More breaking news on the ‘lost Vancouver mural front’. The post-prohibition beer parlour murals that sprung up in 1921 were in all likelihood, painted by one man, and we’ve actually featured him here before. It is none other than Gordon Kit Thorne. I have always wondered who painted these large idyllic scenes and geometric forms, occasionally seen in postcards or Vancouver Archives photographs. In fact, I featured one such beer parlour here before, the Castle Hotel beer parlour. I had found a black and white postcard which showed at least a portion of the wall to wall murals, with geometric patterns worked into the tables and on the ends of the cubicles, with elegant wicker chairs placed around tables running all the way down the centre of the room. Well, it turns out this layout was practically identical to the Hotel Abbotsford beer parlour, from which we have both a colourized postcard and a Vancouver Archives photograph. The postcard shows the ladies beer parlour, while the Vancouver Archives photograph we can assume depicts the men’s beer parlour. These images were most likely taken around 1921, when prohibition in BC was lifted, and strict new laws around beer drinking were enacted. These rules can be loosely paraphrased as follows: Sit down. Drink your beer. No mingling with the opposite sex. No food served with your drink. You may flavour your beer with salt, as desired. Definitely no dancing.
It was some time ago when I finally stumbled on the definitive proof that Gordon Kit Thorne painted the Abbotsford Hotel Mural, as well as the Belmont Hotel mural, among others. It’s published in The Vancouver Sun, Aug 13, 1977, clear as day. An excerpt from this article is worth repeating here:
“Over the years, Kit Thorne has been big in beer parlors. He claims to have drunk the first legal beer in Vancouver following prohibition, when he was painting a mural in the Belmont Hotel. He did most of the downtown pubs at one time or another. He shows you photographs of wicker chairs and hand-painted tables in the ladies’ parlor of the Abbotsford Hotel. The murals are his, of course, and he painted the designs on the wicker chairs. He was on the advertising staff of the Strand Theatre in the ‘20s when he came back from the war and painted everything from posters to billboards. ‘I was one of the best. I would do a 25-foot-by-eight-foot billboard on metal in a day, including the lettering. I remember when they first started doing silkscreen printing. I didn’t like it. Anything mechanical frightens me. I didn’t know what the hell it was all about. If you can’t do it with your hand like an average working man, I don’t want anything to do with it.’ But the billboards and the murals were merely bread and butter to Thorne. The gravy was what came out his studio: watercolors, oils, sculptures (made from pie plates) even copper engravings. And there was never a shortage of buyers. ‘Techniques don’t bother me,’ he says, ‘I can do them all. Not only can I do them, I have done them. I am an inventor, in a way, an experimenter.’ Kit Thorne was in the first class at the Vancouver School of Art in 1921. In 1927, still anxious to learn, he took his wife and two young daughters to England and studied for two years at Goldsmith College, in London. In the years that followed, Thorne lived with his family in Vancouver’s West End, painting hundreds of pictures of the way it was and travelling and painting in many parts of B.C…”
So there you have it, another lost link of Vancouver’s public murals has been retraced. Gordon Kit Thorne may not be one of the most lauded artists in his hometown, but he certainly was prolific. And for now, at least, he is not forgotten.
