Fred Taylor: Wealth and Commonwealth
“New Zealand” — Maoris at a shrine
The bracing “explorer’s specials” in this post are being sold off by Sotheby’s London later this month, apparently on behalf of the local tailor Austin Reed, which evidently displayed them in the “Red Lacquer Room” of its Regent Street flagship store.
Information in the catalogue is sparse, but I’m guessing they’re a commissioned series on the far-flung reaches of what used to be the British Empire. The asking prices range from £4,000 to £8,000.
One wonders whether the sun is setting on Austin Reed as well. It’s a retailer that specialises in men’s and boys’ clothing, so you can well imagine its erstwhile interest in a collection of adventurous mini-murals to thrill its customers. Plus, the artist’s name had a familiar ring to it.
They’re all watercolours by a Canadian, Frederick Bourchier Taylor (1906-87), who’s not well known even in his homeland, even though his big brother was probably Canada’s richest man in his day: Edward Plunket Taylor, the formidable “EP”, beer-retail-media-and-mining tycoon and the man who gave horseracing the greatest sire of the 20th century, Northern Dancer.
“Burma” — The Procession of Umbrellas
The Taylor boys were born wealthy in Ottawa. Grandad handed his Brading Brewery over to EP, who promptly stitched it together with 20-odd others to make Canadian Breweries Ltd, the biggest suds-maker in the world.
Then he founded the massive investment firm Argus Corp, and grabbed Canadian Food Products, Massey-Harris, Orange Crush, Standard Chemical, Dominion Stores, Domtar Paper, Standard Broadcasting and Hollinger Mines.
“British Honduras”
EP set up one of the planet’s first gated communities, Lyford Cay in the Bahamas. His Windfields Farm in Oshawa, Ontario, where he bred his horses (now home to the Canadian Film Centre), was where the British royal family stayed when they came to the colonies.
Somehow in the late ’50s he found time to serve as president of what was then called the Art Gallery of Toronto.
Where was Fred all this time? Becoming a communist, which really must have pissed off his filthy-rich sibling!
At least that’s what it says in John Virtue’s biography “Fred Taylor: Brother in the Shadows”. Apparently they feuded about it for two decades.
Virtue also revealed that Fred tended to boil over. He once pulled a Dick Cheney, shooting and wounding a rival artist while hunting, and people were never quite sure if it was an accident.
A 1941 self-portrait
Fred Taylor got a degree in architecture from Montreal’s McGill University, then travelled in Europe, then delved into drawing back at McGill, did etching of skiers — his sport of choice — and then studied painting in England. He married his cousin, returned to Canada and painted portraits and taught at McGill.
“West Indies”
During World War II, Fred tried in vain to get the National Gallery to finance an “industrial war records project”, and ended up going it alone, making sketches and paintings, in the social-realism style, of the railways and shipyards and doing portraits of factory workers.
He saw industry as symbolic of 20th-century progress and praised the common worker, and he believed his task was “to interpret Canada to Canadians”, whatever that means.
Fred joined the Labour Progressive Party and in 1951 actually visited the USSR as part of the Canada-Soviet Friendship Society.
“New South Wales” — Snowy River
Politics well aside, he obviously accepted commercial commissions. Along with the historical Commonwealth vignettes seen here, there were portraits of the likes of Sir Wilfred Laurier, the revered former prime minister, and paintings of Ottawa’s government landmarks.
En route to becoming a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, he also depicted the fur industry in Montreal and the city’s street scenes and, show below, “Barns, Chelsea”, a 1934 painting, the image from Cybermuse.
Fred gravitated to Mexico, where he remarried, to American artist Nova Hecht, and in 1960 settled there permanently, dying 27 years later in San Miguel de Allende, where there was a colony of expatriate artists.
While Fred was moving to Mexico, incidentally, his nephew — EP’s son Charles Taylor — was joining Reuters news service in London. His career in journalism included stints as Globe and Mail bureau chief in Hong Kong and Peking, which produced the 1966 memoir “Reporter in Red China”.
Uncle Fred had evidently already been there and done that.
“Hong Kong”
“South Africa” — Cape Town with Table Mountain
“Solomon Islands” — War canoes
