Artworks

This is a wonderful slice of Montreal and McGill history and one that has become obscured by the passage of 55 years when the tennis courts were removed for the construction of the Maass Chemistry Building. Can you imagine playing tennis on courts fronting on Montreal’s Golden Square Mile? Retrievable memory even with Google makes these courts hard to find. Inquiries made to McGill directly did not lead to any images or information. An old aerial image of the campus substantiated Little’s positioning of the courts. Thirty years ago the entryway to the offices of McLeod Young and Weir on Sherbrooke Street, located in the renovated and gentrified and developed buildings to the right of the scene, now Scotiabank, had a larger version of this composition hanging behind the receptionist. We recall Walter Klinkhoff saying that he played a few times on those courts with Lawrence Sabbath, who years later was an art writer for the Montreal Gazette.

Note the inferences of the horse-drawn cabs, one immediately to the left on Sherbrooke Street at the beginning of Victoria and one on the right.

The tennis courts shown here are located east of the Roddick Gates. The street immediately below, that is going south, is Victoria. The building shown left of centre in the distance is a building designed by famed architect Percy Nobbs which today is the main entrance and part of the McCord Museum. When John Little did his studies for the painting, that is, prior to 1964, the building housed the McGill Student Union and the campus newspaper, The McGill Daily. The space was developed by McGill University when the university built the Maass Chemistry Building, beginning in 1964.