Defiant Spirits

by Ross King

  The sixth of ten children, Thomson was raised on a hundred-acre farm at Leith, Ontario, ten kilometres northeast of Owen Sound, on the southern shore of Georgian Bay. His father was the son of a Scottish immigrant and his mother (in what gave him an unimpeachable Canadian pedigree) a distant relative of Sir John A. Macdonald. 18 The Thomsons were a talented and artistic family. Their brick farmhouse, Rose Hill, was filled with books and music. Tom had sung in the choir of the local Presbyterian church and learned to play the trombone, the mandolin and the violin. In the evenings, according to a sister, “Tom usually was busy with a book.” 19 He was a sickly child, suffering various ailments. An “inflammation of the lungs” kept him out of school for an entire year. 20 He nonetheless took to outdoor pursuits. In his youth he led what a friend later called (probably with some rose-tinted amplification) the “squirrel-hunting, apple-eating, cow-chasing, chore-drudging life of the farm boy.” 21 An older sister would remember how he roamed the woods near Leith armed with a shotgun and wearing an old felt hat decorated with wildflowers and squirrel tails. 22 He often went fly-fishing with his father, John, an absent-minded and slightly delinquent farmer who escaped the drudgery of his turnip patch by loafing on a riverbank with a fishing rod.

  Another inspiration for Thomson’s love of the outdoors was his great-uncle, Dr. William Brodie, a former mentor of Ernest Thompson Seton, the wildlife painter and later founder of the Boy Scouts of America and the Woodcraft League. A self-taught naturalist who originally trained as a dentist, Dr. Brodie took the adolescent Thomson on expeditions along the Scarborough Bluffs, outside Toronto, to collect plant and insect specimens. Twenty new species of insect resulted from these forays, as well as a collection of nearly 100,000 biological specimens (many of which entered the Smithsonian). In 1903 Dr. Brodie was made director of the Biological Department of what would become the Royal Ontario Museum. His only son, a promising naturalist, drowned while crossing the Assiniboine River, and Dr. Brodie appears to have regarded Thomson (his sister’s grandson) as a kind of surrogate. He passed on to Thomson his love of the Ontario landscape, which he praised for its “deep ravines” and “abrupt wooded hills . . . with the projected tops of stately pines.” 23

  Thomson did not, as might have been expected of a literate young man with artistic talent, study at either university or an art school. Lack of funds was not the problem. In 1898, at the age of twenty-one, he inherited $2,000 from his grandfather’s estate. Two thousand dollars was a large sum, far beyond the annual wage of the average Canadian. In 1898 it would have been enough to either build a house in Toronto or purchase a 150-acre farm in most parts of the country. 24 What became of this sudden largesse is a complete mystery: it seems to have been either squandered outright or slowly but determinedly depleted over the course of many years. In either case, it had little bearing on his career. He began a humble apprenticeship at William Kennedy & Sons, a steel foundry in Owen Sound that produced waterwheels, propellers, mill gearings and other equipment for ships and sawmills. This career ended when, in an episode he later called the “most regrettable” in his life, he quarrelled with the foreman and left after only eight months. 25

  A stint at a business college in Chatham followed. Thomson studied ornamental penmanship and, perhaps subsidized by his legacy, developed a reputation for dancing and socializing. He tried to enlist for service in the Boer War (more than seven thousand other Canadians fought) but was rejected because of fallen arches and the condition of the big toe on his right foot, broken years earlier during a football match. 26 There followed a period of what a friend from the steel foundry, Alan Ross, called “drifting.” 27 One night, during a drinking session, he unburdened himself to Ross, “lamenting his lack of success in life in terms that rather astonished me. I began to think then that he realized his powers and that he also had secret ambitions.” 28

  In 1901 Thomson began pursuing these ambitions by following his older brother George across the continent to Seattle. At the time Seattle was still the transport and supply centre for prospectors heading north to the Yukon. Even the mayor of Seattle had resigned his post in 1897 and joined the gold rush. But Thomson had less intrepid plans, working as an elevator boy in the Diller Hotel on First Avenue and then studying decorative design at the Acme Business College. Owned by the enterprising George and his distant cousin F.R. McLaren, the college offered training in bookkeeping and shorthand. Diploma in hand, Thomson began working as a graphic designer—the trade he would practise for the rest of his life—in a Seattle firm of photoengravers. Once again his independent spirit and flashes of temperament caused friction with his superiors. 29

  Thomson’s time in the United States ended abruptly in 1904, not owing to a quarrel with his manager but, more mysteriously, because of a love affair gone wrong. He left Seattle after an eighteen-year-old named Alice Lambert, the daughter of a former president of Willamette University in Oregon, spurned his marriage proposal. 30 Thirty years later, this interlude would be fictionalized by Lambert herself, who cast Thomson as the romantic lead in one of her novels—a “darkly morose” commercial artist with “thin, nervous hands and flashing eyes.” This young artist (imaginatively named Tom) romanced the heroine with streetcar rides through Seattle and winter afternoons in the “musty dimness of the Public Library where he would pore over prints and reproductions of the Masters.” The affair ended when Tom returned east, “determined to succeed” as a painter. 31

  Success did not appear imminent for Thomson. Moving back to Canada, first to Owen Sound and then to Toronto, he found employment in the art department of another photoengraving firm. He earned $11 a week and (in what was becoming a recurring pattern) a reputation as “an erratic and difficult man.” 32 He was still drifting as he reached his thirtieth birthday in 1907, rooming in a succession of inexpensive boarding houses and remaining a bachelor. He joked to co-workers about hopping a freight train and travelling farther east, hobo-like, in a boxcar. 33

  So, we see Thomson at thirty: handsome; shy; moody; profligate; rebellious; dandyish; rootless; secretly ambitious; given to drink, depression and outbursts of temper. But he was also moving in new directions and making other plans. In 1906 he took night classes at the Central Ontario School of Art and Industrial Design (later rechristened the Ontario College of Art) from a famously cantankerous painter and illustrator named William Cruikshank, the grand-nephew of George Cruikshank, celebrated illustrator of Charles Dickens. Then, after four years in Toronto, he moved to Grip Limited, another commercial design firm.

  At Grip Limited, Thomson came into contact with a vibrant group of young artists and designers. Many were frustrated by the mundane nature of their tasks, which included such inspiring commissions as designing labels for Dr. Clarke’s Stomach and Liver Tonic. A number of the young men in the art department—an “eager group of young fellows” 34—harboured greater ambitions. As a friend later remembered, they hoped to “awaken artistic consciousness in this country.” 35 By the summer of 1912, when Thomson made his first excursion into Algonquin Provincial Park, Grip Limited was fast becoming a nursery for a new kind of Canadian art. Thomson’s drifting was about to be arrested.

  2 THIS WEALTHY PROMISED LAND

  GRIP LIMITED HAD its offices on Temperance Street, two blocks south of where Toronto’s City Hall stood on Queen Street West. The firm’s art department was situated in a high-ceilinged, open-plan, second-storey office. A photograph taken in the Grip office in about 1911 shows ten young men, all in waistcoats and neckties, gathered beneath the office’s clerestory windows and behind a jumble of wooden desks; a framed print of Frans Hals’s The Laughing Cavalier hangs on the wall behind them. Tom Thomson, wearing a jacket, puffs away at the pipe he always stuffed with Hudson Bay tobacco (“the rankest, reekingest, deadenest, most odiferous” on the market).1

  The mood looks industrious but relaxed and good humoured. A visitor to the department later reported that the men’s moments away from their desks wer
e spent in “boxing and wrestling matches, playing horse or monkey with much stamping, kicking and swinging on the steam pipes.” 2 Thomson on one occasion filled a photoengraver’s tank with water and, after pulling a chair alongside and producing his paddle, “sat there gently paddling.” 3 But a young man who joined the firm in 1910 had found their behaviour respectful and orderly: the men were “artistic and decent,” and there was “no chewing, spitting or cursing . . . Their conversation is clean and interesting.” He noted that “they all seem so very ambitious.” 4

  The firm took its name from an illustrated periodical, Grip, founded in 1873 by J.W. Bengough, a political caricaturist who named his weekly after the talking raven in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge. Bengough was a crusading moral reformer who wanted to turn Canada into a Christian republic and who used his barbs and outrageous puns (“the pun is mightier than the sword,” he once declared) to “serve the state in its highest interests.” 5 Grip ceased publication in 1892, with Bengough’s dreams of a Christian republic unfulfilled, but the company that printed it survived. Known as the Grip Printing & Publishing Co. (shortened in 1901 to Grip Limited), it incorporated engraving, lithography and advertising departments. Gone was Bengough’s Christian evangelizing. The firm now produced images advertising Canada’s commercial prosperity: posters and pamphlets for hotels and railways, furniture warehouses, real-estate firms and mail-order catalogues.

  Designing logos and pamphlets might have seemed a prosaic occupation for men, like Thomson, who harboured artistic ambitions. This, however, was the heroic age of commercial illustration. Many artists with international reputations were creating beautiful and innovative commercial work. Pierre Bonnard began his career designing posters for champagne, the Beggarstaff Brothers used their talents to sell corn flour and Rowntree’s cocoa, and the Art Nouveau designer Alphonse Mucha did ads for bath salts, cigarette paper and baby food. Art and advertising had come happily together. In the 1890s the advertisements of designers like Mucha and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec unleashed an affichomanie, or “poster craze,” in Europe and America. Advertisements became so popular (and valuable) that enthusiasts stole them from billboards and kiosks. As an American advertising handbook exulted, people “obtain more genuine joy and satisfaction from a first-rate poster than they would from an old masterpiece.” 6

  By the first decade of the twentieth century, Grip Limited was on the leading edge of this kind of commercial design. It had introduced into Canada not only the Art Nouveau style but also metal engraving and the four-colour process. A young Englishman, shown work by Grip designers in 1910, enthused that it was “equal if not better to anything I have seen in England.” 7

  WITH ITS GROWING population and booming economy, Toronto offered much opportunity to Grip designers like Tom Thomson. It was the second-largest city in Canada, after Montreal. An English visitor in 1913, the poet Rupert Brooke, described “T’ranto” (as he was told to pronounce it) as the “soul of Canada . . . wealthy, busy, commercial, Scotch.” He found it “a clean-shaven, pink-faced, respectably dressed, fairly energetic, unintellectual, passably social, well-to-do, public-school-and-’varsity sort of city”—though not lacking “its due share of destitution, misery, and slums.” 8

  The city had been known since the 1880s as “Toronto the Good,” thanks to a crusading mayor who shut down many brothels and gambling dens. Much-lamented shortcomings remained: muddy streets, wooden sidewalks, ugly buildings, garish signs and a lack of public parks and squares. Its dearth of cultural amenities (its art museum had no premises) prompted one writer to call it “the most philistine city in the Dominion.” 9 Nevertheless the city had a powerful sense of its own civic worth. “Torontonians used to say that Toronto was destined to become a great city,” one commentator proudly declaimed. “We employ the present tense now. Toronto is a great city.” According to another observer, measuring the city against its American neighbours in the anxious hobby that would engross Torontonians for at least another century, it “compared magnificently with many of the largest cities on the American continent.” 10

  Toronto had grown immensely over the previous decade. Swollen by European immigration, mainly from Britain, its population had almost doubled to 382,000. Canada as a whole was booming and growing. A giddy optimism was in the air. Famously, on January 18, 1904, the Canadian prime minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, gave a speech at the first annual banquet of the Canadian Club of Ottawa. “The nineteenth century was the century of the United States,” he declared. “I think that we can claim that it is Canada that shall fill the twentieth century.” 11

  There were good reasons for this optimism. Canada seemed a land of untold resources and as-yet-untapped potential. A 1911 book on Canada by an English journalist bore the emphatic title The Golden Land. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Canada had the world’s fastest-growing economy. The wheat boom that began in 1896 boosted the nation’s exports and populated the Prairies as immigrants arrived from all over the world. A song called “The Sugar Maple Tree” included the lines, “All nations of the earth / Are now learning of its worth / And are flocking to this wealthy, promised land.” 12 Canada’s population rose from 5.3 million at the turn of the century to 7.2 million in 1911. Lured by the Laurier government’s aggressive promotion of Canada abroad as “The Land of Milk and Honey,” more than 2.5 million immigrants arrived in Canada between 1903 and 1913; 405,000 would come in the year 1913 alone. In 1911 the Montreal Daily Star called Canada “the richest, most promising, most prosperous country in the world.” It predicted an eventual population of 80 million.13

  There was some anxiety about how these hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all nations of the earth would be assimilated into Canadian society. Many of those moving to the West were not the pink-faced Protestants from Scotland, Ireland and England who settled Ontario but a more eclectic mix from the Galicia and Bukovina regions of the Austrian Empire and from Belarus, the Ukraine and the Punjab. By 1905 hundreds of Romanian Jews were homesteading in Saskatchewan, and thousands of Sikhs were arriving in British Columbia. Between 1909 and 1911 some 1,500 black settlers from Oklahoma moved onto the Prairies.14 In 1912 more than 80,000 immigrants who spoke no English arrived in the country.15 A Conservative mp from Ontario complained that Canada “is today the dumping ground for the refuse of every country in the world.” 16 A 1909 book entitled Strangers within Our Gates lamented the “uncouth ways,” “alien ideas” and “laxity of morals” of the “motley crowd of immigrants” moving to the Prairies.17

  Laurier allowed that Canada was made up of “confused elements”: “Our existence as a nation is the most anomalous as has yet existed. We are British subjects, but we are an autonomous nation; we are divided into provinces, we are divided into races.” 18 What ballast was there to keep this strange vessel on an even keel? What encompassing interpretation of its history could be offered?

  The Dominion of Canada was less than fifty years old. It knew no revolution, no grand battle; there was no legion of martyrs with whom to keep faith. The sedate progress from colony to nation robbed Canadians of the traumatic events that the leading sociologist of the day, Émile Durkheim, called “effervescences”—collective shocks that bind a people together by means of a shared body of rituals, myths, heroes and sacred objects.19 Canada had no distinctive flag of its own, no official anthem, no great metropolis, no widely recognized body of literature, mythology or music. Colonized by Britain and France, it was founded on lands purchased (sometimes stolen) from the Natives, divided between French and English speakers, populated by immigrants and bordered by the United States, whose population of 92 million made it the continent’s economic and cultural centre of gravity.

  The Grip designers wished to “awaken artistic consciousness” in Canadians. But what did it mean to be Canadian? What, indeed, was Canada?

  THE ONE THING Canadians had in common, it seemed obvious to anyone who travelled across the country on one of the two t
ranscontinental railways, was a vast landscape and a northern geography. Canada was a land of mountains, frozen lakes and unending prairies and forests at the top of the world map. What made Canadians unique was their engagement with this hostile and unforgiving land that dictated the terms of human existence. If Canada had a national mythology, it involved arduous voyages of discovery and struggles for survival in the wilderness, from Jacques Cartier and Martin Frobisher to Samuel Hearne and David Thompson.

  The Canadian wilderness was a place of great wealth—of Cartier’s fabulous, ruby-rich “Kingdom of the Saguenay,” or Skookum Jim Mason’s gold nuggets panned in a Klondike tributary. But it was also a wild and dangerous place, where, as a chronicler soberly noted of Frobisher’s voyages, “all is not gold that glistens.” 20 The Canadian landscape inspired fear, mystery, wonder and often frustration and disappointment. One confronted not other people, or even oneself, so much as the forces of nature and the vastness of the universe. The English poet and philosopher T.E. Hulme, in Saskatchewan to help with the wheat harvest in 1906, experienced what he called the “fright of the mind before the unknown”: a horrifying, agoraphobic vision of the insignificance of man before the oppressive and impossible immensity of Canada’s physical landscape.21 Hulme went on to become the English-speaking world’s greatest philosopher of modernism, the man celebrated by T.S. Eliot as “the forerunner of a new attitude of mind.” 22 This new attitude was shaped, Hulme himself believed, by his fright of the mind before the distended horizons of the Canadian Prairies—“the first time I ever felt the necessity or inevitability of verse.” 23

  Others, gazing upon this robust grandeur, had felt the necessity and inevitability of pictures. At the opening of the Art Association of Montreal in 1879, the governor general, the Marquess of Lorne, urged Canadian painters to turn for inspiration and the creation of a national “school” to “the foaming rush of . . . cascades, overhung by the mighty pines or branching maples” and “the sterile and savage rock scenery of the Saguenay.” 24 By 1879 his injunction was already redundant. Almost every corner of the country had been captured on canvas. The habitants, waterfalls and Mohawk and Huron encampments of Quebec had appeared in the work of Cornelius Krieghoff. Paul Kane captured the remote frontiers of the West during a long odyssey across the continent in 1846–48, from Toronto to the Juan de Fuca Strait and back. Two decades later the English painter Frances Anne Hopkins canoed through the fur-trading routes of the Great Lakes with her husband, an inspector for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Then in 1888 Lucius O’Brien, the first president of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, made a cross-country train journey to Vancouver. He spent the entire summer exploring Howe Sound in a sailing canoe navigated by Chinook guides.