by Ross King
Angling was a cure-all, in other words, for what another of Thomson’s favourite writers, Wilfred Campbell, called “our modern ills and problems”—the enervation caused by a life spent amid the bustle and smoke of the city. Like the lean-and-draw motion of the paddle, fly-casting into a flowing stream brought Thomson into touch with the rigours and rhythms of a more natural way of life.
FOLLOWING A BRANCH of the Mississagi River, Thomson and Broadhead eventually reached Aubrey Falls, a series of cataracts the highest of which, cascading over pinkish granite, is an imposing fifty-three metres. From Aubrey Falls they made their way south along the Mississagi to Squaw Chute, near Thessalon on the North Channel of Georgian Bay. Altogether, their journey was some 160 kilometres by canoe and portage through an area whose thunderous rapids and brooding granite hillsides Grey Owl later described so vividly in Tales of an Empty Cabin.
Thomson boasted to a friend that the Mississagi Forest Reserve provided “the finest canoe trip in the world.” 13 Although suitably impressive, their voyage was dwarfed by those of Paul Kane and Frances Anne Hopkins. It was also less audacious than one made in 1907 by another Canadian painter, the wildlife artist Ernest Thompson Seton. He and a companion had rowed more than 3,000 kilometres through northern Canada in a thirty-foot Peterborough canoe, from the old fur-trading post at Athabaska Landing (150 kilometres north of Edmonton) to Great Slave Lake. Thomson was probably aware of Seton’s feat, not merely because the painter recounted the journey in The Arctic Prairies, published in 1911, but because Seton’s natural history mentor had been Thomson’s friend, relative and own natural history mentor Dr. William Brodie. Seton was good friends with Dr. Brodie’s son (Thomson’s first cousin, once removed), and he was present when the young man drowned in the Assiniboine. Although based in Connecticut for the previous dozen years, he may well have met Thomson at some point, courtesy of Dr. Brodie. In any case, Seton could have provided inspiration for the younger man, since he was far and away Canada’s most famous artist, naturalist and woodsman.
Near Bruce Mines, on the North Channel of Georgian Bay, Thomson and Broadhead caught a steamer that took them to Owen Sound. Reaching his family on September 23, after a journey of almost two months, Thomson wrote to a friend that he had “got back to civilization.” 14 If he had not been a skilled canoeist when he left Bisco, then two months later, as his canoe nosed into the waters of the North Channel, he and Broadhead could legitimately claim to be something more than the amateurs disparaged by Grey Owl as “kitchen-garden woodsmen.” 15
THOMSON PHOTOGRAPHED more than he painted during his voyage through the Mississagi Forest Reserve. The weather through August and into September was not conducive to plein-air painting. Constant rains caused the rivers to swell dangerously. Thomson wrote about his experiences to a friend in Huntsville, Dr. John McRuer, a fellow fisherman whose best man he had been in 1909: “The weather has been very rotton [sic] all through our trip never dry for more than 24 hours at a time and some times raining for a week steady.” He added details of a mishap recalling the accidents that claimed the lives of both Neil McKechnie and Dr. Brodie’s son, as well as an upset in the Athabaska that cost Seton his journal. “We got a great many good snapshots of game—mostly moose and some sketching,” he explained, “but we had a dump in the forty mile rapids which is near the end of our trip and lost most of our stuff—we only saved 2 rolls of films out of about 14 dozen.” 16 Broadhead soon afterwards recounted details of this “narrow escape” to Thomson’s brother-in-law, describing how they had been shooting rapids in a fully laden canoe when they struck a submerged rock and came close to “losing their lives.” He claimed that if Thomson had not been “such an expert canoesman, they would both have been lost.” 17
McRuer commiserated over the loss of the photographs but alluded to an earlier mishap: “You might have drowned, you devil, and that was not the first time you were dumped, eh?” 18 Thomson had been taking the photographs (a total of fourteen rolls of a dozen exposures each) as a record of his journey and perhaps to use for future paintings. With most of these lost or damaged, he asked McRuer to find the friend of a mutual acquaintance named Hicks—“a man who was through the trip last year and who had a fine lot of photos”—to ask if he might borrow them. “If Dr. Hicks can remember that man with the photos he may save a life.”
But McRuer and Hicks had fallen out (“he acted very unkind . . . so that we ‘bounced him,’” reported McRuer), and so it was another doctor who would come to the rescue. Besides the two rolls of film, Thomson also salvaged some of his paintings. After he showed them to his friends at Grip Limited, word reached Dr. James M. MacCallum, a friend of Lawren Harris.
Dr. MacCallum might have seemed an unlikely hero for Canadian art. The fifty-two-year-old ophthalmologist was a professor of materia medica, pharmacology and therapeutics at the University of Toronto and the author of the treatise “Recurrent Fugitive Swellings of the Eyelids.” 19 He came by his love of art through a passion for the Canadian wilderness. His father had been a Methodist minister whose parish included the east coast of Georgian Bay, an area MacCallum had come to love deeply. He had recently purchased a twenty-seven-acre island—“Island 158”—in Georgian Bay, fifty kilometres north of Penetanguishene; in 1911 he added to it an Arts and Crafts cottage designed by C.H.C. Wright, head of the University of Toronto’s Department of Architecture and Drawing.
MacCallum’s Toronto residence was on Warren Road, only a block or two from where Harris lived, but it seems to have been West Wind Island (as Island 158 would more romantically be christened) where MacCallum and Harris met. Harris had spent the summer of 1911 in a nearby cottage owned by Dr. David Gibb Wishart, a professor of otolaryngology at the University of Toronto. Dr. Gibb Wishart may even have introduced the two men: and so it was that an ophthalmologist and an otolaryngologist (a specialist on the diseases of the ear, nose and throat) came to play vital roles in Canadian art.
Dr. MacCallum, a bald man with a waxed moustache, was already friends with an artist, Curtis Williamson. A Brampton-born painter who had lived in Barbizon, France, in the early 1890s and spent time in the Netherlands, Williamson was known for gloomily atmospheric paintings that earned him the nickname the “Canadian Rembrandt.” MacCallum had also met J.E.H. MacDonald. After seeing MacDonald’s 1911 exhibition at the Arts and Letters Club, he not only purchased several of his works but also invited him to paint on West Wind Island. The works produced there, including View from Split Rock, Sunlit Water, and Clouds and Rock, Split Rock, he either purchased or else received as recompense for hosting the artist. It was to be the start of a faithful and generous patronage.
Since leaving Grip Limited, MacDonald had been sharing a studio on Adelaide Street East with Bill Beatty, and it was here, one day in the autumn of 1912, soon after returning from the Mississagi Forest Reserve, that Thomson met Dr. MacCallum. MacCallum was shown some of the works that had been, as he put it, “fished up from the foot of the rapids.” 20 Thomson’s paintings at this point were considerably less sophisticated than MacDonald’s: it would have been fair to say that Thomson was, capsize notwithstanding, a better outdoorsman than a painter. His works were sombre in colour and barely a cut above the average Sunday-afternoon dauber in oils. They were characterized by distant views, low horizons, largely unbroken bands of muted colour and a general absence of detail. Still, Mac-
Callum believed they had a feeling “for the grim, fascinating northland. Dark they were, muddy in colour, tight, and not wanting in technical defects; but they made me feel that the north had gripped Thomson as it had gripped me when, as a boy of eleven, I first sailed and paddled through its silent places.” 21
A short time later, interested in adding a few Thomsons to his collection, MacCallum looked up the painter at home. Not having the exact address—Thomson was still leading a peripatetic existence—he was forced to ring every doorbell on Summerhill Avenue until he found the boarding house. Although Tho
mson was out, the proprietor admitted MacCallum to his room in the attic, where he studied the Mississagi sketches as he waited. When he returned at last, Thomson told the doctor, in his usual self-deprecating way, “Take them home with you. They’re no good.” 22
WILL BROADHEAD’S FIRST few years in Canada were marked by a heedless optimism of the sort that infected so many Canadians. His letters home to his family in Sheffield described the boundless possibilities of his newly adopted country. “I see nothing but sunshine and prosperity,” he wrote in one letter. “Everything in Canada seems to be booming,” he declared in another. He assured his friends and family that he was “doing wonders,” that Canada was “a great place,” and that his bosses “think I am a rapid worker, but as a matter of fact I just take it easy & try to do good work, there is absolutely no hustling here.”
Word of this promised land for designers soon reached the ears of Arthur Lismer, a friend from their days together at the Sheffield School of Art. Lismer wrote to Broadhead that he was “sick of Sheffield” and wanted a change. Broadhead was enthusiastic, because he regarded Lismer, then twenty-five, as “a real fine fellow, just the fellow for a companion.” He tried to ease Lismer’s path to Canada, late in 1910, by taking samples of his design work to Grip Limited (Lismer was self-employed in Sheffield as a photoengraver and “specialist in pictorial publicity”). Alas, as Broadhead wrote confidentially to his father, “The truth is—his work is not good enough.” But it was too late: in January 1911 Lismer boarded ss Corsican in Liverpool.23
The extroverted and ambitious Lismer (a friend would later describe him as “an ardent spirit suffering no restraint”)24 was a spare six-footer with red hair and piercing green eyes. The son of a Sheffield draper, he had begun studies at the Sheffield School of Art at the age of thirteen; two years later, while still a student, he went to work as an illustrator for the Sheffield Independent, doing sketches of what he later called “the spot where the body was found,” 25 as well as portraits of visiting luminaries such as George Bernard Shaw and a fledgling MP and former war correspondent named Winston Churchill. He joined the Heeley Art Club, a working-men’s sketch club not unlike the Toronto Art Students’ League; its members went on sketching excursions on the moors outside Sheffield before retiring to the local hostelries for refreshment. Some of them, Lismer included, were members of a group called the Eclectics who gathered to discuss theosophy as well as writers such as Edward Carpenter, the sandal-wearing apostle of “cosmic consciousness.”
In 1906, at the age of twenty-one, Lismer enrolled in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Founded in 1664, the Royal Academy was one of the finest teaching institutions in Europe, in a city that was once the artistic centre of the continent. Discipline was rigorous. A journal of the day reported how the students toiled for seven days a week. Smoking was forbidden, and breaches of the regulations resulted in “compulsory holidays for two or three days or sometimes weeks” (one of the more illustrious but troublesome pupils, Vincent Van Gogh, had been expelled some twenty years earlier). The products of this regime were young artists of “breadth and manliness” whose “technique and feeling” could, in the opinion of the journal’s critic, “cope with any on the continent.” 26
Besides formal instruction at the school, there were museums and galleries in Antwerp for the students to visit, in particular the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten. This royal museum held fine examples of Netherlandish landscapes that included several works by Joachim Patinir, the “father of landscape painting” who had specialized in panoramic views of rugged coastal terrain. Lismer also made side trips to see the galleries in Paris and into the French countryside to study the landscape where Camille Corot and Charles-François Daubigny had painted.27
Lismer survived under his stringent Antwerp tutelage for eighteen months. Back in Sheffield, he found himself unable to earn a decent living or offer prospects to his fiancée, Esther Mawson. “It was a cold world for artists in those days in northern England,” he later wrote.28 He therefore set sail for Canada with $5 in his pocket and his few worldly possessions (which included a parting gift from his fellow Eclectics, a copy of Carpenter’s The Art of Creation) crammed inside a travelling trunk made from his chopped-up writing desk. Weeks later, after a winter transatlantic crossing that finished with ss Corsican encased in ice, the effusive Yorkshireman was working at Grip (Broadhead’s appraisal had clearly been too pessimistic) and rooming on Summerhill Avenue with the reticent and self-effacing Thomson.
TORONTO PROVED AS lucrative and welcoming to Lismer as it had to Broadhead. Within a year of his arrival, he had enough money in his bank account to return to Sheffield to marry Esther and then to bring her to Canada and install the pair of them in a small house near Christie Pits. The streets of Toronto, he jubilantly informed a Sheffield acquaintance in a letter, “were practically paved with gold.” 29
That acquaintance was Frederick Horsman Varley, the next son of Sheffield to immigrate to Toronto. Varley was a thirty-year-old commercial artist and Lismer’s fellow graduate of both the Sheffield School of Art and Antwerp’s Royal Academy. Varley too had been struggling to earn a living in Sheffield, a city he would later dismiss as “a back alley for art.” 30 For much of the previous decade he had led a hand-to-mouth existence in both Sheffield and London as a newspaper illustrator, but by 1908 his bleak prospects had forced him to take work as a stevedore on the docks of the North Sea port of Hull and then as a clerk in a railway office in Doncaster. In the summer of 1912, with a wife and young daughter to support, he was prepared to listen to his old friend’s tales of Canada as a land of artistic opportunity. That summer, leaving behind his family and borrowing money from Lismer’s brother-in-law, he sailed from Liverpool aboard SS Corsican. Arriving first in Montreal, he tossed a dime into the air: heads meant New York, tails Toronto. Although the coin came up heads, he went to Toronto, no doubt owing to the presence of Lismer. Within days he, too, had landed on his feet, finding work at Grip and a bed on Summerhill Avenue.
Thomson and Varley immediately became friends. The red-haired, craggy-featured Varley was a loner with a mercurial temperament and—almost unheard of even among artists in Toronto the Good—bohemian appetites. He had spent several years in London, by his own account, “drifting in the underworld.” 31 He drank copiously and chain-smoked cigarettes, and beneath his corduroy trousers (the choice of Parisian aesthetes and bohemians from Théophile Gautier to Leo Stein) he wore silk underwear. Thomson too liked to drink and, when not in the bush, could be something of a dandy. He was a “connoisseur of good tobacco,” according to one Grip colleague, and he wore what Lismer called “silk shirts of a fairly loud pattern.” 32 When in funds, he dined at the fashionable McConkey’s Restaurant on King Street West, an elegant establishment whose Palm Room was the home of Toronto’s beau monde. His mackinaw-clad forays into the bush notwithstanding, Thomson had, according to one of his sisters, a “hunger for the refinements and niceties of life.” 33
Thomson and Varley got along so well that soon Varley began acting as a matchmaker, trying to engineer a relationship between Thomson and his sister-in-law Dora, the half-sister of his wife, Maud: the two Englishwomen were expected to arrive in Canada by spring. Thomson declined the offer. He “wasn’t fit for a girl,” he told Varley, because he was “a wild man.” 34
Painting was the two men’s greatest passion. Weekends found them sketching in the outskirts of Toronto and on Centre Island, in Toronto Harbour. Thomson evidently regaled his new friend with tales of life on the Mississagi, because before long Varley was writing to his sister in England that he was “aching” to express the landscape of what he called “this . . . outdoor country.” 35
6 WILD MEN OF THE NORTH
IN JANUARY 1913 Lawren Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald caught a train from Union Station in Toronto. On this occasion they were going not north but south, 150 kilometres around Lake Ontario to Buffalo, New York.
Buf
falo was a far more impressive city than Toronto. The eighth-largest city in the United States, it had a population of more than 420,000. Buffalonians could boast spacious boulevards built on a radial plan, houses by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the United States’ largest office block, the Ellicott Square Building. They also enjoyed more than a thousand acres of beautiful parkland designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, America’s greatest landscape architect; one of the parks, Delaware Park, had been the site of the Pan-American Exposition, which in 1901 attracted nearly 8 million people to the city. Whereas Toronto still had no permanent public art collection, Buffalo could take pride in the neoclassical Albright Art Gallery. The gallery was begun in 1900 and completed five years later. Its 5,000 tons of marble, 102 Ionic columns and eight-foot-high caryatids all announced Buffalo’s triumphant commitment to the arts.
The Albright had already mounted several major exhibitions. Recent shows were devoted to modernist artists such as the Russian Prince Paolo Troubetzkoy, the Spanish Post-Impressionist Ignacio Zuloaga, the Art Nouveau designer Aubrey Beardsley and the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Two separate exhibitions had been dedicated to James McNeill Whistler. In 1911 the Albright had hosted yet another important exhibition, the first showing outside Paris of the Société des peintres et sculpteurs (formerly the Société nouvelle). According to a New York Times review, this exhibition revealed the “intelligent zest” of the “new forms of expression” in France.1 It included bronzes by Auguste Rodin and paintings by the expatriate Canadian
