181 BALMORAL AVE.
WHAT: A modernist home in South Hill that belonged for more than 60 years to the late portrait painter Cleeve Horne and his sculptor wife, the late Jean Horne. The house has five bedrooms and five bathrooms on an 81- by 135-foot lot.
ASKING PRICE: $2.294-million
TAXES: $14,418.72 (2008)
AGENT: Avant Garde Real Estate Ltd. (Victoria Boscariol)The residents of Balmoral Avenue must have become accustomed to seeing limousines and entourages lining the street in front of No. 181.
The security presence would also tip off the neighbours that perhaps a prime minister or a governor-general had made the journey to Cleeve Horne's Toronto home in order to sit for the acclaimed portraitist.
Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, Governor-General Jeanne Sauvé and Ontario Lieutenant-Governor John Aird all made the trip.
Eight chief justices, several bank presidents and dozens of other luminaries — from Charles Best to R.S. McLaughlin — also had their portraits painted by the artist, who died in 1998.
His statue of Alexander Graham Bell is a landmark in Brantford, Ont., where Mr. Bell did much of his work on the invention of the telephone.
"That was done here — in the backyard," says the artist's son, Bob Horne, of the noted monument.
One eighty-one Balmoral was originally Tudor in style, says Victoria Boscariol of Avant Garde Real Estate Ltd., who adds that the house was built in 1906 by the Van Horne family of Canadian Pacific Railway fame for their daughter.
The street just south of St. Clair Avenue was still relatively remote when the Hornes purchased the property in the 1940s.
"They were almost out in the country when they bought here," Mr. Horne says. "They were told they were crazy to buy here."
Undeterred, the Hornes brought in the architect Gordon Adamson, who dispensed with tradition and redesigned the house in 1947 after the Frank Lloyd Wright style that emphasizes nature and simplicity.
The house was an early conversion to a more open plan, with one room leading to another instead of opening onto a traditional hallway.
"They had New Year's parties with costumes and hundreds of friends," Mr. Horne says. "They'd take over all the rooms of the house."
The makeover included the addition of a two-storey studio with a wall of windows and glass ceiling at the front. Outside, the façade was clad in stone and wood siding, and a front porch was added.
A large floor-to-ceiling double-sided fireplace sits between the living room and dining room in the centre of the house.
"He was always ahead of his time," Mr. Horne says of his father's style.
The house still has rooms painted in the bright colours favoured by Jean Horne.
"She just didn't like anything dull," her son says of the palette. "I had cowboys painted on the walls in my room. Every room was different."
Cleeve Horne spent many hours with his subjects, or "sitters," as he preferred to call them. But while the artist worked, Mr. Horne says, it was Jean Horne who did most of the talking.
She would encourage the subjects to relax by enquiring about their travels and family, her son says.
The Hornes had ventured to such destinations as Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, Australia, South America, Europe and Africa.
"Since my parents had been all over the world, it gave them something in common," Mr. Horne says.
Halfway through the session, the artists and subject would take a break for lunch served in the dining room.
"We generally just sat there and listened because we learned a lot," Mr. Horne says of those lunches, which he was sometimes allowed to attend with his two siblings.
The portraitist talked with his sitters before he started painting in order to find out what type of pose would make them comfortable. He wanted to know where the painting would hang and who it was for.
"He didn't do too many women — he found them phony," Mr. Horne says.
While the artist strived to capture the character of his subjects, he felt that the women he painted were often more self-conscious about their appearance and therefore guarded.
He began painting portraits as a teenager, his son says. He attended the Ontario College of Art in the early 1930s. That's where he met another aspiring artist who would eventually become his wife.
The two married in 1939, Mr. Horne says, after they built a cottage together on Six Mile Lake in Muskoka as a test of Jean Horne's outdoor spirit.
Cleeve Horne was an early president of the Arts & Letters Club of Toronto and also worked as a consultant to corporations that were choosing art for their boardrooms and head offices.
The family's country house, built in 1958 near Claremont, Ont., is said to be the first house in Canada to be built of thin-shell reinforced concrete and to dispense with bearing wall supports.
While the Horne household welcomed some of Canada's most eminent citizens, talk never centred on politics or business.
"They talked about life experiences," Mr. Horne recalls of his parents. "That's when you really got to know the person."
