Vaughan
— a young city the woodlots still remember.
Not only on a wall.
“A city of about 340,000 just north of Toronto, in York Region, where the old farm concessions of the Humber valley became neighbourhoods. The McMichael Canadian Art Collection sits in the village of Kleinburg, on a wooded bend of the Humber River. The subway now runs north from downtown Toronto and ends in Vaughan. Late October is the colour the McMichael painted.
Vaughan, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Vaughan is a city of about 340,000 in York Region, immediately north of Toronto and west of Markham. It became a city in 1991, growing out of the older Township of Vaughan first surveyed in 1792 and named for Benjamin Vaughan, a British commissioner to the 1783 Treaty of Paris. The headwaters of the Humber and Don rivers run through it. Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, the downtown around the TTC Line 1 terminus opened in 2017, is the northernmost subway station on the Toronto system and connects the city to Union Station in roughly 45 minutes.
The McMichael Canadian Art Collection, in the Kleinburg village within Vaughan, holds about 6,500 works including a defining collection of the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson. Several of those artists are buried on the grounds. Canada's Wonderland, near Highway 400, opened in 1981 and remains the country's largest theme park. Black Creek Pioneer Village preserves a 19th-century Ontario settlement. The TTC subway makes Vaughan reachable from downtown Toronto in about 45 minutes, and Pearson airport is roughly 20 kilometres south.
Southern Ontario's seasons read clearly across Vaughan's woodlots and ravines. Sugar maples along the Humber turn deep red in mid to late October; the McMichael property is one of the most painted autumn landscapes in the country. Winters are cold and snowy, with average January lows near minus ten degrees Celsius. Spring brings trilliums to the wooded conservation areas; July and August are warm and humid, with afternoon temperatures around twenty-seven degrees and frequent thunderstorms rolling east off Lake Huron.