Alfred Joseph Casson. Housetops in the Ward, c. 1924. Oil on canvas, 114.7 x 94.1 cm.The Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario, 2017. © Estate of A.J. Casson. Photo © AGO. 2017/156
This cozy image of urban houses covered in a thick coat of snow actually depicts an early 20th-century Toronto neighbourhood often considered a slum. The Ward, as it was known, was the area from College Street south to Queen and from Yonge Street west to University Avenue. It was where newcomers to the city, fleeing famine or pogrom, often settled. Of multiple nationalities and faiths, living cheek by jowl, they somehow managed to get along.
Artist A.J. Casson painted this scene in 1924, two years before he was invited to join the Group of Seven. While his colleague Lawren Harris occasionally observed that Toronto housing was down-at-the-heels (Shacks from 1919 in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada), Casson turns on the charm. The tightly packed houses, painted in warm, almost southern, colours, suggest comfort and conviviality, while the vanilla-flecked snow, emphasized by those striking blue shadows, adds an insulating blanket rather than anything chilly.
Most of the Ward was razed in the 1950s to make way for what is now Nathan Phillips Square, but you can still see remnants of the housing type around Dundas and Beverley streets, next door to the Art Gallery of Ontario, where this painting hangs in the Thomson Collection. Kate Taylor
