem before O Canada. His 10-year tenure as principal of Leslieville School was interrupted in 1867 when he saw action as a member of Toronto’s Queen’s Own Rifles regiment at the Battle of Ridgeway, in which members of the Irish-American radicals, the Fenian Brotherhood, were repelled. The song was intended to celebrate Confederation, which followed the short-lived invasion, but it wasn’t performed until 1874 when Muir brought his school choir to perform the song in Newmarket.

George Agnew Reid

1860-1947

Reid left a lasting impression in Toronto in the form of murals in Old City Hall and in the auditorium of Jarvis Collegiate Institute. A former president of the Royal Canadian Academy, he was one of the founders of the Ontario College of Art, later renamed the Ontario College of Art and Design University, the country’s oldest institute devoted to art and design.

Dora Mavor Moore

1888-1979

The Glasgow native arrived in Toronto with her family as a child and became the first Canadian student to be accepted at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1938 she co-founded the Village Players, which performed Shakespeare at schools; she founded the New Play Society in 1946, where she worked with Lorne Greene and Don Harron. A teacher, director, producer and actor, Moore was a fervent supporter of indigenous theatre. The Dora Mavor Moore Awards, created in 1978 to honour Toronto theatre, is the city’s top award for dramatic achievement.

Robert Thomas Allen

1911-1990

Allen’s tales of growing up around Danforth and Coxwell in the 1920s and his later life as a husband and father of two endeared him to generations of Canadians through such publications as the Star Weekly,

Saturday Night and Reader’s Digest. Allen published 14 books and won several literary prizes including the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour.

Lucius O’Brien

1832-1899

A graduate of Upper Canada College, O’Brien left a career in civil engineering to become a full-time painter at age 40. He is best known for his oil and watercolour landscapes. He became founding president of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts in 1880, the same year he became editor of Picturesque

Canada, the first major post-Confederation collaboration of Canadian artists.

Augustus Stephen Vogt

1861-1926

The son of immigrants, Vogt was an accomplished organist when he returned from studying abroad in 1888. He taught at the Toronto College of Music and the Toronto Conservatory of Music and is best remembered for founding, in 1894, the Mendelssohn Choir, Canada’s oldest and best-known choral ensemble.

Sir Ernest MacMillan

1893-1973

A prodigy who gave his first organ recital at 10, the Mimico native became an internationally respected conductor during a career that included 25 years (from 1931 to 1956) at the helm of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He was also an educator, first at Toronto’s Canadian Academy of Music and later as dean of the U of T’s faculty of music. He created a program called Music for Young Folk, holding concerts for students at all levels with the accompaniment of the TSO.

“Christ, I hate to leave Paris for Toronto, the City of Churches.”

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

1923