by Ross King
Returning to Toronto following his visit with MacDonald to Burk’s Falls, he turned his hand to another such scene, a composition called The Drive, at 91 centimetres high by 138 centimetres wide, his largest work to date. It too took the theme of rural labour beloved of Barbizon and Hague School painters but transplanted it from an agricultural landscape of peasant ploughmen and their beasts of burden to a more distinctively Canadian location in the Ontario bush. The limited colour scale revealed less of a departure from the Hague School tradition. With the exception of the brightly dressed lumberjacks, the tone was still muted and dark, with an umber and russet landscape beneath a lowering sky providing the background for the men’s exertions. The way he lit his composition—darkened edges giving way to a patch of sunlight in the distant central plane—was suggestive of the Barbizon-influenced American painter Henry Ward Ranger, known as the leader of the “Tonal School of America.” 14
Harris must have painted the work quickly because, despite its size, it was ready for the annual exhibition of the Ontario Society of Artists, Toronto’s most important art show, which opened in early March.
MOST MIDDLE-CLASS Torontonians wanting to look at paintings or decorate the walls of their homes made their way to the intersection of Yonge and Queen streets. The Robert Simpson Company had a picture gallery on its sixth floor (and Bell-Smith’s Lights of a City Street in its Palm Room), and across the street the T. Eaton Company displayed framed paintings in its windows along Yonge. The publicity for Eaton’s boasted that its upstairs picture gallery had “stacks and stacks” of paintings. It sold both reproductions of famous works of art and original oils and watercolours of “beautiful bits of landscape, delightful spots in the woods, lovely women, animals, home scenes, and children at play.” The original works were priced between $10 and $50, often heavily discounted in clearance sales.
Eaton’s even had a Canadian Gallery on its fourth floor to cater to those interested in Canadian scenes and Canadian painters. One artist regularly featured in the Canadian Gallery was C.M. Manly, a teacher at the Central Ontario School of Art and Industrial Design and a former member of the Toronto Art Students’ League. His landscapes of Nova Scotia were advertised (in his 1913 exhibition) at between $20 and $125. These prices were not especially cheap in a world where a mohair suit cost $15, a wolf stole $25 and a diamond in a ten-carat gold band $75. But because Toronto had no permanent art museum, the picture galleries in the two department stores probably did more than anything else both to shape and to reflect the general public’s aesthetic tastes.15
Another place to see art, though less frequently and in smaller doses, was in the Public Reference Library. Each March, the Ontario Society of Artists staged a public exhibition of painting, drawing and sculpture in the Beaux Arts–style building at College and St. George. Founded in 1872, the osa was intended to foster (as the prefatory note to one of its exhibition catalogues stated) “original and native art in the Province of Ontario.” 16 Public attendance at its annual exhibitions was comparatively light, usually in the low thousands over the course of the three-week run (the exhibition was open Mondays through Saturdays). Almost all of the works were for sale, but few members of the public ever bought them, even though many were priced in the same $20–$50 range as those at Simpsons and Eaton’s. Stalwarts of Eaton’s Canadian Gallery such as C.M. Manly (an active osa member) and the French-born Georges Chavignaud regularly appeared at osa exhibitions, though here some of their paintings were offered at the upper end of the scale, with price tags of $300 to $400—the cost of a fur coat from Simpsons.17
A more reliable patron for artists exhibiting at the osa was the Government of Ontario. It purchased works (generally to decorate government offices) after taking advice from the Toronto Guild of Civic Art, a committee of artists and laymen. Despite a limited budget, the National Gallery too bought paintings for the collection in Ottawa. Almost as important as the sales were the reviews. Most of Toronto’s six newspapers, as well as magazines such as Saturday Night and Canadian Courier, gave the exhibition a write-up. However modest, it was therefore the city’s most prestigious venue for painters and sculptors to make their names.
Just as advertisements for Eaton’s repeatedly drew attention to the stock of “beautiful bits of landscape” and “delightful spots in the woods,” most paintings in osa exhibitions were landscapes. In 1911 some 120 of the 200 paintings were landscapes or European street scenes. Interiors, still lifes, genre paintings and portraits were in a distinct minority, done for the most part, though not exclusively, by the thirty women who showed work in 1911.18 The landscapes at the osa always included a number of European subjects—the Normandy and Cornish coasts, views of St. Paul’s, the Pont-Neuf—but mostly they were Canadian scenes because foreign landscapes required the expense of a ticket on a transatlantic liner. The 1910 exhibition had included pictures of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, the Rockies and rural Ontario. One year later visitors could see paintings with titles such as Northern Ontario Homestead, April in Manitoba, Magnetawan, In the Pine Woods and In the University Parks, Toronto. Toronto’s most distinguished landscapist, C.W. Jefferys, offered The Plains of Saskatchewan, Virgin Prairie and The Qu’Appelle Valley.
As their titles suggest, many of these landscapes represented Canada in a state of pastoral bliss. osa exhibitions abounded with images of snake fences and picturesque barns. It had long been axiomatic that Canadian landscapes should be agricultural scenes. “Canada is essentially an agricultural country,” proclaimed a writer in the Canadian Magazine in 1904, “and any picture distinctively Canadian in subject must include the painting of animals.” Another writer in the same magazine agreed that Canada’s artistic destiny lay with scenes of beef-on-the-hoof, though he was willing to entertain another subject too, since Canada was notable for “handsome women” as well as cows.19
There was another reason for these serial pictures of cows and barns. In Canada as elsewhere, pictures destined for the domestic interior were meant to provide notes of calm and order—to give the occupant respite from the chaotic world outside. Doctors of the day, following the “new psychology,” claimed pictures could be an emotional emollient, the next best thing to a rest cure in a canoe. Contemplation of landscape paintings, preferably ones with distant views and sombre tones, provided relief to the overworked and overstimulated. “Lines and hues,” according to one French critic, “exert as considerable an influence as that of pure air, spectacles of nature and flowers.” He no doubt voiced the aspiration of many a middle-class Canadian picture-buyer when he wrote, “Oh, to forget the ugliness of the street when we stand before an idealized landscape.” 20
Augustus Bridle believed that at the 1912 osa exhibition the country was not only better represented than ever before but also represented in a way that put less stress on this kind of idealized pastoral landscape. “There is an exhilaration, almost an abandon,” he wrote, “that convinces any average beholder of the vitality of Canadian art.” He claimed the painters were not only depicting “farm landscapes and pastorals and smug interiors, and pretty women”—the sort of work to be found, in other words, in the department stores. They were also capturing “Canada of the east and west, north and south, of railways and traffic, and city streets; of types of people . . . and phases of development.” He claimed that “to a Canadian, scenes in this country are of vastly more interest than all the fishing smacks and brass kettles and seaweed sonatas of north Europe.” 21
Bridle was overstating his claims about the “first satisfying depicture” of Canada, since in 1912 Canada was no better or more abundantly served by artists than in most previous years, and there were still “farm landscapes” aplenty. But the partnership of Harris and MacDonald, with their stabs at urban realism, produced impressive results. They were the most prolific artists at the exhibition. Each showed six paintings, and Harris included a number of pencil sketches of Toronto’s neighbourhoods. He did not exhibit The Gas Works
(the painting was probably not yet complete) but showed scenes of houses and buildings in downtown Toronto, a barn in the Laurentians (from his trip with Kyle several years earlier), and The Drive. Besides Tracks and Traffic, Frosty Morning (as the work was called in the catalogue), MacDonald exhibited winter scenes set mainly in the High Park area of Toronto, such as The Sleighing Party and Ski-ing.
Both painters were rewarded for their efforts. The Government of Ontario purchased one of MacDonald’s six canvases, Morning Shadows, and the National Gallery of Canada bought The Drive from Harris. MacDonald would get a further boost when Tracks and Traffic was praised in the international art journal The Studio as “a tour de force of the effects of steam and snow.” The review, written by a Canadian critic, went on to make a surprising claim: “No such scenes may be held anywhere but in Canada, where every manufacturing and transporting enterprise is hustle-bustle evermore.” 22
This strange hyperbole, along with that of Augustus Bridle, could not hide the fact that the sought-after “Canadian tang” was still not as sharp as it might have been. Harris and MacDonald were seeking what the former called “the varied moods, character and spirit of this country.” 23 But paintings such as The Drive or MacDonald’s vignettes of suburban snow marked no great advances over the dozens of other Ontario scenes hung each March on the walls of the Public Reference Library. The two painters, MacDonald especially, were working in a technique that, with its light palette and concise brushwork, still owed much to French Impressionism. Several other painters at the OSA exhibition also worked in this style, including Helen McNicoll and Elizabeth McGillivray Knowles. But if Impressionism was adept at catching the transient and delicate effects of filtered sunlight or shadowed snow, it offered little in the way of strength or grandeur. Highly derivative of European models and attacked by some critics as superficial glitter, it was probably regarded by Harris and MacDonald as too effete for their ambitious plans to capture the harsh realities of the Canadian north.
Harold Mortimer-Lamb’s remarks from 1908, that no one yet possessed the “power of insight” to interpret “the spirit of the great northland,” still appeared to hold dismayingly true.24 Where, then, could this power of insight be found? The answer, oddly enough, would be in Buffalo.
5 LIFE ON THE MISSISSAGI
IN LATE JULY 1912, two months after returning from Algonquin Park, Tom Thomson departed on another canoeing and painting expedition. This time he would spend not two weeks, but two months, in the bush. His destination was the Mississagi Forest Reserve, eight thousand square kilometres of land north of Lake Huron that had been set aside by the Ontario government in 1903.
Thomson’s companion this time was a twenty-three-year-old Yorkshireman named William Smithson Broadhead. After immigrating to Canada from Sheffield almost three years earlier, Broadhead had begun working with Thomson at Grip Limited at the end of 1910. By 1911 the pair were sharing the same lodgings, a boarding house on Summerhill Avenue, on the northern fringe of Rosedale. Broadhead too was an aspiring painter, but whereas Thomson was diffident and insecure, the ambitious and self-assured young Englishman wrote letters home to Sheffield proclaiming himself “by far the best designer in Canada” and “cock of the walk” among Toronto’s painters. “I could knock the spots off half the so-called big guns here,” he brashly declared.1 His accomplishments hardly justified such self-regard. He showed several works at the 1912 OSA exhibition, including a painting called Boy with Goldfish and a drawing of Lady Macbeth. These works collected no prizes or critical attention, nor were they the kind of works Augustus Bridle had praised for giving a “satisfying depicture” of Canada.
Despite his clamorous amour-propre, Broadhead evidently made an agreeable roommate, co-worker and travelling companion for Thomson. The two men caught the train from Toronto to Biscotasing, on the shores of Biscotasi Lake, 140 kilometres northwest of Sudbury and almost 500 kilometres from Toronto. Although on the cpr line, this area was more remote than Algonquin Park, with slightly fewer chances of encountering American fishermen or weekending Torontonians. The local fur-trading post, La Cloche, had shut down several decades earlier, but trappers, fur traders and canoe brigades still worked the area around Bisco (as the town was known) and along the Spanish River, and each spring the Spanish River Lumber Company drove sawlog timber downriver. These men who took to the lakes and rivers were no recreational canoeists in search of a rest cure. One of the rangers working in the Mississagi Forest Reserve in 1912 later described these rivermen as “hard-bitten bush-wackers, nurtured in hardship,” with “barbed, gritty humour” and an “unparalleled skill in profanity.” 2
This particular ranger was a hard-drinking Englishman, born the same year as Broadhead, named Archie Belaney, later to become famous as Grey Owl. He would soon be run out of Bisco for demonstrating his marksmanship on the bell of the local church while a Sunday service was in progress. In the summer of 1912, however, he was working for the Ontario Department of Lands, Forests and Mines, his face burned “as black as the arse of a tea kettle” by the summer sun.3 Legend has him meeting Thomson and Broadhead in Bisco. Thomson supposedly impressed Grey Owl with his skill in making doughnuts, though the Englishman was later distinctly ambiguous in his memories of the encounter.4 Still, a meeting is not unlikely, given how it would have been prudent for relatively inexperienced canoeists like Thomson and Broadhead to check in with the local ranger (as Thomson had done in Algonquin Park) before paddling into the maze of woods and waterways. But what, if anything, passed between these two icons-in-the-making—besides a plate of doughnuts—has long since been lost to history.
The Treaty No. 9 commissioners (among whom were the poet Duncan Campbell Scott and the painter Edmund Morris) had noted in Biscotasing a “considerable Indian population” who “make their living by acting as guides and canoeists for sportsmen.” 5 It is unclear if Thomson and Broadhead hired an official guide: once again, a prudent recourse for a pair of relatively inexperienced canoeists, if only to keep them from getting lost in unfamiliar territory. But Thomson might have felt his experience in Algonquin Park held him in good stead, and Broadhead was typically proud of his expertise in the bush: “I am an expert with a canoe now,” he boasted to the folks back home two years earlier, after paddling a stretch of the Humber River.6 In any case, after provisioning themselves in Bisco, they began making their way in a Peterborough canoe west across Biscotasi Lake to Ramsey Lake and then along the Spanish River, through a great wilderness of red and white pine.
Canoeing would have been difficult, with their passage impeded throughout their journey by rapids, dams and dead logs left over from the drives. What Grey Owl’s “hard-bitten bush-wackers” might have made of these two would-be painters up from Toronto, had they met on the lake, one can hardly guess. But Thomson and Broadhead were not the first landscape painters to dip their paddles in a Canadian river. In the 1840s Paul Kane had travelled with the Hudson’s Bay Company canoe brigades, and in 1869 Frances Anne Hopkins voyaged along the Ottawa and Mattawa rivers and through the Great Lakes. More recently, in the summer of 1903 Tom McLean and Neil McKechnie, both described by the Toronto Globe as “expert boatsmen,” had paddled through the Abitibi district and then the following year, with tragic consequences, on the Mattagami.7
Artists, along with sportsmen and tourists taking a rest cure, were only the latest in a long line of Canadians for whom the canoe had proved important. It had been used for many centuries both by the Aboriginal peoples and the European explorers, fur traders and surveyors. Canada’s geography as well as its industry were shaped by its waterways and consequently by vessels such as the birchbark canoes of the Algonquin peoples and the ten-man canots du maître of the North West Company. By the early twentieth century the canoe had become a romantic symbol of the country that encompassed and included—as little else did—First Nations, French-Canadian and
English-Canadian cultures. Ole Evinrude built the first outboard motor in 1909, but Sa
muel de Champlain’s wonder at the canoes of the Aboriginal peoples at Lachine in 1603 (“in the canoes of the savages one can go without restraint, and quickly, everywhere”)8 could still be experienced by anyone, like Thomson and Broadhead, who wished to travel the more remote and inaccessible routes through the Canadian hinterlands.
Thomson and Broadhead spent their nights in makeshift campsites. Their meals were trout and smallmouth bass caught and then cooked in a reflector oven, sometimes after Thomson, like a big-game hunter, photographed them. He took great pride in his skills as a fly-fisherman, tying his own flies and casting his line in perfect figures of eight.9 But although canoeing in these parts called for great skill, he regretted that an expert fisherman was hardly called for to extract pike from the waters in the forest reserve, since “they are so thick there is no fun in it.” 10
Thomson clearly fished for reasons beyond putting something on his dinner plate. Fishing was part of his communion with nature, an escape from civilization into what the publicity for the Grand Trunk Railway constantly emphasized was a more salubrious and elemental world. Fishing seems to have exemplified for Thomson what the novelist J. Macdonald Oxley had called “wise idleness,” which he defined as “quietly absorbing something through the eye or ear that for the time at least drowns the petty business and worries of life.” 11 It is probably revealing that Thomson took with him on fishing expeditions a copy of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, first published in 1653. Presumably he read the book not for Walton’s advice on how to keep live bait or catch trout at night, but rather for the work’s poetic celebrations of the contemplative life. The book is subtitled The Contemplative Man’s Recreation, and for Walton the “art of angling” was a “pleasant labour which you enjoy when you give rest to your mind and divest yourself of your more serious business.” For the careworn scholar of the seventeenth century, angling was “a cheerer of his spirits, a divertion of sadness, a calmer of unquiet thoughts, a moderator of passions, a procurer of contentedness.” 12
