Documenting a life, in words and art
Poet learned she had more in common with painter than she realized
There’s something magical about getting up close to a painting. Nose to canvas feels daring, even when you’re not under a museum guard’s watchful eye. It’s a humbling experience. Often it’s too easy to forget that this work in front of you is a physical manifestation of one person’s vision and talent.
Poet Molly Peacock goes to sleep at night surrounded by the art of 19th-century Toronto painter Mary Hiester Reid, the subject of her new hybrid biography “Flower Diary: In Which Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door.” The book is an intimate glimpse not only into Reid’s work, but into Peacock’s own life and marriage to Michael Groden, a pre-eminent James Joyce scholar who died in March of this year.
Three of Reid’s paintings hang on the bedroom walls of Peacock’s delightful Toronto condo, perfectly at home with the spectacular views and enviable bookcases. A fourth painting is on its way, recently purchased from an online auction.
I’m drawn immediately to a small canvas beside the bed — it’s my favourite out of “Flower Diary,” too, which features full colour plates of Reid’s works. (“Flower Diary,” published by ECW Press, with its carefully reproduced paintings, gorgeous endpapers and glossy paper stock, puts it in the running as the most stunning book to come out of Canadian publishing this year.)
The painting is simple in description. Three pink roses, heavy in bloom, bow under their own weight as they cascade out of an earthenware jug. Peacock, who spends endless hours studying the works, points out the smoothness of the canvas, the places where the paint has cracked slightly over time, and how Reid used tiny brush strokes to give each petal its own texture and animation.
As it turns out, “Three Roses” is also Peacock’s favourite. “This is the essence of Mary,” she says.
Like Peacock, Mary Hiester Reid was a dual American-Canadian citizen. Reid married fellow painter George Agnew Reid, also known as the first principal of the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University). The couple seemingly had an idyllic life: travelling abroad to paint and sharing a studio in New York’s Catskills region, though “Flower Diary” makes it clear that the expectations for female artists at that time were much different than their male counterparts. Often women would paint domestic scenes out of practicality as they would still be expected to maintain a household, despite whatever talents they may have possessed.
Peacock points out how these European tours would have influenced Reid’s painting style, which varies from canvas to canvas, as she caught up on artistic movements that hadn’t made their way to Canada yet. “Mary became an impressionist, a tonalist and a realist all at the same time,” says Peacock, pointing to a colourful landscape on the other side of the bed that at first glance appears to have been painted by another artist.
As she carefully takes it off the wall, drawing it closer, Peacock speculates that it was painted near her Wychwood Park home, at the pond during the early pink of sunrise when Mary could create without interruption or wifely demands.
“Flower Diary” is not a typical biography. There is not a lot of historical documentation available on women artists from Reid’s era. But in Peacock’s mind, Reid’s 300 paintings serve as documents to her life, as do her former homes and the travel diaries she left behind.
There was a widely popular exhibition of Reid’s work at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario) in 1922, a year after her death, marking the gallery’s first solo show by a woman. But it wasn’t until late 2000 that the AGO would feature another solo show, which is where Peacock first discovered Reid and her story.
Some biographers are drawn to the opportunity to write the definitive biography of a famous person. As a poet, Peacock had no desire to write a scholarly tome.
“My interest is in people who did something wonderful and have fallen into obscurity,” says Peacock, who along with her seven poetry collections is the author of “The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72,” a study of British artist Mary Granville Pendarves Delany, who later in life began creating a series of cutpaper botanical flowers that are now housed in the British Museum.
“I’m not an art historian. I just have a certain amount of fearlessness and feel that I’m on solid ground, thinking about creativity my whole life and being a poet,” Peacock says. “There’s a certain kind of book that I can write. This is a human and personal book.”
“Flower Diary” took about a decade to complete, in between which Peacock published a poetry collection. Writing about Mary’s life became a respite during Groden’s long illness.
Just as I found intimacy in staring up close at Reid’s paintings, “Flower Diary” stands as a revealing contemporary look at two people who together lived a life of words and ideas.
Groden is not only present in the narrative, but behind the scenes in the enduring support he provided Peacock as she undertook the research that provides the book’s scaffolding.
As “Flower Diary” reveals, the couple first met in high school, broke up after first-year university and reunited nearly 30 years later.
Recollections of their relationship appear interspersed throughout the book as separate yet connected “Interludes” to the Reids’ marriage.
In retrospect, Peacock suggests that empathy is the enduring theme that runs throughout the book and its parallel stories.
“There’s a secret hope that sometime in the future, someone will bring a hand back to bring you or your era alive,” Peacock says. “It’s a moving thing to do. It’s emotional and everything that Mary put into her paintings.”
“There’s a secret hope that sometime in the future, someone will bring a hand back to bring you or your era alive.”
MOLLY PEACOCK POET