Harold Town
Harold Town’s artistic career was shaped by the rapid postwar development of his hometown, Toronto. The physical and social environment of that city—and the conditions it offered for the exhibition, sale, and reception of his art—are key to understanding the shifts in his production and in his reputation.
Town was born in Toronto in 1924 and grew up in the west end, in the Village of Swansea, where his father worked as a railway conductor. From childhood he was obsessed with drawing; his mother allowed him to use the enamel-topped kitchen table as his canvas. As a student at Western Technical-Commercial School, Town specialized in art, and his imagination was fired by studies of Renaissance art history and the Old Masters. He attended the Ontario College of Art (OCA; now OCAD University) from 1942 to 1944 but found the teaching there uninspiring.
As an OCA student Town received free admission to the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario). He felt challenged by the achievements of great artists of the past. At age twenty he could emulate the work of Edgar Degas (1834–1917), though with a contemporary twist, as exemplified in his work Seated Nude, 1944. He resolved to master every aspect of figure drawing by the age of thirty.1
The Royal Ontario Museum was an even greater source of inspiration. Town marvelled at the Oriental prints and ceramics, the grandeur of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian antiquities acquired by archaeologist C.T. Currelly, and the suits of European and samurai armour. This exposure gave him what he came to see as a global horizon, and it inspired his work as a commercial artist and his first experiments in abstraction.
