View from the Toronto General Hospital 1931

McCarthy painted this canvas from her mother’s fourth-floor room at the Toronto General Hospital, looking south to the recently opened Royal York Hotel and the towering Bank of Commerce Building, then the tallest structure in the Commonwealth. It offers an intriguing take on the Toronto cityscape, with clear colours and forms in the foreground, an unusual diagonal recession to the middle ground, and a greyish background. With the play of light and shade in the foreground giving way to haze in the distance, the image is a classic example of atmospheric perspective. Although similar to some paintings of Toronto houses by Lawren S. Harris (1885–1970), the colours are not as bright—an echo of the academic training McCarthy had received at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), notably from John William Beatty (1869–1941). As she noted: “It took years to free yourself from the Beatty colour.”  The sharp diagonal recession is unusual for a city view of the time, when most paintings depicted structures from the front.

The high vantage point depicted in the painting recalls some images of L’Estaque and other areas of southern France by Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), as in Gardanne, 1885–86, for example. McCarthy went on to use an elevated viewpoint and high horizon frequently in her works (except in her prairie and Haliburton images), as did many other Canadian landscape artists, perhaps to avoid the difficulty of handling perspective in wide open spaces. Additionally, McCarthy appears to adapt Cézanne’s brushwork, notably in the rendering of the sky and treatment of buildings.

When McCarthy submitted View from the Toronto General Hospital to the annual exhibition of the Ontario Society of Artists in March 1931, it was accepted—her first in a juried show. Pearl McCarthy (no relation), art critic for The Globe and Mail, called it a “major canvas” and the result of “honest workmanship.”  McCarthy’s own assessment was far less generous, writing that she was “ashamed” of her canvas.  Like many artists, McCarthy was her harshest critic and rarely satisfied with the finished product.