Reid, George Agnew (1890) - Mortgaging the Homestead (Oil on canvas) ©Government of Ontario Art Collection, Archives of Ontario
This sketch for Mortgaging the Homestead, part of the National Gallery of Canada’s collection, was the most compositionally powerful and psychologically complex work Reid had produced to that point in his career, and it remains, for many, his most compelling painting. It was also sufficiently famous and timely that it was adapted for use in two federal election campaigns.
Produced when Reid had just returned from a sixteen-month stay in Europe, and when he was at the height of his fame as a master of rural genre subjects, it recalled for him the time when he was thirteen years old and his father mortgaged the family farm—a move that risked financial disaster if the family were to default.
When Mortgaging the Homestead was exhibited in Montreal and Toronto in 1890, critics were as enthusiastic about its dramatic power and lack of sentimentality as they were about its social criticism, and they described Reid as “a sympathetic lover of humanity.”