The column towered over the mouth of the Humber River, where once the Rousseaus had lived and the cornfields of the Mississaugas covered the land. It stretched high into the sky above the entrance to the brand-new Queen Elizabeth Way. It was topped by a crown, adorned with a relief of the king and queen, and there at the base — just beginning to rise to his feet — stood an impressive stone lion. It was one of Toronto’s most famous monuments — so well-known many simply called it the Monument.
It was unveiled in the first year of the Second World War to celebrate the city’s newest highway. The beautiful Queen Elizabeth Way stretched from the Humber River around the western end of Lake Ontario to Niagara Falls. Now a roaring strip of asphalt and concrete, the QEW was born as a pleasant drive through farmers’ fields and cherry trees. And it was named after the queen whose face graced the column at its entrance. Queen Elizabeth, better remembered as the Queen Mother, was the wife of King George VI and the mother of the future Queen Elizabeth II. She was even there for the dedication ceremony that summer. The royal couple’s Canadian tour was a landmark event: the first time a reigning monarch had visited the country — or any other Dominion for that matter — and a way of rallying the British Empire as war loomed.
And so, the new monument symbolized many things. It celebrated the new road, commemorated the royal visit, and promised Canada would do its part in the fight against the Nazis. But it was also a testament to its creators and to the love that bound them together as partners — in art and in life. The Monument was a monument to Frances Loring and Florence Wyle.
They were two of the most respected sculptors in Canadian history, but they met in the United Sates. That’s where they’d both been born and raised. Their paths first crossed as students at the Art Institute of Chicago. The two young women made something of an unlikely pair. Florence Wyle was from a conservative family, with a father who made it clear her place was inside doing housework while her twin brother played outdoors. They lived on a farm; Wyle grew up tending to wounded animals, interested in the life all around her. That’s what turned her into an artist. She enrolled in medical school, where she took an anatomical drawing class that eventually led her to sculpture.
Loring, on the other hand, found sculpture in Europe. Her father made his money on Wall Street and in mining. But his fortune was wiped out by a stock market crash right in the middle of the family’s trip to Europe. He suddenly couldn’t afford the return ticket. So, while he headed home to save up enough money to bring his wife and children back to the United States, a teenaged Frances Loring spent seven years living in France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland.
There, she explored the great museums and galleries, enrolled in prestigious Parisian art schools, and was exposed to a more liberal way of life than the one she had known back home. During one visit, her father took her to the Moulin Rouge, where she was transfixed by the scantily clad dancers. “Is this a place ladies can come?” she asked him. “Certainly,” he told her. “A lady can go anywhere.” Loring would spend the rest of her life trying to prove that was true.
When she enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago, she and Wyle hit it off immediately. “It seemed amazing how congenial [we] were,” Wyle would later remember, “how [our] ideals merged.” They shared a love of sculpture, feminist ideas, and a way of seeing the world. When they were apart, they exchanged letters. And though Florence was in love with one of her professors for a while, he wasn’t the one she would spend the rest of her life with.
Before long, the two young women had moved to New York, sharing a studio in Greenwich Village, at home in that neighbourhood’s booming bohemian scene, getting to know their artist neighbours like Georgia O’Keeffe and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. It was the beginning of their lives together. They shared the same kind of ambiguous Boston Marriage that Mazo de la Roche and Caroline Clement were about to start living in Toronto.
Their parents didn’t approve. One day in 1913, Loring’s father shut down the studio and offered to move the pair to Toronto. He thought he would be able to keep an eye on them in Canada — and hoped the city’s conservative values might rub off on them. Instead, it was the other way around.
When the young sculptors arrived in Toronto, the Morality Squad was still at the height of its powers. Love was strictly regulated. We’ll never know whether Loring and Wyle had a physical relationship, because if they did, they certainly couldn’t feel comfortable being open about it in “Toronto The Good.” The city’s first lesbian bars were still a couple of decades away; it wasn’t until the 1940s and ’50s that places like the Continental and the Rideau began the long, hard work of carving out a safer space for queer women. But even as the Morality Squad stalked the streets of Toronto, the foundations of a more progressive, inclusive city were beginning to be laid. And Loring and Wyle would play a leading role.
The sculptors brought a slice of bohemian life to stodgy Toronto. They eventually settled into a rundown converted church in Moore Park (near Mount Pleasant Road and St. Clair Avenue), which is still there today. “The Church,” as they called it, would become not just home to the women and their work, but the closest thing Toronto had to the famous salons of Paris.
Loring and Wyle became friends with the most important artists, musicians, architects, and intellectuals in the city. Their Saturday night parties became the thing of legend, going on long into the night; guests warmed by the big, red-brick fireplace, surrounded by half-finished sculptures and an assortment of cats. The artists of the Group of Seven and the Nobel Prize–winning doctor Sir Frederick Banting, who helped discover insulin, were particularly close friends, but the guest lists were long and filled with notable names.
The Church has been called “the hub of all that was vital and exciting in the Toronto art world of the twenties and thirties … one of the most fascinating gathering places in the country.” Their good friend A.Y. Jackson, one of the members of the Group of Seven, called it “the art centre of Toronto … a most colourful place.… What wonderful parties they put on!” A young Timothy Findley grew up nearby; his father pointed Loring and Wyle out to him. “One day,” his father said, “you will remember those two women, and you will understand how wonderful they are.” And since they were in the habit of handing out lumps of clay to children around the neighbourhood, those children started calling them “The Clay Ladies.”
Their contributions went far beyond social gatherings. At a time when female sculptors were dismissed and passed over for commissions — they were too frail for such physical work, some claimed — Loring and Wyle not only pioneered the place of sculpture in modern Canadian art, but the place of art in modern Canadian culture.
When the Clay Ladies first arrived in Toronto, Canadian art wasn’t taken seriously, not even by Canadians. Loring and Wyle set about changing that attitude — even while some Torontonians were busy gossiping about their sexual orientation. They co-founded groundbreaking artistic organizations, like the Sculptors Society of Canada and the Federation of Canadian Artists, pushing for the policies that would eventually lead to the creation of the Canada Council for the Arts. Loring in particular dedicated much of her time and energy to public causes and education; she was a familiar face at meetings and art openings, and her voice was often heard on the CBC.
By the time the QEW opened, Loring and Wyle were already well known for their war-related work. During the First World War, they had been commissioned to produce a series of statues about workers on the Home Front. Those sculptures had made them famous. Since then, Wyle had concentrated on smaller pieces while Loring developed a taste for large, monumental work. So, she was an obvious choice for the lion that would sit at the base of the column on the QEW; Wyle was chosen to carve the much smaller king and queen in relief.
It was an architect who designed the monument, but Loring and Wyle who would bring it to life. And that was a daunting task; the Lion was one of the most challenging pieces Loring would ever tackle. Given its prominence and meaning, the work came with strict, nationalistic requirements. The limestone would have to come from a Canadian quarry, even though it was of a lesser quality. And that was only the beginning of the trouble. A stone carver would be required to complete Loring’s design, but every stone carver she suggested was rejected. They all had Italian or German heritage; as far as some Canadian government officials were concerned, they were the enemy.
In the end, Loring was stuck with an Englishman she had never worked with before — and who, as she soon discovered, resented taking direction from a woman. When she discovered he had made a change to the design of her lion without her permission, Loring fired him on the spot. She would complete the stonework herself, despite the fact she had never done stonework on that scale before. Already in her fifties, but unfazed, she climbed the scaffolding up the column on an island in the middle of the highway, protected from Lake Ontario’s bitter November winds by only a thin tarpaulin. As she chipped and chiselled away in the cold for weeks on end, her fingers were seized by arthritis. It would plague her for the rest of her life.
And yet, despite the obstacles, when Loring and Wyle’s work was finally finished, it was a triumph. Loring’s stylized lion rose from his rest, snarling and defiant, ready to face the Nazi threat and the brutal travails of the Second World War. She was praised for her artistic mastery: “a balance of tension that could be sensed running from the powerful paws to the end of the tail.” The great cat has been hailed as “one of the finest pieces of outdoor sculpture in Canada” and “the finest piece of architectural sculpture in the country.”
The Lion became a landmark for Torontonians. It was impossible to miss as they drove along the lakeshore in and out of the heart of the city. Children were particularly enthralled by the stone beast, keeping an eye out for the big cat as their parents drove along the highway. They called it the Lucky Lion. It was a powerful part of the city’s public imagination. Loring and Wyle had cemented their place in the lore of their adopted home.
But then came the Gardiner Expressway. Twenty years after the opening of the QEW, another highway was built along the lakeshore, and some of Toronto’s most recognizable landmarks were destroyed to make way for it. The old Dufferin Gate at the CNE was demolished. So was most of the Sunnyside Amusement Park. South Parkdale disappeared. Fort York was barely saved. And with the new highway and a booming population driving more and more traffic toward the QEW, the older highway would need to be expanded. In 1974, it was widened to twelve lanes. The island where the Monument stood was removed. The plan called for the Lion to be demolished.
In response, there was an outpouring of public support for the Monument. Torontonians loved their Lion. In the end, the government relented and promised to save it. But many hoped for more than that: not only did they want the Lion saved, they wanted it to be given a new home where it would remain an important part of Toronto’s cultural consciousness. The Globe and Mail published an editorial declaring, “A country which sweeps aside its past and its art for ribbons of concrete is going nowhere of any importance.”
The sculptor Rebecca Sisler, who had followed in the pioneering footsteps of Loring and Wyle and would later pen their first biography, wrote a letter to the paper: “Surely The Monument represents something rare in the annals of Canadian achievement: a synthesis of artistic excellence, historic significance, and public affection. Is this province so poverty-stricken, spiritually and financially, that funds cannot be allocated to preserve our best-known monument?” She, too, wanted it kept in a prominent location. “Are there no sites in the core of Ontario’s capital where the column and its splendid Lion could be re-erected in the mainstream of everyday life where it can continue to stir public imagination?”
In the end, there was a compromise: the Monument was moved to a nearby location on the waterfront: in Sir Casimir Gzowski Park. It survived — it’s still there today — but its importance was greatly diminished. Cars passing on the Gardiner Expressway can barely see the tip of it; the Lion is part of the mainstream of everyday life only for those who pass through that quiet section of the park or pay particularly close attention as they speed by on Lake Shore Boulevard. Over the last few decades, the Lion has faded from the minds of most Torontonians. As have Loring and Wyle.
They ended their lives in Newmarket living on separate floors of the same nursing home. They were both in their eighties by then, frail and suffering from dementia. Having spent sixty years living and working together, they now seemed to barely remember each other at all; as their minds slipped away, they rarely asked about one another, even though they were still so close. They died within three weeks of each other at the beginning of 1968.
Their work, however, lives on. Their sculptures can be found all over Toronto — all over Canada, in fact: chiselled into some of the country’s finest buildings; on display at Osgoode Hall, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; standing on Parliament Hill; and preserved among the old ruins that grace the gardens of the Guild Inn high atop the Scarborough Bluffs. Whether Torontonians realize it or not, they are surrounded by the sculptures Loring and Wyle hammered and chiselled into existence. “They are,” as Wyle once put it, “our immortality.”