Additional Images

Provenance:

Estate of the artist 
Private Collection, Ontario

Literature:

A. H. Robson, Canadian Landscape Painters, Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1932, page 164.

Colin S. MacDonald, A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, 3rd edition, Canadian Paperbacks, Ottawa, 1975.

Evelyn de Rostaing McMann, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Spring Exhibitions 1880-1970, University of Toronto Press, Toronto/Buffalo/London, 1988, page 350 for The Market, November listed.

Exhibited:

51st Annual Spring Exhibition, 19 April-13 May, Art Association of Montreal, Montreal, 1934, no. 318. 

Note:

Toronto-born Peter Clapham Sheppard served as an apprentice lithographer before training as a painter under George Reid, John William Beatty, and William Cruickshank at the Central Ontario School of Art and Design and the Ontario College of Art. After 1912, he set off to travel throughout Europe and the United States. He became a member of the Ontario Society of Artists in 1918 and an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1929, exhibiting regularly with both organizations alongside contemporaries such as J.E.H. MacDonald, Tom Thomson, and Frederick Varley.

Sheppard worked in oil, watercolour, and pencil to depict the landscapes and cityscapes he observed in Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Ontario. Developing a wide range of subject matter and figure groupings, he focused his compositions on capturing urban and industrial activities in cities like New York, Montreal, Toronto, and Ottawa. The bustle and small economy of the marketplace is a subject he approached in a number of ways in his maturity as a painter. The Market exhibits many of the facets of Canadian Impressionism while reinterpreting the lessons he had taken from European Symbolism and Expressionism.

At the height of his renown in Canada, Sheppard was invited to participate in a number of international exhibitions: the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley (1925); L'Exposition d'Art Canadien in Paris (1927); and the New York World's Fair (1939). Today, his work is represented in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canadian War Museum and the National Gallery of Canada.

While there is an R.C.A. exhibition label attached to the back of the frame which gives the title of the painting, there is no painting listed for the R.C.A. exhibitions from this period that precisely corresponds. There are other market scenes that were shown at the R.C.A. at this time including Fruit Market (exhibited in 1933) and Hamilton Market (exhibited in 1934). However, a work of this same title is listed as having been included in the records for the 1934 A.A.M. exhibition.