Restorer finds hidden mural

When he started crawling around on scaffolds high up inside the sanctuary of St. Peter and St. Simon the Apostle on Bloor Street, Maurice Kwiecinski knew that surprises lay in store. For the next seven weeks, the artist and restoration specialist would painstakingly scrape four layers of paint loaded on the church’s upper walls since the early 1970s, hoping to uncover and then restore what he had been told lay below.

The unknowns were enticing. There weren’t even proper photographs of the fresco-mural hidden under the layers of paint. When he found it emerging – a pair of angels facing one another from either side of the main stained glass altar window, and then other ornamentations, including an image of the paschal lamb on a side wall – it was thrilling.

Mysteries around the fresco, the restoration of which is a parishioner’s memorial project to a partner who died in 2023, still abound. There seems to be no information in the church archives about the provenance of the original, which was undoubtedly painted soon after St. Simon the Apostle was built in the mid-1880s. The widely respected Eden Smith was one of the architects, and his fondness for the Arts and Crafts style of William Morris lent itself to such decorative touches.

The story of everything getting covered up a century later in the early 1970s is also somewhat murky. Older parishioners who remember the original paintings seem unable to recall what discussions took place prior to the cover-up paint job. Parishioner Margie Huycke says that they just came to church one day “and there it was.” It was done, it seems, at the impetus of a choirmaster who pushed for a number of alterations to the chancel area, believing the acoustics of his music might be improved.

According to Mr. Kwiecinski, such paint-overs in churches are not uncommon. “People find interiors laden with murals and frescos too dark, or they think flat monochrome walls are more modern.” He has worked in the field for some time. His father, Andrew, was an artist in Poland, and when the family emigrated to Canada in 1981, the Roman Catholic church they attended in Kitchener experienced a flood. The elder Mr. Kwiecinski was asked if he could undertake repairs to wall frescos damaged by the water. He did so, and the careers of both him and son Maurice, who was his apprentice, were launched. Many churches – and even work on the Hockey Hall of Fame – later (Andrew passed away in 2009), Maurice would find himself up the scaffold at St. Peter and St. Simon with angels emerging.

For the parish, which prides itself on the historic nature of its building’s architecture, the project has been exciting. The parishioners and visitors to the church find the restoration delightful. The Rev. Canon Geoffrey Sangwine, the incumbent, exclaims that in a city that tears things down and often replaces them with something only ordinary, it’s great to do our part to restore the heritage of both Toronto, the diocese and our parish.

“Beauty is a way to draw us toward God’s grace,” he says. “This is a liturgical painting, expressing the reality we proclaim each Sunday that Heaven and Earth are joined together in worshipping God in Christ.”