Defiant Spirits

by Ross King

  MacDonald had no real enthusiasm for urban scenes, least of all ones of Toronto, which he disparaged as “this grey town.” 35 The choice of location was almost certainly Harris’s. The subject matter was probably inspired by Skarbina’s twilight masterpiece Railway Tracks in North Berlin, an industrial landscape featuring a gasometer flanked by chimney stacks in a haze of smoke and steam. Harris was no doubt also aware of cries of modernists such as the English poet and art critic Laurence Binyon, who wanted artists to turn away from “subjects from the past” and instead paint images of modern life. “We are to celebrate the sublime geometry of gasworks,” Binyon wrote in 1910, “the hubbub of arsenals, the intoxicating swiftness of aeroplanes.” 36 What better way for Harris and MacDonald to proclaim themselves modernists than by depicting icons of the contemporary industrial city such as smokestacks, locomotives and gasometers?

  There might have also been another motive for choosing this location. Toronto industrialized around the time of Confederation, after which its steam-powered factories and foundries became sources of local pride. The first few decades after Confederation were the heroic age of factories and machines—of locomotives puffing through Crowsnest Pass and Massey-Harris reapers fanning out across the Prairies. Indeed, one of the first films ever shot in Canada, by the Edison Company in 1898, starred a new Massey-Harris binder. The pages of the Canadian Illustrated News were filled with inspiring engravings of Toronto’s busy factories, and a nineteenth-century catalogue for Hart Massey’s farm implements proudly featured an illustration of a factory blackening the sky with smoke.37 Steam and smoke meant jobs and signalled prosperity. As late as 1912 a new Toronto subdivision called the Silverthorn Park Addition hoped to lure homebuyers with a newspaper advertisement that showed smoke-belching factories. It proudly declared Silverthorn to be “right in the heart of the factory district.” 38

  Canadian industry was prominent in the news in the months before MacDonald and Harris took themselves down to the waterfront. Toronto’s industries had vigorously expanded over the previous decade,39 and a good deal of MacDonald’s professional career had been spent producing images of Canadian commercial prosperity (including, in 1911, a poster for Canadian Northern Steamships showing black smoke billowing from a steamer’s funnels).40 But in 1911 all of that prosperity had been threatened. The country had just fought an election on the issue of free trade with the United States. The reciprocity proposals called for free exchange in both natural resources and a wide variety of manufactured goods: everything from pocket knives and surgical gauze, to musical instruments, motor vehicles and urinals. Reciprocity was popular in the resource-rich West but bitterly opposed by Ontario’s captains of industry. Arguments about the national interest were rolled out to defend the owners of private fortunes. “Canadian nationality is now threatened with a more serious blow than any it has heretofore met with,” declared the manifesto of a group of protectionist magnates known as the Toronto Eighteen. The Conservative leader, Robert Borden, wrote a letter in a Toronto newspaper claiming the treaty would cause “the disintegration of Canada.” 41 Anti-American sentiment was unleashed in pamphlets and cartoons; the Stars and Stripes was even censored in Ontario cinemas. On September 21, 1911, Borden’s Conservatives won the election by 132 seats to Laurier’s 85.

  It seems too much of a coincidence that Harris should have been drawn to Toronto’s industrial zone at such a time. Already stirred by nationalist sentiments, he must have noticed how the treaty had provided for the importing of American harvesters, reapers and threshing machines. He would also have known that Sir Lyman Melvin-Jones, president and general manager of Massey-Harris, though personally loyal to the Liberals, opposed the deal, which would have seen farmers in the West able to buy more affordable farm machinery.

  If MacDonald’s work for Grip Limited involved him in the design of publicity for steamship lines and ambitious new Toronto subdivisions, Harris had already done his own hymn to industrial endeavour and commercial abundance. In 1911 he painted The Eaton Manufacturing Building. This twelve-storey factory on Queen Street West was built two years earlier, the latest addition to the handful of skyscrapers on the urban landscape and a glass-and-steel testimony to Toronto’s prosperity and modernity. Harris produced a remarkable picture in which the Eaton building looms like an apparition over the Ward’s nondescript houses and sheds. Chimney smoke, shadows and industrial steam are set off by an ethereal sunset shimmering in the monolith’s windows.

  Harris was no doubt hoping for a similar evocation of the city’s industrial sublime when he and MacDonald set up their easels in the snow beside the lakefront. They were probably accompanied by another Toronto painter, thirty-year-old Peter Clapham Sheppard, a graphic designer and a student of Cruikshank (MacDonald’s former teacher) at the Central Ontario School of Art and Industrial Design. Each produced a painting of a gasometer, concentrating on the interactions of atmosphere and colour to create Canadian versions of the “tinted steam” paintings of nineteenth-century landscapists such as J.M.W. Turner and Claude Monet.42 The example of Skarbina, at least for Harris, was paramount. For Skarbina railway tracks and chimney stacks were motifs by which the brutality of the modern metropolis, mercilessly shaped by industry and hostile to its inhabitants, was most graphically expressed.43 Skarbina, however, was also mesmerized by the visual effects of the bustling metropolis—its electric light, its swirling smoke and rising steam. Railway Tracks in North Berlin was a Stimmungsbild, or “atmosphere painting,” intended to capture the spectacle of the metropolis and evoke a mood of reverie.44

  The Toronto painters likewise beautified their city’s industrialized urban landscape. Sheppard’s Toronto Gasworks with Locomotives, a fifteen-by-twenty-centimetre oil sketch (no doubt painted on the spot), and MacDonald’s finished painting, Tracks and Traffic,

  both showed a black cpr locomotive powering through the snow-

  covered premises of the Consumers Gas Company, steam billowing from the smokestack into an overcast sky. Harris’s The Gas Works approached the subject from a different angle. Unlike MacDonald, who painted the gasholders from the south, he positioned himself on their north side, in what appears to be a vacant lot overlooking the backs of houses on Niagara Street. From this vantage point he concentrated on the larger of the two gasometers, a monstrous, rust-brown shadow. Only MacDonald offered a human touch: two workmen, one with a shovel slung over his shoulder, crossing the cedar-block pavement that stretches through the foreground.

  Already the differences in MacDonald’s and Harris’s approaches are evident. MacDonald added a profusion of distracting detail—a caboose, stacks of lumber in the yard, telephone poles—and gave volume to the locomotive steam through an intricate manipulation of light and shade. Harris simplified his composition: detail was eliminated and forms flattened as he concentrated on the profile of the gasometer, which he turned into the kind of distant but looming presence that would appear in so many of his later paintings of mountains. His interest in geometric forms indicates his movement away from Impressionism and its transient effects in search of more solid volumes.

  Anyone seeing these paintings in 1912 could have believed an urban realist school, mixed with tinctures of French Impressionism and German Stimmungsbild, was on the brink of developing in Toronto. Harris certainly maintained an interest in urban subjects, and in future years Sheppard would create ambitious and magically beautiful Toronto cityscapes. But the experiment at the foot of Bathurst Street would never be repeated. Harris and MacDonald seem to have concluded that there was no real “Canadian tang” in paintings of chimney stacks and gasometers: such works could as easily have been done in Berlin or Amsterdam or London.

  There was, of course, only one direction to go in order to paint Canada “in her own spirit.” Soon afterwards, with snow still on the ground, the two men set off for the bush.

  4 EERIE WILDERNESSES

  IN 1884 A Montreal surgeon named William Hales Hingston publis
hed a treatise called The Climate of Canada and Its Relation to Life and Health. The relation, as Hingston saw it, was a happy one: the country’s northerly latitudes gave its citizens good health, long life and “increased muscular development.” 1 The Grand Trunk Railway may well have been justified, therefore, in promoting itself as the “Highway to Health and Happiness.” For many people, however, Canadians and immigrants alike, the physical benefits of a northerly climate were offset by some inconvenient realities. For them the Canadian north presented a more discouraging prospect.

  North is, of course, a relative term. From Algonquin Provincial Park, situated between the 45th and 46th parallels of latitude, the North Pole and the equator are virtually equidistant. The park shares the same latitude as Venice, Milan and the wine-growing region of Bordeaux in southwest France, and it is only a few degrees of latitude higher than Provence, extolled by French writers at exactly the same time as a “southern” Eden.2

  But the Canadian “north” is a concept concerned less with degrees of latitude than perceptions of remoteness, underpopulation, lack of cultivation and, above all, harsh winter weather. Whatever its beauty and grandeur, whatever its appeal for boating enthusiasts, fly-

  fishermen and ozone-gasping valetudinarians, the forested wilderness beyond the bounds of Ontario’s cities and towns was regarded by many who visited it, especially in winter, as alien and dangerous. Even Grey Owl, a man who lived closely and apparently harmoniously with nature, wrote of the “brooding relentless evil spirit of the Northland” that sought “the destruction of all travellers.” 3

  Many volumes of writing affirmed this bleak view of the Canadian north, from early stories of the despairing Portuguese explorer’s lament, Cà nada (“here nothing”), to the numerous accounts of Franklin’s failed quest to find the Northwest Passage. The popular adventure stories of Robert M. Ballantyne and J. Macdonald Oxley catalogued with gusto the ever-present dangers of Canada’s northlands. Oxley’s 1897 novel The Young Woodsman, or Life in the Forests of Canada confirms the hero’s mother’s “dread of the woods” with references to people freezing to death or getting dashed against the rocks or eaten by wolves.4

  At the opposite end of the literary spectrum, equally harrowing portraits of spectral woods and frigid winds came from the pens of the Confederation poets Wilfred Campbell and Archibald Lampman. Campbell, who finished high school in Owen Sound in 1879, two years after Tom Thomson’s birth, was known as the “laureate of the lakes” (and he would become one of Thomson’s favourite writers). In 1905 he wrote that the cure for “our modern ills and problems” was “a return to the land,” and five years later he published a guidebook, The Beauty, History, Romance and Mystery of the Canadian Lake Region.5 Anyone reading his poetry would wish to reconsider plans for a return to the land or a visit to the Ontario lake region. His 1889 poem “The Winter Lakes” piled up relentless images of Northern Ontario as a “world of winter and death” where “the mighty surf is grinding / Death and hate on the rocks.” Lampman offered no more irresistible a view, with many of his poems evoking the bitter cold: “winds that touch like steel” (in “Winter Evening”) and “frost that stings like fire upon my cheek” (“Winter Uplands”).

  Worse than the cold, according to the poets, was the loneliness and isolation—the lack of any other human presence. Lampman’s poem “Winter–Solitude” sums up the Canadian experience of “a world so mystically fair, / So deathly silent—I so utterly alone.” Another of his works, “Storm,” describes “eerie wildernesses / Whose hidden life no living shape confesses / Nor any human sound.” It is usual to point out that the Ojibwa lived in this supposedly empty wilderness, but the theme of the “vanishing Indian” had been common in Canadian writing for at least a half a century. Catharine Parr Traill noted as early as the 1850s that the “poor Indians” in her part of Ontario (the Kawartha Lakes) were “dying out fast” thanks to the white man, who had brought them “disease and whiskey and death.” 6 The Native population of Ontario was no doubt also growing scarcer because their ancestral lands in the Georgian Bay watershed had been ceded to the Crown in the 1850 Robinson Treaties. Then, in 1905, the James Bay Treaty (also known as Treaty No. 9) stated with brutal pragmatism that “activity in mining and railway construction” in Northern Ontario “rendered it advisable to extinguish the Indian title.” The Aboriginal people still accounted, however, for some three-quarters of the population of Northern Ontario.7

  Empty of people or not, the northland was something whose terrors and intractability—as well as its paradoxical nearness to civilization’s fragile stretches of road and rail—haunted Canadians. Even Stephen Leacock’s sense of humour deserted him when he turned his attention northwards. “Here in this vast territory,” he wrote in 1914, “civilization has no part and man no place.” 8 The statistics seemed to bear out this observation: the Government of Ontario reported in 1909 that, of the province’s 116 million acres, 40 million remained “virgin forest.” 9

  Perhaps the most disturbing presentation of these barren lands was found in Lampman’s 1888 poem “Midnight,” in which the wilderness instills in the poet a cosmic terror similar to that felt on the Prairies by T.E. Hulme. Five years before Edvard Munch painted The Scream, Lampman describes “some wild thing” that calls from the depths of the snowy night, an unsettling “crying in the dark” that is neither man nor beast nor wind. This unnerving sound pervades the wilderness and resounds in the poet’s head in a Canadian version of what Munch (another northerner) would soon call “nature’s great scream.” 10

  IT WAS FROM these “eerie wildernesses” that Lawren Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald—like so many others before them—were hoping to forge their vision of Canada. They entered this frozen and supposedly menacing hinterland in January or February of 1912. The two men pressed north through the fashionable Muskoka Lakes, sensible, perhaps, that this region, with its picturesque shorelines and quaint mills, had been well represented over the years in Canadian art exhibitions. Nor was Muskoka either eerie or a wilderness. For the best part of four decades, Canadian and American nabobs of finance and industry, such as Harris’s father-in-law, Frank Phillips, had been building ever more grandiose estates for themselves along its lakefronts. (In an illustration of the dangers lurking in the eerie wilderness, Phillips drowned in a lake in 1910—though in Michigan rather than in Ontario). By the turn of the century, heavily promoted by the businessman Alexander Cockburn, the district had mushroomed with more than fifty summer resorts. The grandest of these was the Royal Muskoka Hotel on Lake Rosseau. It came complete with its own golf course and billed itself with no undue hyperbole as “The Grandest Spot in all America.” 11

  Harris and MacDonald moved northward into an area less touched by summer tourism. It appears the two men made their base at the home of MacDonald’s wife’s aunt, Esther Prior, in Burk’s Falls, forty kilometres north of Huntsville on the Magnetawan River, not far beyond the western boundary of Algonquin Park.

  The journey between Huntsville and Burk’s Falls, made on the Grand Trunk Railway through tracts of land heavily logged by the lumber baron J.R. Booth, would have been an unprepossessing panorama of slash and deadfall, primitive settlers’ shanties, and trails for skidding timber cut into the dense bush. Burk’s Falls itself was an old lumber town, with dirt streets and wooden sidewalks scarred by the cleats of the loggers’ boots. At the end of their journey were the rapids and falls of the Magnetawan River, described by the English painter and teacher Ada Kinton as a “boiling, broken tumbling tumult of fall and swirling rapids . . . bubbling and seething, dancing a mad, frantic waltz in dazzling circles.” 12

  Although MacDonald would paint these rapids and falls on later journeys, on this particular visit the two men were taken more with the winter landscape, including the activities of the lumber industry (a favourite subject of the Toronto Art Students’ League). Winter was a busy time for logging companies, with trees cut almost exclusively in the colder weather
because felling was easier with no sap flowing. Most drives had to wait for spring, but the swift flow of the Magnetawan evidently meant it was still possible to float sawlogs downstream to the mill. Harris witnessed one of these midwinter log drives and, inspired by the sight, as well as by MacDonald’s By the River, Early Spring, made studies of drivers in the middle of the river.

  This visit to Burk’s Falls was not Harris’s first experience of the lumber industry. He might have looked the part of a tweedy patrician, but he had fairly impressive experiences of outdoor life. After leaving Berlin he had ridden a camel four hundred kilometres across the desert from Jerusalem to Cairo. He had been accompanying another Brantford expatriate, Norman Duncan, the thirty-six-year-old author of two successful novels, Dr. Luke of the Labrador and The Cruise of the Shining Light, based on his travels in Newfoundland and Labrador. In 1907, contracted to write an account of his journey through the desert for Harper’s Monthly Magazine, Duncan invited Harris along to prepare illustrations. For three weeks the two men travelled the old caravan route south from Jerusalem, enduring blistering heat and passing through windstorms and settlements of (as Duncan did not scruple to express it) “evil faith and monstrous reputation.” 13 After returning to Canada in 1908, the pair was dispatched by Harper’s to a Minnesota lumber camp, in the middle of winter, for a similar assignment.

  Harris’s sojourn in the Minnesota lumber camp inspired a scene of back-breaking hibernal toil not unlike Horatio Walker’s paintings of rural labour in half-lit agrarian landscapes. In 1911 he painted a large canvas called A Load of Fence Posts depicting a horse-drawn wagon crossing an iced-over lake against the backdrop of a radiant sunset. In this rural companion-piece of sorts to the urban The Eaton Manufacturing Building, the northern bush was envisaged as a place of hard physical work as well as gorgeous visual effects.