Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  If the small group of artists found acceptance in one another, they were also bound by rejection. The elitist Canadian art establishment wanted nothing to do with them or their art. When several of the young Algonquin artists exhibited some of the works they had completed over the winter of 1913–1914, the critics lunged. Henry Franklin Gadsby, writing in the Toronto Daily Star, tagged the colourful landscape work of the young men the “Hot Mush School” of art—a slur that produced a sarcastic rebuttal by J.E.H. MacDonald in the same paper. MacDonald asked Gadsby and other critics to have “an open eye” and enjoy the “Canadianness” of the paintings. Instead of maligning, MacDonald said, the critics should “support our distinctly Canadian art, if only for the sake of experiment.”

  Undaunted, the artists, led by Thomson, headed straight back into the bush at spring breakup and sketched until the onslaught of winter brought them back to the Toronto studio. During that second winter, 1914–1915, Thomson painted his famous Northern River, a large canvas he self-deprecatingly called his “swamp picture.”

  Much to Thomson’s surprise, the painting met with rave reviews when it was shown at the annual gathering of the Ontario Society of Artists in the spring of 1915. Saturday Night’s Hector Willoughby Charlesworth said it was “fine, vigorous and colourful.” The Daily Mail and Empire claimed it was “one of the most striking pictures of its kind in the gallery.” The National Gallery purchased Northern River for five hundred dollars.

  Flush with a new stake, Thomson soon headed north, likely stopping in at Huntsville to visit the young woman who was becoming convinced they might one day marry. It is notable, however, that none of the painters Thomson brought to Canoe Lake mentioned any relationship or ever named Winnifred Trainor as a special friend of Tom. This suggests either that Tom didn’t think of the relationship as anything but casual, and therefore not worthy of mention, or that he feared his sophisticated city art friends might tease him for having such an unsophisticated, uneducated woman from the boonies as a girlfriend—however cruel and unfair such a description of Winnie might be. Yet, certainly, while in Huntsville, Tom made no effort to conceal the romance, often walking up and down Main Street with Winnie, meeting her after work and at times picnicking around the area.

  The painter was once again at Canoe Lake for the going-out of the ice, and that spring of 1915 he sketched Spring Ice from Hayhurst Point. Over the following winter, the sketch would become another major National Gallery purchase. Thomson visited Tom Wattie in South River, staying at the New Queen’s Hotel, and at the same time used some of his newfound money to purchase a silk tent and a magnificently crafted Chestnut canoe. These canoes, built by the Chestnuts of Fredericton, New Brunswick, were treasured for their elegant lines and ease of paddling. With a small keel, they were ideal for the windy lakes of Algonquin, but were also quick and responsive for river travel and light for portaging. The lines are so distinctive a canoe aficionado can tell a Chestnut at a glance, yet Thomson made his even more noticeable by mixing a $2 tube of cobalt blue with a standard marine grey in order to paint his new canoe a “dove grey” colour—perhaps to distinguish his from the common reds and greens of the lodges and various cottages.

  That fall Thomson claimed, in a letter he wrote to MacCallum, that he’d completed “about a hundred” small sketches on his preferred birch panels. It was a banner year: selling work in the spring, sketching well all summer and fall and now receiving an offer from MacDonald to make some extra cash on a painting commission that would free him up to do more of his own work in the spring of 1916. Dr. MacCallum had asked MacDonald to design and build murals along the walls of this cottage at Go Home Bay as a birthday surprise for his wife, and MacDonald quickly enlisted Thomson and Lismer to help with the project.

  Jackson was unavailable. As Private A.Y. Jackson of the 60th Battalion, he was already in Europe, where, in June 1916, shortly after he reached the front, he was wounded in the Battle of Sanctuary Wood. He recovered well and was transferred to Canadian War Records as an artist and would go on to paint some of the most memorable works on the Great War.

  Jackson’s fellow painters stayed back and kept largely to their schedules of sketching in fair weather, finishing off large canvases in winter at the Studio Building and showing their work at the spring exhibition of the Ontario Society of Artists. In mid-March 1916, Saturday Night’s Charlesworth again took notice, accusing the OSA of letting “quasi-’futurism’ ” take over much of the exhibition. “Those who believe that pictures should be seen and not heard,” he wrote, “are likely to have their sensibilities shocked.” Naming MacDonald the “chief offender,” the critic railed that “it is hardly necessary to tear one’s eyes out” in the performance of the artist’s craft.

  Speaking of MacDonald’s now-iconic Tangled Garden, Charlesworth suggested the artist “certainly does throw his paint pots in the face of the public.” The canvas was too large for the subject, he argued, and the colours so crude they mocked the “delicate tracery of all vegetation.” Still, Charlesworth thought it a “masterpiece” compared with other MacDonald offerings on display, snidely suggesting that their titles be changed from The Elements and Rock and Maple to Hungarian Goulash and Drunkard’s Stomach.

  The Toronto Daily Star’s Margaret Fairbairn was much kinder. Three years earlier, she had argued in favour of giving these new young artists their space, but not at the “almost entire exclusion of the older element, in whose work are to be found dignity, serenity, sound draughtsmanship, and all the solid qualities of good design and color which are to be found in the great art of all ages.” In March 1916 Fairbairn specifically mentioned Thomson’s The Birches and The Hard Woods, works that “show a fondness for intense yellows and orange and strong blue, altogether a fearless use of violent color which can scarcely be called pleasing, and yet which scoops an exaggeration of a truthful feeling that time will temper.”

  Thomson, however, seemed to be past caring what the experts or the art rivals thought. There are no records of him griping about any of the negative comments in the Toronto newspapers, and he thought Charlesworth’s wordy analyses in Saturday Night magazine were nothing short of silly and pompous. Thomson was more the artist’s version of the “I-may-not-know-art-but-I-know-what-I-like” school of thought on painting. He spoke with his brush. And, as far as he was concerned, only those who’d known frostbite on their ears, the annoyance of the May blackfly bites and, most significantly, the way wind seems to sing in the branches of high pines, could fully appreciate what he was saying.

  “Thomson had but one method of expressing himself, and that one was by means of paint,” his patron MacCallum wrote in a magazine article in 1918, the year after the artist’s death. “He did not discuss theories of art, technical methods nor choice of motives. He never told about marvelous scenes, of how they had thrilled and held him. He merely showed the sketches and said never a word of his difficulties or of what he had tried to express. His idea seemed to be that the way to learn to paint was to paint. He did not choose some one landscape or some one kind of landscape. All nature seemed to him paint-able—the most difficult, the most unlikely subjects held no terrors for him—the confidence of inexperience it may have been. No doubt he put his own impress on what he painted, but the country he painted ever grew into his soul, stronger and stronger, rendering him shy and silent, filling him with longing and love for its beauties. His stay in the studio became shorter and shorter, his dress more and more like that of the backwoodsman. The quiet hidden strength, confidence and resource of the voyageur showed itself in the surety of handling in his work. He was not concerned with any special technique, any particular mode of application of colour, with this kind of brush stroke or that. If it were true to nature, technique might be anything.”

  That same year, Tom returned briefly to his training in illustration. He had read Rudyard Kipling’s popular The Light That Failed and selected a quote that he set out in Old English letters and surrounded with elaborately drawn leave
s. The quote was deliberately chosen: “I must do my own work and live my own life in my own way, because I’m responsible for both.”

  FIVE WAR

  Thomson became even more of a loner in the winter of 1915–1916. With Jackson serving overseas and the studio he had shared with him now rented to another artist, Thomson moved his operation into a small building that had served as a tool shed during the construction of the Studio Building. It became known as Tom’s “shack” and was later moved to the grounds of the McMichael gallery in Kleinburg, north of Toronto. Tom paid the princely rent of one dollar a month to use the shack.

  But once again, as the ice went out, Thomson went back into the North Country, this time spending part of the early spring exploring the northeastern portion of the park and canoeing the spectacular Petawawa River. Algonquin is different there, with quick, turbulent runs compared with the flat-water travel around Canoe Lake. It seems wilder, and Thomson, by all accounts, liked it hugely, sketching many paintings that would become his best-known canvases—including The Jack Pine at Grand Lake.

  He also stopped, whenever possible, at Canoe Lake and at Huntsville, where he once again became a familiar guest at mealtime. It was during these years that neighbours such as Addie Sylvester became convinced that Tom and Winnie would end up together. When the Trainors spent weekends at the lake, and Tom was about, he would often take his meals with them there too. The rhythm of the lake began to take form over the spring—evening paddles, picnics, trail walks and gatherings (often with music) at nearby Mowat Lodge, where Tom would stay when the Trainors were in residence at the Manse. Apart from the bugs worsening as the days grew warmer, Canoe Lake was a quiet, picturesque escape—worthy of the name so many give to the one place that matters most to them: God’s country.

  Despite these summer idylls, the duty owed to a country at war was much on everybody’s minds. Mark Robinson had already shipped out in the fall of 1915 with the Simcoe Foresters. Tom told people he would serve the wartime cause as a fire ranger. Such work, including anything to do with the lumber industry, was generally considered an acceptable alternative. He was assigned—surely much to Winnie’s chagrin—to a ranger cabin near the Achray rail depot at Grand Lake, a large, windswept lake near the eastern boundary with easy portages into the Barron River and the spectacular granite canyon that twists and turns along the park’s eastern boundary. There being no fires in the area, he had plenty of free time to explore and sketch. That summer, he travelled to Lake Traverse, where he stayed with Ranger Jack Culhane and his family and where he might have painted with young Jimmy Stringer, who was there that summer with his Uncle Jack’s family.

  At Grand Lake, Thomson stayed with Ranger Edward Godin. He got on well with Godin—Thomson even made a sign, “Out-Side-In,” for the cabin they shared—and Godin later said he found Tom “a very fine fellow. Easy to get along with and always in good humour.” Godin thought that Thomson did the sketch for The Jack Pine while there. He was equally convinced that Thomson’s best-known work, The West Wind, was sketched out somewhere near Kiosk in the northwestern part of the park. Others would prove to have different ideas as to the location of the painting Arthur Lismer would later call “the spirit of Canada made manifest in a picture.”

  There has always been controversy concerning the exact location of The West Wind. Godin said that it was first sketched out near Kiosk. Ranger Tom Wattie said it had been painted at Round Lake, where he had his family cabin and where Thomson sometimes stayed and sketched. In August 2009 I went by canoe to Kioshkokwi Lake and spent hours trying to match a copy of The West Wind to the shoreline and while there are angles that look persuasive, nothing quite convinces. Mark Robinson claimed that the original sketch had been completed at Achray on Grand Lake and further claimed that Thomson had tried to give the exquisite little painting to him but that he’d refused, telling Thomson to put it on a large canvas over the winter. Winnie Trainor once said that Thomson told her it had been painted at Cedar Lake, near the railway depot at Brent.

  James MacCallum, however, claimed not only to know where it was painted but also to have been there when it happened. MacCallum said that he, Thomson, Harris, and a cousin of Harris’s had been travelling that spring and Thomson decided to paint a gnarled tree growing near the shore of Little Cauchon Lake. To make the story more dramatic, MacCallum claimed, confirmed by Harris, that it was blowing very hard—as evidenced in the whitecaps in Thomson’s painting—and that “the wind blew down the tree of the picture and Harris first thought that Thomson was killed, but he soon sprang up, waved his hand to him and went on painting.”

  A far less dramatic account comes from oldtimers in Huntsville who always claimed that The West Wind was painted at Fairy Lake and that Tom had been staying at the Trainors when, one day, he set out and found inspiration at the nearest lake from town. There is, in fact, a certain point where you can stand and, if you imagine that a gnarled pine once stood on the rocks, the round hills on the far shore rather neatly match Thomson’s masterpiece.

  Tom made several new friends during his time at Grand Lake. Each week he went by canoe and tote road to Basin Depot to pick up supplies and mail, where he would visit with Ranger Will Hughes and his wife, Charlotte, who was called “Lottie.” Lottie Hughes had been the first ranger’s wife allowed by park authorities to live in the park with her husband. She did wonderful crochet work, and Tom once sat down and drew an intricate pattern in pen for her to follow. The Hugheses had no sense that they were being honoured by an artist, since Tom never mentioned his true calling. Later that year Will and Lottie Hughes were transferred to Brent, on Cedar Lake, and never saw Tom again, learning of his artistic life only after he died. They had previously spoken of him as a welcome visitor who was “handy with his pen.”

  Lottie’s sister, Alice Green, lived with Will and Lottie, and the three would often play cards with Tom. Alice kept a deck of Air-Cushion Finish Congress Playing Cards 606 from the U.S. Playing Card Company. Under the words “Summer of 1916, Best Summer Ever Was Known,” Alice has written the date, August 2, 1916, and signed the name “Tom Thompson.” On another card, four names—Tom Thompson again, Carl Goddin, Charlotte Roche and Alice Green—are written, along with the words “Five Hundred Players.” It is clear, because of the “p” in “Thompson” that Tom did not sign it himself, but he was known to be a frequent visitor, and it appears that the writer was quoting him directly.

  “Best Summer Ever Was Known,” Tom apparently told his new friends. It would also be his last summer.

  Pete Sauvé, a park local who later worked as a cook at Taylor Statten Camps, remembered meeting Thomson at this time and thought him “a perfect gentleman.” Sauvé once watched Thomson sketch the log drive along the Petawawa River and was impressed, though not everyone else was. “The other men thought the man was foolish,” Sauvé said in a later interview, “out of his head, all his thoughts and everything, when he was bored. They didn’t know anything about a painter.”

  There were now nine ranger stations in the park, including the fine cabin at Achray that Thomson shared with Godin, and thirty-two rangers employed. More and more private cottages were to be found, some newly built and some, like the Trainors’, adapted from previous use. The lease on a place was $7.50 a year, with cottagers allowed a maximum of two acres. There was talk of building a road through the park from Whitney, on the eastern boundary of what is now the southern portion of the park, to Huntsville, west of that portion of the park, but Highway 60 would not become a reality for years (it was a special make-work project during the Great Depression). The eventual road would follow a trail blazed by my grandfather, Ranger Tom McCormick.

  Somewhat ironically, while Thomson served as a fire ranger in a far corner of the park, seeing next to no action, a huge fire broke out at Canoe Lake when a Grand Trunk engine ignited a pile of wood chips and the fire spread to the hill back of the Canoe Lake station before it could be brought under control. Fortunately, no buildings or cabins were
affected, including the Trainors’ place.

  It must have occurred to Winnie that fire ranger work was needed closer to Canoe Lake, yet Tom had been assigned to Achray. Had he asked for Achray? Had he not suggested Canoe Lake or, at least, one of the stops along the Grand Trunk line heading east and west? Achray was much too far for him to travel by canoe to see her in the little time he had off, and even letters were difficult to send. If, at this time, they were talking about the possibility of a life together, as she certainly came to believe in the coming year, she must have wondered what he was thinking. If the story on the cards is correct—“Best Summer Ever Was Known”—Tom must have been thinking of her rather less than she was thinking of him.

  Meanwhile, Winnie and her mother were deeply involved in patriotic support of the war effort. Knitting socks was considered an important part of the “drive,” as it was always called. All Saints’ Anglican Church and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were both major forces behind that cause. Winnie was working with the church to raise money for the troops, as well as helping with a separate drive to knit for those serving at the front. She must have wondered whether Tom’s work as a fire ranger was really enough war service for a man she knew to be in the prime of health and still, unfortunately, a bachelor with no family obligations.