by Ross King
Another painter badly shaken by the critics in 1913 MacCallum and Harris almost certainly would not have known about. In the summer of 1912, when Tom Thomson and Will Broadhead were paddling through the Mississagi Forest Reserve, another aspiring artist, Emily Carr, was travelling along the Skeena River and through the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia. Earlier that year, following her studies in France and San Francisco, she exhibited some of her Fauve-inspired French canvases—to critical alarm—in her studio at 1465 West Broadway in Vancouver. In 1913 she rented space at Drummond Hall in Vancouver to show two hundred of the works painted in northern British Columbia. Like Harris and MacDonald, she hoped to forge a new style appropriate to the Canadian landscape, in her case by combining the vibrant colours of Post-Impressionism with the designs of totem poles and ceremonial masks of the First Nations peoples. “More than ever I was convinced,” she later wrote, “that the old way of seeing was inadequate to express this big country of ours, her depth, her height, her unbounded wideness, silences too strong to be broken—nor could ten million cameras, through their mechanical boxes, ever show real Canada. It had to be sensed, passed through live minds, sensed and loved.” 32 But the lack of support for her work in Vancouver, both critical and financial, obliged her to close her studio and move back to Victoria. She would live for many years in artistic isolation and, like Lyman, no longer disturb the sensibilities of the Canadian critics.
MacCallum and Harris were determined that Jackson should not join the ongoing exodus of Canadian painters. Seeking him out on Portage Island, MacCallum found the painter gamely trying to insulate his quarters by stuffing birchbark and moss into the gaps in the walls. Inviting him to spend the winter at the cottage on Go Home Bay, he also made Jackson another even more generous offer: he would pay the painter’s expenses for a year, relieving him of his need to work at anything other than painting.
JACKSON STAYED IN Dr. MacCallum’s cottage for a month before returning to Toronto and accepting further hospitality from Lawren Harris, who gave him space to work in his own studio above the Bank of Commerce at Bloor and Yonge.
Harris also tried to woo Jackson by getting his work into the National Gallery. Although founded in 1882, for many years the gallery was woefully neglected by the Dominion government. Until recently its small collection (in 1913 it held some four hundred paintings) shared space in a mansard-roofed building on O’Connor Street in Ottawa with the Government Fish Hatcheries Exhibit: stuffed salmon were displayed on the ground floor, art a floor above. In 1911 the collection moved into the newly opened Victoria Memorial Museum, this time sharing accommodation with the Department of Mines and the Geological Survey. The building was to prove structurally unsound, and in 1915 the central tower would need to be removed to stabilize the shaky foundations that served as an all too apt metaphor for the state of the national collection.
Found among these mineral samples and dinosaur bones was a painting collection of what Harris derided in a letter to a newspaper as “second-rate foreign pictures.” 33 Eager to have his new friend represented in the national collection (to which The Drive had recently been added), he convinced nineteen Toronto artists—most of them members of the Arts and Letters Club—to invest in one of Jackson’s paintings, a French landscape entitled Autumn in Picardy. Then, without troubling to consult either the director, Eric Brown, or the majority of his subscribers, he announced in a newspaper article that the painting was to be donated to the National Gallery. Brown was taken aback by the offer, and some subscribers felt conned. The eminent portraitist E. Wyly Grier was angered that until he read Harris’s “preposterous article” he had not been informed of the “monstrous suggestion” that such a “microscopic sketch”—it was only twenty-one centimetres high by twenty-seven centimetres wide—should be sent to the National Gallery.34 Grier was probably objecting to the style of Jackson’s painting as much as he was to its minuscule size. Autumn in Picardy was a blur of bright colour and dissipating form, a plein-air sketch with dabs of pigment thickly and energetically applied with a wide brush.
Autumn in Picardy was one of the works Jackson displayed in Toronto in December 1913, when Harris—in another effort to keep him in Canada—arranged for an exhibition of his paintings at the Arts and Letters Club. The critical waters proved little better in Toronto than in Montreal, and Jackson received a facetious rebuke in the Toronto Daily Star in a review entitled “The Hot Mush School.”
With more than eighty thousand readers, the Daily Star was Toronto’s largest-circulation newspaper by some margin.35 A few months earlier its regular art reviewer, Margaret L. Fairbairn, responded favourably to the “virile” style of the “younger men.” But it was not Fairbairn but a man named Henry Gadsby who strolled through the doors of the Arts and Letters Club to survey the paintings. Gadsby freely admitted his lack of qualifications to speak knowledgeably about art: he was a parliamentary reporter more accustomed to penning affectionately mocking portraits of politicians. His persona in the article was that of the befuddled member of the public confronted by strange and incomprehensible images. Mystified by Jackson’s experimental style, with its urgent colours and liberal paint handling, he claimed the works looked as if someone had sprayed a tube of paint at the canvases. One of them he described as looking like “a plesiosaurus in a fit,” another as “Dutch head cheese having a quarrel with a chunk of French nougat.” The works, he claimed, looked more like “a gob of porridge than a work of art.” The “younger set,” he wrote, “believes in Explosions, Outbursts and Acute Congestions of Pigments.” He even suggested that many of these “Hot Mushers” were under the influence of opiates or other hallucinogens.36
Gadsby’s comments were a harmless pastiche of the outraged moral panic that had greeted the Post-Impressionist works at the Grafton Galleries and the Armory Show. But Jackson’s new Toronto friends were not prepared to let these insults go unpunished. MacDonald leapt swiftly to his defence with his own article in the Toronto Daily Star, published a week later.
MacDonald took an interesting tack to defend Jackson. Various clear explanations and robust defences of this kind of paint slinging had recently been offered in both Britain and America. Such was the topicality of Post-Impressionism following the scandal of the Armory Show that in November 1913 even Popular Science published an article explaining the optical theories that underpinned it. Many other statements of purpose could have helped unscramble Gadsby’s confused thoughts. In an essay published in 1909, Roger Fry had argued that “likeness to Nature” was no longer important to the modern artist: what counted were the “emotional elements” of a painting.37 Or as the catalogue for his 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post-
Impressionists stated, “There comes a point when the accumulations of an increasing skill in mere representation begin to destroy the expressiveness of the design.” 38
MacDonald could easily have defended Jackson along these lines. But aligning Jackson with a coterie of dreaded Post-Impressionists would have done the painter few critical favours in Canada, and so his support for Jackson was based not on the integrity of his experimental modern style so much as on the nationality—the “Canadianness”—of his paintings. He urged Gadsby and his fellow critics to respond to such works “with an open eye and perhaps a little receptivity of mind,” and to “support our distinctly Native art.” 39 In what would become a familiar refrain, he appealed to the patriotism of the critics and the public, arguing that a new Canadian style could not emerge so long as the country’s young painters were forced to maintain the shopworn conventions of the past.
MacDonald therefore swaddled their art in the flag of the Dominion. He was sincere in his desire to forge a new Canadian style, but his manoeuvre was disingenuous: patriotism was used as a stalking horse for an international style of art that, as reactions at both the Armory Show and the Art Association of Montreal revealed, the North American public was not prepared to accept. Anything that might be disparage
d as a French fancy needed to be garbed in mackinaw.
This kind of artistic flag hoisting was not regarded by everyone as the highest ideal for art. The best painting was supposed to aspire to timelessness and universality, not nationalist concerns. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called for a distinctively American art, admitted that the “highest charm” of masterpieces was “the universal language they speak.” 40 Good art was meant to cut across national boundaries. When that most deracinated painter, James McNeill Whistler, founded the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers in 1898, he disparaged the idea of “nationality in Art.” He wished to occupy instead what he called the “cosmopolitan ground of International Art.” 41
Yet not everyone wished to join Whistler on his cosmopolitan terrain. Modernist art is often seen—thanks to Whistler and others—as loftily international, at odds with narrowly regional or nationalist concerns. But MacDonald and his friends were far from alone in their desire to forge an indigenous culture based on the land. Many European modernists openly appealed to nationalist sentiments or were inspired by their love for a homeland.42 Modernism’s three greatest innovators, Cézanne, Gauguin and Picasso, were deeply rooted in either their provincial homelands or (in the case of Gauguin’s South Sea paintings) the particular features of a specific locale, rural and remote. Many of their paintings, however formally adventurous, can be seen as “ethno-scapes”—celebrations of geographical patrimonies.43
Cézanne, for example, was thoroughly imbued with the terroir of Provence. After his permanent return to Aix-en-Provence in 1886 he described his passionate attachment to “our native soil, so vibrant, so harsh and so reverberant with light.” 44 Picasso’s landscapes from the area around Horta de Ebro, painted in 1909 and declared by Gertrude Stein to be the first examples of Cubism, were inspired by both Cézanne’s example and his own Catalan nationalism.45 For Picasso’s friend, Guillaume Apollinaire, all art was inescapably national. This influential apostle of modernism believed art always expressed “a milieu, a nation,” and that artists were inevitably the products of their environments. “Art will only cease being national,” he wrote, “the day that the whole universe, living in the same climate, in houses built in the same style, speaks the same language with the same accent—that is to say, never.” 46
MacDonald and his friends wished to produce a “distinctly Native art” that could do for Canada what Cézanne’s self-conscious provençalisme did for his homeland, or Picasso’s paintings for the hilly Catalan landscape. They hoped to produce works that would be both artistically audacious and (in the old phrase beloved of cultural nationalists everywhere) “racy of the soil.” 47
Whether the public and the critics would show any “receptivity” and support for these painters was still an open question. But Jackson at least paid heed to the injunctions of MacDonald and the blandishments of Harris and MacCallum: by the end of the year he had decided to remain in Toronto rather than follow the path of so many other artists south to New York.
9 RITES OF PAYSAGE
LAWREN HARRIS AND Dr. MacCallum had another idea, besides their sponsorship of A.Y. Jackson, about how to kindle the “sacred fires” of Canadian art. In the autumn of 1913, construction began on a three-storey brick and concrete building on Severn Street, a few hundred metres east of Yonge and Bloor, on the southwestern-most fringe of Rosedale, one of Toronto’s most affluent neighbourhoods. “The Studio Building for Canadian Art,” as it was known, would offer workspace, and even some limited living quarters, for at least six artists. Harris paid more than three-quarters of the building costs, with MacCallum contributing the rest. The total layout, including the land, was $60,000. It was an enormous sum considering that the average assessed value of a house in Toronto at the time was $1,600.1
With fourteen-foot-high ceilings and six north-facing windows, the Studio Building was intended as a Toronto version of the hospitable and inspiring MacCallum cottage on West Wind Island. It was designed by Eden Smith, the architect of Harris’s new home on Clarendon Avenue. Smith was a co-founder in 1903 of the Arts and Crafts Society of Canada and, since his arrival in Toronto from England in the 1880s, one of the country’s leading architects. Dozens of his stylish Arts and Crafts houses, occupied by barristers, businessmen and university professors, adorned the city’s boskier neighbourhoods, such as Wychwood Park, the artistic community where he had built his own home.2
The hallmarks of Smith’s usual William Morris–inspired style—dormers, hipped roofs, multi-paned sash windows—were largely absent from the more utilitarian Studio Building. A visiting journalist described it as a “factory-looking building.” 3 The premises nonetheless showed the pervading influence of the Arts and Crafts ideal of a cooperative community.4 Its name and purpose furthermore revealed familiarity with the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York, a three-storey structure opened in 1858 and still offering studio space to artists in 1914. New York’s Studio Building had housed prominent American painters such as Winslow Homer and William Merritt Chase, as well as Canadians like Horatio Walker. It had provided winter quarters for many landscapists, from the Hudson River School to American Impressionists, who in the summer flocked to the Catskills or the Connecticut coast in an attempt to create a distinctively American idiom.
The Studio Building’s Toronto counterpart (whose originators scrupulously avoided all reference to their model in New York) was aimed at creating a uniquely Canadian style of art, or what Harris was later to call “a modern conception which suited this country.” 5 The Studio Building, Canadian-style, would therefore become (as Jackson wrote) “a lively centre for new ideas, experiments, discussions, plans for the future and visions of an art inspired by the Canadian countryside.” 6 Visions of art inspired by the Canadian landscape were an important criterion for anyone hoping to claim one of the six studios, since Harris specifically reserved space “for artists doing distinctly Canadian work.” 7
THE STUDIO BUILDING filled with tenants as soon as it opened in January 1914. Jackson and Tom Thomson began sharing an atelier on the ground floor, splitting the monthly rent of $22. Two more studios were occupied by MacDonald and Harris himself.
Some of the other occupants likewise had an interest in northern landscapes. One of them, forty-four-year-old Bill Beatty, was a friend of both Harris and MacDonald. Although he, like Jackson, had spent much time studying and painting in Europe, he was a brawny outdoorsman heralded as the first to “attempt to paint into this northern wilderness the quality of its trackless immensity.” 8 An adolescent during the 1885 Riel Rebellion, Beatty went west to Batoche as a bugler in the 10th Royal Grenadiers. Afterwards he worked as a house painter and firefighter, astounding co-workers at the Hook and Ladder Company of the Lombard Street Firehall with feats such as sliding headfirst down the brass pole or with a man clinging to his back. Following his return from his studies in Europe in 1909, he painted with Harris in the Haliburton Highlands and a year later travelled with Tom McLean to Fort Mattagami on the Abitibi River. Since 1912 he had been teaching, like Arthur Lismer, at the Ontario College of Art.
Another occupant of the Studio Building, forty-three-year-old Arthur Heming, known as “the chronicler of the north,” also seemed to fit the bill as a combination of artist and outdoorsman. As a youth in Hamilton he was a prodigy at lacrosse, football, rowing and wrestling. His first trip into the Canadian wilderness, at the age of sixteen, was followed over the next two decades by more than a dozen treks through the northlands. He even crossed the Rockies with a Royal Northwest Mounted Police pack train. According to his own meticulous accounting, he had chalked up 550 miles by raft, 1,100 miles by dog sled, 1,700 miles on snowshoes and 3,300 by canoe. Legend had him pitching teepees, knocking together rafts and toboggans, even harpooning whales. Augustus Bridle viewed him with exhilarated reverence. He celebrated him in a 1912 Toronto Globe article: Heming had “seen more,” boasted Bridle, “and found out more about the wild life and the outpost e
dges of the Canadian north than any other artist or writer alive.” 9 The article was illustrated with a photograph of Heming striding through the snow, a slit-eyed lynx cap on his head and a rifle in the crook of his arm. Those who met this husky-
mushing, pemmican-munching paragon of northern get-up-and-go were invariably surprised to find him extremely “citified” and “curiously over-refined”—for Heming was fastidious to the point of prissiness and (according to one observer) a “popinjay.” 10
Although he “disdained social life” and “arty circles,” Heming was a member of the Arts and Letters Club.11 It was probably there that he came to know Harris, who in 1911 praised his paintings for the “masterly way” they captured the “mystery and bigness” of the North and the “cold crispness” of its snow.12 This was to err on the side of generosity. The (literally) colour-blind Heming’s outdoor scenes of Canadiana were traditional in execution and similar in subject matter to the northern adventure stories of Robert M. Ballantyne or J. Macdonald Oxley: square-jawed Mounties collaring renegades, fur-hatted hunters taking beads on their quarries.
