It’s ever harder to find among the bustle and din and ever-sprouting glass towers of Toronto a space of consistent sublimity: of quiet and beauty and community. St. Anne’s Cathedral, the famed Anglican church in Little Portugal, which was consumed by fire on Sunday morning, along with all the treasures housed within it, was for more than a century just such a spot.
Anyone who visited the church, which was finished in 1908, is unlikely to forget it. Outside, visitors were greeted with the scent of chocolate wafting from the Cadbury factory across the street; within, the scene was (by the standards of Protestant churches) radical. At the time St.
Anne’s was constructed, churches were generally neo-Gothic, all pointed arches and flying buttresses, but the iconoclastic head of the congregation, Rev. Lawrence Skey, commissioned a building in the rounder and more exotic Byzantine style, with a domed roof and a less formal, more democratic interior, inspiring scandalized headlines in local newspapers, including this one. It was a church both profoundly unusual and unusually lovely.
In 1923, Skey made another eccentric choice, hiring J.E.H.
MacDonald, part of the then-nascent Group of Seven, to lead a team in decorating the church’s walls, despite the artist’s total lack of experience with liturgical painting. The results, solemn depictions of religious scenes on backgrounds of gold, were strikingly beautiful. These artworks and the church that housed them are now largely g.
