Defiant Spirits

by Ross King

  Heming first made his reputation with illustrations for James Williams Tyrrell’s 1897 classic of northern travel literature, Across the Sub-Arctics of Canada: A Journey of 3,200 Miles by Canoe and Snowshoe through the Barren Lands. He was also a writer and in 1907 illustrated his own novel, Spirit Lake, based on his travels near Hudson Bay. “It was generally believed that Heming knew more about the north country than anyone else in Canada,” Jackson later wrote, “and Harris hoped he would inspire a northern movement.” He added, “I do not remember that he ever mentioned the north country or expressed a desire to go there.” 13 Some of Heming’s hardbitten northern exploits undoubtedly erred on the side of myth, but Jackson’s observation showed his wish to claim for himself and his friends the role of pioneers of the Canadian north. There is no doubt that, however dandified his appearance, Heming saw vast tracts of northerly Canadian latitudes long before Jackson.

  The final atelier was taken by someone with, at first blush, slightly less impressive credentials for doing “distinctly Canadian work.” Curtis Williamson, born in the year of Confederation, was the portrait painter known as the “Canadian Rembrandt” for a dark and moody tonal style he had developed in Holland. In this sense he made a strange studiomate for Jackson and Harris, considering their antipathy towards the Hague School. But Williamson had travelled and painted the coast of Labrador, returning with works that, according to one writer, “struck the Scandinavian note.” 14 His place in the Studio Building may also have been assured thanks to his close friendship with Dr. MacCallum, who had fast become one of the driving forces in Canadian art.

  That the Studio Building was meant to give Canadian painters a place in which to depict their country—and to gain what Harold Mortimer-Lamb had called the “power of insight” demanded by the Canadian landscape—was affirmed in an article printed in the Toronto Daily Star several weeks after the building opened. According to the writer, in a piece called “Where Artists Work by Northern Lights,” it was a venue for painters to produce “pictures which partake of the larger, bigger feeling which abounds in Canada—conveying to the minds of people something broader, grander, more noble, even, of the aspects of life which come to artists who are permeated with the virility and enthusiasm of the freer atmosphere of a new country—freed from the conservatism and staid ways of older countries of Europe.” 15

  Within these walls, the band of painters—what Beatty called “men with good red blood in their veins”—would flex their artistic muscles and begin to create their “virile” interpretations of the Canadian landscape. They would make, as Beatty confidently predicted, “the future of Canadian art.” 16

  IF A MUTUAL shortage of funds originally prompted them to share a ground-floor atelier in the Studio Building, A.Y. Jackson and Tom Thomson soon discovered they had much else in common.

  The two men first met in the late autumn of 1913, after Thomson returned from his latest expedition into the bush. He had spent the summer canoeing through Algonquin Provincial Park and then working as a fire ranger north of Biscotasing on the Mattagami Reserve, the area through which Neil McKechnie and Tom McLean canoed in the summer of 1904 when they too worked as fire rangers.

  Thomson was probably drawn to this particular area of Ontario in part because one of his sisters lived in Timmins and also because Lawren Harris and Bill Beatty went there in 1910. But he almost seemed to be following the trail of the doomed McKechnie, born in the same year, 1877, and celebrated as a “real Canadian” who captured the “granite-ribbed” wilderness and the “mystery of the North.” 17 Thomson probably never met McKechnie, but his memory was kept alive in Toronto almost a decade after his death. He lay buried near Gogama, southwest of Mattagami Lake, beneath a wooden cross designed by friends who included J.E.H. MacDonald. His remote and primitive burial (a newspaper reporting his death described the impossibility of finding “even a plain deal coffin within 200 miles of the scene of the disaster”)18 probably inspired Duncan Campbell Scott to compose “Night Burial in the Forest.” Scott, who travelled to Mattagami Lake the year after McKechnie’s death, described the inhumation of a young man “in his secret ferny tomb” in the middle of a mossy forest.

  Thomson evidently decided that his artistic destiny, like McKechnie’s, lay along these same lakes and rivers. But although he had found a subject in Ontario’s forested regions, he still needed a personal style—what Harris called a “modern conception”—with which to capture the wild vitality of the Ontario northlands. Help was fortuitously at hand.

  Like Jackson, Thomson became a beneficiary of Dr. MacCallum’s patronage. The ophthalmologist made Thomson the same offer: he would underwrite his expenses for a year as he concentrated on his work. But if MacCallum was impressed with Thomson’s skills, Jackson was not. He found his paintings, he later claimed, sombre and colourless. Thomson’s hesitancy and lack of chromatic panache were hardly surprising. He was the least experienced and most untutored of the painters in the “northern movement” being fostered by Dr. MacCallum and Lawren Harris. Apart from his classes from William Cruikshank, he had not studied in a recognized school or academy, nor had he visited Europe or had the opportunity to see, except in reproduction, works of art by modern masters such as Cézanne, Gauguin or Matisse.

  The only place Thomson might possibly have been exposed to international artistic trends was in Connecticut. The art colony based at Florence Griswold’s boarding house in Old Lyme, on the Connecticut coast, was the most famous in America. The first art colony in the United States to experiment with Impressionism, it was founded in 1899 by Henry Ward Ranger, who worked in muted tones and hoped to create an “American Barbizon.” The colony, however, soon came to be dominated (after his arrival in 1903) by Childe Hassam. Painting in bright colours and occupying a shack-like studio christened “Bonero Terrace,” Hassam turned Old Lyme into an “American Giverny.” Arthur Heming had been a member of the “School of Lyme” for much of the previous decade, spending each summer there between 1902 and 1910. By about 1907 another member of Old Lyme’s art colony was Tom Thomson’s older brother George, who had sold his share in the Acme Business College and moved from Seattle to New York to study under Frank Vincent DuMond at the Art Students’ League. Each summer, DuMond taught outdoor painting classes in Old Lyme, and in 1907 George’s Lyme Pastures was accepted at the National Academy of Design’s annual exhibition in New York. Since 1908 he had been living in New Haven, fifty kilometres west of Old Lyme.

  If Tom Thomson visited his brother in New York or Old Lyme, he left no trace: Heming mentions neither George nor Tom in his memoir of Old Lyme. Still, it almost seems inconceivable that Thomson should have followed his brother across the continent to Seattle but not made the much shorter journey to Connecticut. If he did visit the art colony, the impact on his painting was limited. By 1913 his landscapes revealed none of the splashy colour or animated brushwork of Old Lyme’s resident American Impressionists—but nor, for that matter, did the work of either Heming or George Thomson.19

  Jackson, by contrast, had already absorbed numerous influences during his travels. His exposure to European art, both Old Masters and the avant-garde, was extensive. He was also steeped in modern painting theories and techniques. Much of this exposure came through his dedicated—almost maniacal—extramural efforts. As a young art student in Chicago and then Paris, he had been desperate to learn the technique of painting. “I must learn to paint or my name is mud,” he wrote to his mother from Paris in 1908. Since he was taught painting and colour theory at neither the Art Institute of Chicago nor the Académie Julian, he knew that to become what he called a “paint-slinger” he needed to read as many books and magazines, and to attend as many art exhibitions, as possible. He became an artistic omnivore, gourmandizing on lectures, exhibitions, books, periodicals and, presumably, conversations with other students. In Chicago he went to the library of the Art Institute and “read all the magazines,” even telling his mother of his plan to spend
the 1906 Christmas holidays in the library, “where they have all the Art Magazines and books on art that you could wish for.” 20

  In Paris these studies continued unabated. Jackson joined the American Art Association of Paris (the headquarters of English-speaking art students) because “it’s the cheapest way of seeing all the art magazines. Besides they have quite a library.” He soon buried himself in a “big, long serious” book on the history of art. He also visited numerous art museums and attended multiple exhibitions (on a quick trip to London in 1908 he visited five museums in two days). “My painting is still pretty punk,” he complained to his mother in 1908, before announcing he was off to see the Franco-British Exhibition—“one of the finest art exhibits ever brought together.” Four years later, “Have been seeing lots of exhibitions,” he wrote breathlessly from Paris, “which is very necessary.” 21

  EVIDENTLY RECOGNIZING THE sheer raw talent of his studiomate, Jackson began tutoring Thomson in the first weeks of 1914. Clearly the two men got along on a personal level. Jackson called Thomson “a good companion” and “a friendly chap.” 22 He even invited Thomson to accompany him on visits to a family friend, Christina Bertram, the widow of a wealthy Toronto industrialist. Mrs. Bertram, a patron of the arts, lived in La Plaza Apartments at the corner of Charles and Jarvis, a short walk from the Studio Building. She fed the two men and mended their clothing. They gave her some of their sketches in return.23

  Thomson no doubt realized there was much to be learned from his self-confident new studiomate. Jackson began describing to Thomson some of the trends in modern art, in particular the techniques of the Neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat and his use of what Jackson called “clean-cut dots of colour.” 24 Seurat and his followers took up the optical theories of scientists such as the American Ogden N. Rood, a physicist (and part-time painter) who believed that light was the product of an oscillation of adjoining colours. The Neo-Impressionists (as an 1886 review christened them) abandoned broad, blended strokes to apply their paint in separate dots or dashes of unmixed pigment (the “clean-cut dots”) in the belief that the mosaic-like blobs would blend in the eye of the viewer to produce pulsatingly vibrant canvases.

  Jackson had first-hand experience of these works. Besides the exhibition of the Italian Divisionists, he probably saw the Seurat exhibition in December 1908 at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, which featured one of his most famous works, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. He could likewise have seen the work of Seurat’s disciple Paul Signac at numerous Paris exhibitions, such as one at the Galerie Druet in the summer of 1911 that included paintings by another Neo-Impressionist, Henri-Edmond Cross. By this time, Cross and Signac, in search of more expressive powers, had enlarged their dots and begun using coarser, thicker brushstrokes to create separate squares of colour—what Signac called a “divided touch” and an English critic “large brick-like rectangles.” 25 This broader and looser touch, sometimes known as the second phase of Neo-Impressionism, was the ne plus ultra of Parisian painting at the time of Jackson’s first sojourn in Europe.26

  Thomson not only heard about various new trends in European art, but he also saw his new studiomate in action. The two men were probably first introduced in Harris’s studio at Bloor and Yonge in November 1913, at the time when Jackson, using sketches done on Georgian Bay, was painting Terre sauvage, one of his first important canvases. Thomson would therefore have seen taking shape on Jackson’s easel something very different from many of the “second-rate paintings” on show each summer at the Canadian National Exhibition.

  In Terre sauvage (initially known as either The North Country or The Northland), Jackson worked the Shield landscape that he once believed resistant to pictorial composition into a haunting vision of backwoods remoteness: black spruce rising above a foreground of Precambrian rock into a steel-blue sky. These rocks and trees became the building blocks of his artistic experimentation. Georgian Bay’s sharp colours, smooth contours of granite and statuesque vegetation allowed him to explore elements of the new styles he had seen in Europe. His determination to paint in this manner, despite his lack of sales and the vociferous attacks in Montreal, showed both his strength of character and the value of the support established by MacCallum and Harris. He continued working in the Hot Mush style, using a bold palette and simplified but expressive forms, such as distended trees and swirls of cloud.

  The final title of the painting (adopted in 1920) seems to allude to the “eerie wildernesses” described by the Confederation poets—the hostile and untamed land of forest and snow beyond the bounds of civilization. Yet Terre sauvage is no straightforward depiction of the harsh Canadian barrens. Topographical veracity was less important to many modern painters than emotional values and visual effects. “Sitting down in nature and copying what you see is not the way to make a painting,” Signac once cautioned.27 If the Impressionists tried to give objective depictions of the natural world by means of an almost scientific study of the chromatic effects of light and shade, by the end of the nineteenth century their successors—the “paint-slingers” whose work Jackson so admired—were freely manipulating the visual data of the landscape. The process was described by Matisse’s friend Simon Bussy: “I draw from nature the elements necessary to my composition, I reassemble them, I simplify them . . . I transform and twist them.” Unlike the Impressionists, Bussy was not concerned to render effects of light and atmosphere. He sought instead, he claimed, “the equilibrium of volumes” and “the rhythm of lines.” 28

  In Terre sauvage, Jackson ignored atmospheric effects and deliberately distorted the forms of the landscape. That he was not merely transcribing the scene as he actually saw it can be seen from the fact that he did not paint the sky beneath the rainbow darker than that above—the well-known meteorological phenomenon shown in Joseph Wright of Derby’s 1795 painting Landscape with Rainbow. In Jackson’s painting, the swell of the earth and the arrangement of the trees have little to do with arboreal precision or the rules of single-point perspective. The warped-looking jack pine, the indistinct foreground, the weirdly elongated spruce that recall the flame-like cypresses in Van Gogh’s 1889 paintings such as A Wheatfield with Cypresses and The Starry Night—together with the rainbow on the left, these dream-like effects show Jackson translating the raw data of nature in order to communicate aesthetic emotions. The result is a unique and personal vision of the “primal energies and realities” beyond the physical world of rocks and trees.

  THE STUDIO BUILDING quickly became a smaller and more exclusive version of the Arts and Letters Club, a place for lively exchanges of opinion. According to Jackson, “There was the stimulus of comparison and frank discussion on aims and ideals and technical problems which resulted in various experiments.” 29

  Lawren Harris was inevitably at the centre of these discussions. He was painting his own experimental work as Jackson worked on Terre sauvage. Using a sketch of fire-swept hills done on a trip to the Laurentians with Fergus Kyle five years earlier, he began a canvas nicknamed “Tomato Soup” by the others because, Jackson claimed, he would drag his brush through several pigments and then “slap it on the canvas” in hopes of achieving vibrant colours.30 The actual process was probably more measured, since the end result, Laurentian Landscape, made use of a technique known (after its inventor Giovanni Segantini) as the “Segantini stitch.” Segantini had adapted Seurat’s brushwork in the 1890s to create narrow, stitch-like hatchings that gave his Alpine landscapes a moiré effect, like a phosphorescent tweed.

  Where exactly Harris learned this technique remains unclear, but before his premature death from peritonitis in 1899 Segantini had been one of the most famous painters of his day (Austria, Italy and Switzerland all claimed him as their own). An English catalogue of his works was published in 1901, and leading journals such as International Studio, Scribner’s and The Artist carried studies and reproductions of his paintings. Americans such as Marsden Hartley (who saw Segantini’s work reproduced in th
e January 1903 issue of Jugend) revealed his influence. Harris could easily have learned about Segantini through this kind of “graphic traffic” (as art historians call such exchanges of images), and it is likely that he also heard about him from Jackson. Thirty-seven of Segantini’s works had gone on display at the Italian Divisionist exhibition seen by Jackson in Paris in 1907.

  Segantini probably held a special fascination for Canadians like Harris, Jackson and Thomson, obsessed as they were with painting remote locations in inclement weather. Living in a hut high above

  St. Moritz, he had painted the surrounding mountains in the most bitter conditions, wearing furs in winter and even a custom-made body-warmer, a tin-plated receptacle filled with hot coals. This kind of performance—which won him a reputation as a kind of Nietzschean Superman—was bound to appeal to the “men with good red blood in their veins” searching for virile interpretations of their own rugged landscape.31

  TOM THOMSON MAY still have had, as an acquaintance later claimed, a “disbelief in himself,” “fits of unreasonable despondency” and an “erratic and sensitive” temperament.32 But his faith in his abilities as an artist began to grow under the tutelage of Jackson and Harris. One indication of his growing self-confidence was the fact that in February 1914, within a month of moving into the Studio Building, he chose to exhibit five paintings in the exhibition Little Pictures by Canadian Artists staged in the Public Reference Library.