Defiant Spirits

by Ross King

  Sir Edmund visited the Studio Building in his capacity as chairman of the board of trustees of the National Gallery. A short while earlier Lawren Harris had published an angry letter in the Toronto Globe decrying the National Gallery’s supposed practice of filling its rooms with what he called second-rate European pictures. This policy was detrimental to Canadian painters, he claimed, because it endorsed the “snobbishness” of collectors (he might have had Sir Edmund in mind) who bought only “foreign work.” He ended with an angry blast: “Out of touch, with no sympathy or enthusiasm or any belief in the future of Canadian art save that it ape the past and severely copy European standards, it with its stupid policy is merely helping the dealer to blind the people whom the Canadian artists must depend on for a living.” 2

  Harris’s letter was overstated and in many respects unjustified. Although Canadian collectors steered clear of Canadian paintings, the same could not be said of the National Gallery. Its director, Eric Brown, had recently written about how Canada had “a strong and forceful art which only needs to be fostered and encouraged in order to become a great factor in her development as a nation.” 3 He was making it his business to make certain the National Gallery fostered Canadian art, with particular attention to what he called “the younger men.” One of Harris’s own works, The Drive, had been added to the collection in 1912, and Tom Thomson’s Moonlight was purchased only weeks earlier. The gallery included works by most Canadian artists of any repute whatsoever, many of them Canadian-themed landscapes. Its confined quarters could boast (to name only a few) Maurice Cullen’s winter landscapes First Snow and The Ice Harvest, Fred Brigden Jr.’s A Muskoka Highway, C.W. Jefferys’s Prairie landscape Western Sunlight, Last Mountain Lake, Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté’s Autumn Landscape, Evening, Edmund Morris’s coastal view Cap Tourmente, Horatio Walker’s moody rural scene Oxen Drinking and Homer Watson’s pastoral A Hillside Gorge.

  Some of these painters might well have been guilty of trying to “ape the past” and imitate European standards. But the accusation that the National Gallery was neglecting homegrown art in favour of European paintings was such a gross exaggeration that one suspects Harris either had not set foot in the Victoria Memorial Museum or else (more likely) he was being deliberately and provocatively disingenuous in the interests of further promoting himself and his friends.

  Harris’s strident letter produced the effect of luring Sir Edmund Walker—“a strong man with a liking for his own way of doing things” 4—into the Studio Building. The times must certainly have seemed auspicious for Harris and his fellow “rising men.” During the 1911 election campaign, Sir Edmund, as leader of the Toronto Eighteen, had been one of the most powerful and effective opponents of reciprocity. Harris and his friends were protectionists in the art world: they hoped, as the Toronto Daily Star reported, to “counteract the effect of the importation of European pictures.” 5 Would Sir Edmund now defend and support Canadian painters as he had Canadian businessmen?

  The meeting passed cordially and peacefully. Walker proved sympathetic to Harris’s arguments. Despite his personal taste for Japanese prints and Old Masters, Walker recognized that the National Gallery needed to collect representative samples of Canadian art. As early as 1909 he had instructed his fellow trustees that they must consider purchasing for the collection works of art “which may not be attractive to us as individuals, but would be fair expositions of the condition of art in Canada.” 6 According to A.Y. Jackson, he asked Harris “what all the fuss was about. Harris told him of our intention to paint our own country and to put life into Canadian art. Sir Edmund said that was just what the National Gallery wanted to see happen; if it did, the Gallery would back us up.” 7

  Walker must have been by taken aback by the fervency with which the painters expressed a desire to paint their own country, since Canadian landscapes were hardly in any short supply. But he must have been shown some of the paintings that Harris and his friends had recently finished or were executing at the time—works that, like Terre sauvage or Laurentian Landscape, did indeed show that the tenants of the Studio Building were attempting to “put life into Canadian art” by expressing themselves in a style different from earlier generations of landscapists such as Homer Watson. Although Walker might have little wished to see such works on the walls of Long Garth, he could appreciate the need to put them in the National Gallery.

  FOLLOWING HIS CANOE expedition in Algonquin Park, Arthur Lismer returned to Toronto, to his job and his domestic obligations, in the third week of May. Tom Thomson, with neither work nor a wife to detain him, remained in Northern Ontario for the rest of the summer. After Lismer’s departure he travelled west by train from Algonquin Park to Parry Sound, at the mouth of the Seguin River. Here, on the eastern edge of Georgian Bay, he continued to pursue the leisure that Dr. James MacCallum’s patronage offered him.

  Some 240 kilometres north of Toronto, Parry Sound was a bustling port, logging town and railway terminus. It had several sawmills, a shingle mill and two grain elevators built by J.R. Booth. There was also a deep, well-protected harbour for steamships, many owned by the endlessly enterprising Booth. Yet when he sat down with his box-easel on the last day of May, Thomson chose not to record any of this industry and activity. Instead he produced a remarkable sketch, Parry Sound Harbour, which showed the more elemental forces of wind and wave. As Thomson knew, Georgian Bay was renowned for its wrathful storms. Wilfred Campbell had written in his guidebook of the “iron surfs” and the “maddened fear” of the waves on this “inhospitable coast.” 8 Thomson no doubt knew how tempests in this area had claimed steamers such as the Waubuno and the Asia, the latter, in 1882, at the cost of more than a hundred lives. The Asia, which had set off from Thomson’s hometown of Owen Sound, even became the subject of the popular ballad “The Wreck of the Asia.”

  It was this destructive power that Thomson hoped to capture. The composition of his sketch—horizontal bands of lake and sky in panorama—he had done many times already, but Parry Sound Harbour showed evidence of rapid progress as he deployed his new-found skills, texturing his paint to give turbulence and menace to the white-capped water and wind-blown sky. In the bottom right-hand corner, in blood-red pigment, he confidently inscribed his name.

  A few days later, after travelling north along Georgian Bay, probably by steamship, Thomson camped with Dr. MacCallum near the delta of the French River. Here the doctor was able to see the latest fruits of Thomson’s industry. Unlike Sir Edmund Walker, Dr. MacCallum was hardly a knowledgeable connoisseur. Jackson claimed the ophthalmologist knew astonishingly little about art. His virtue, to Jackson, was that he had a great passion for the Ontario northlands and “looked for the feel of it in pictures.” 9 Yet Dr. MacCallum, to his credit, had more advanced tastes than many other collectors, and Thomson’s latest paintings, with their gestural brushwork and exuberant colours, seem to have left him reassured about his decision to fund the artist. He acquired (either then or later) Algonquin sketches such as Larry Dickson’s Shack as well as both Parry Sound Harbour and a sketch Thomson made a short distance from their campsite, Spring, French River. Executed on plywood with the same robust brushwork, this latter painting showed a stand of trees, including a twisted jack pine, huddled on an outcrop of rock.

  In the past few years, Jackson, Harris, MacDonald and Lismer had all visited Dr. MacCallum’s cottage on West Wind Island. In the summer of 1914 it was Thomson’s turn to enjoy the doctor’s hospitality. He spent much of June and all July at the cottage, canoeing among the islands and making numerous sketches. He gave painting lessons to Dr. MacCallum’s ten-year-old daughter, Helen, and presented her with a painting called Boathouse, Go Home Bay, one of several sketches he did of the area’s numerous summer cottages. She inscribed on the back, “Given to me by Tom Thomson the summer he taught me to paint.” 10

  Although the landscape of the “happy isles” appealed to Thomson no less than to Jackson and Lismer, he was less t
han impressed with his fellow visitors to Go Home Bay. Jackson later wrote that on Georgian Bay everything was still “pretty much as it had been when Champlain passed through its thousands of rock islands three hundred years before.” 11 But this was to turn a blind eye to the effects of industry and, especially, tourism. Thomson wrote to Fred Varley in July that the area was “too much like North Rosedale . . . all birthday cakes and water ice.” 12 This disdain was evidently for people like Jackson’s friends the Clements—affluent urbanites who each summer descended on the “wilderness” for a few weeks of marshmallow roasting and dinghy rowing.

  Deprived of the guidance of Jackson, Harris and Lismer, Thomson found himself unable to paint.13 Soon he began yearning for the relative isolation of Algonquin Park, whose deeper reaches were as yet untrammelled by the same kind of tourism and whose landscape offered so much inspiration a few months earlier. At the beginning of July he wrote a letter trying to persuade Varley and his wife, Maud (who had arrived in Canada the previous summer), to join him for a canoeing and camping excursion. He hoped to be back in Algonquin Park “about a week from today.” 14 However, it was not until the beginning of August 1914—when the lamps were going out all over Europe—that he finally set off by himself for Algonquin Park.

  THE PRECISE DETAILS of Thomson’s remarkable solo voyage—one that has entered the realms of Canadian myth—are vague. He probably took a steamer the hundred kilometres north from Go Home Bay to the French River, from which point he began canoeing and portaging northeast to Lake Nipissing.15

  This was a daring voyage through mythic waters. Exactly a year earlier Rupert Brooke, struck by the apparent lack of history or habitation as he travelled through this area, wrote that the pools of water and cliffs of rock were “dumbly awaiting their Wordsworth or their Acropolis . . . The air is unbreathed, the earth untrodden.” 16 But Brooke was almost as ignorant of Canada as his graceless New York friends. This was by no means a pathless and anonymous wilderness, because these waterways, as Wilfred Campbell had noted, were replete “with history and legend.” 17 Thomson undoubtedly knew the histories and legends, not only from reading Campbell but also through discussions with

  Dr. MacCallum. It was no accident the two men met to camp along the French River, at the spot where Champlain, in search of the sea route to China, had arrived on Georgian Bay. The Madawaska Club was planning celebrations for the three hundredth anniversary of Champlain’s voyage, and MacCallum was probably scouting locations for the proposed pageant. Festivities were to include actors rowing a canoe ashore and playing the parts of Champlain, the Hurons and Father Le Caron.18

  In traversing the 110 kilometres along the French River between Georgian Bay and Lake Nipissing, Thomson was tracing earlier voyages by both the Algonquin peoples and the explorers, fur traders and Récollet friars who followed them. For many years the French River had been part of the main fur-trade route to the Great Lakes, and by the end of the nineteenth century, as lumber replaced fur as a staple, tens of millions of board feet of timber were driven down the river each year to the sawmills on Georgian Bay. More recently, fishermen had come to the river in search of smallmouth bass and northern pike.

  However commercialized, the French River was still undeniably treacherous, especially for a lone canoeist. Passing through the undulating, glaciated granite of the Canadian Shield, it offered stretches of whitewater and sheer cliff. Alexander Henry, navigating the river in the summer of 1761, described “many rapids, full of danger to the canoes and the men.” 19 Jennet Roy’s The History of Canada, published in 1850, reported that beside a single set of its rapids thirteen wooden crosses had been erected “to commemorate an equal number of fatal accidents.” 20 It was almost as if in undertaking this foolhardily perilous voyage Thomson was measuring his abilities against all those who had come before him—including Neil McKechnie, the “expert canoeist” and “real Canadian” who had captured the country’s savage beauty in paint.

  There is probably a good reason why Thomson’s solo voyage has become legendary. Besides placing him alongside near-mythical vagabonds of the Canadian wilderness such as voyageurs and coureurs de bois, it gives a uniquely Canadian twist to the age-old myth of the solitary quester, which has been called “the single most pervasive literary plot in western literature.” 21 In this myth, the hero, in a time of need, goes forth from his homeland and into an underworld of dangerous wonders. Here he contends against mighty forces and undergoes a series of trials before returning home, armed with special powers that give vitality to his community. Anthropologists and literary historians find this motif everywhere, from Homer and the Bible, to Grail legends and the Native American hanblecheya, or vision quest. The myth was particularly cherished during the Age of Discovery.22 As such, it bore a special relevance to Canada, with its history of European seamen-adventurers such as Champlain or Martin Frobisher navigating into an underworld of treacherous northern straits in hopes of returning home laden with fabulous riches.

  In the tale of Tom Thomson as the epic quest–hero, the setting (the Shield country) and means of transport (the canoe) set him alongside these other heroes of the Canadian national epic. His victory in the green deeps of the wilderness over what Grey Owl called the “brooding relentless evil spirit of the Northland” grants him insights into this harsh geography, as well as special artistic powers with which to interpret it for his countrymen.23

  A.Y. JACKSON WAS undertaking adventures of his own at this time, as he spent the summer of 1914 with Bill Beatty in the Rocky Mountains. The pair had received a commission to accompany work crews of the Canadian Northern Railway as they laid steel through the Yellowhead Pass. They therefore became the latest in a long line of landscapists, beginning with John A. Fraser, F.M. Bell-Smith and Lucius O’Brien a quarter century earlier, who journeyed west on passes issued by railway companies anxious to promote the Rockies as a tourist destination.

  More accustomed to the beaches of Picardy than the Canadian wilderness, Jackson enjoyed the rigours of his mountain adventure. He described in a letter to Dr. MacCallum the hazards and exertions of painting in the Rockies: “We took too many chances, sliding down snow slopes with only a stick for a brake, climbing over glaciers without ropes, crossing rivers too swift to wade by felling trees across them.” 24 This rough-and-ready approach to the task of landscape painting anticipated a friend’s comment, made years later, that Jackson’s painting expeditions were forays into a world of “nature-as-enemy as known to the explorer . . . an affair of Jackson-against-nature and vice-versa.” 25 Even so, Jackson was hardly an explorer of the calibre of some of his fellow painters. His frolics in the cnr camps in the Rockies pale beside the feats of an American contemporary, the painter Belmore Browne, another product of the Académie Julian. Between 1906 and 1912, Browne made three attempts on the summit of Mount McKinley in Alaska, established the altitude record for North America and made the first ascent of Mount Olympus.

  Whereas Browne’s adventures led to finely observed paintings of wildlife and glacial peaks, Jackson proved unable to translate his enthusiasm for the Rockies into successful canvases. The brief to create beautiful works that might attract tourists and immigrants to the Rockies was not one for which the painter of Terre sauvage was ideally suited. He came to the conclusion that “mountains were not in my line” and consigned most of his sketches to the flames.26 Making matters worse, he did not find Beatty a stimulating companion. “He can look after the business end of a trip and is a good man to travel with in that respect,” he confided to MacDonald, “but he isn’t an artistic inspiration. I don’t know what he thinks of me, and care less.” 27 Beatty’s admiration for William-Adolphe Bouguereau—the French academic painter of glossily erotic nymphs and shepherdesses—disgusted Jackson.28 Nor could Beatty keep up with Jackson, who was thirteen years younger. The man whose feats once astonished colleagues at the Lombard Street Firehall was now forty-five and not the physical specimen he used to be. “We’d
start to climb a mountain, but about halfway up Old Bill would have to lie down panting, so I’d go on alone.” 29 It was to Algonquin Park and Tom Thomson that Jackson now looked for inspiration and companionship. As soon as he returned to Ontario he made his way to Canoe Lake.

  THOMSON HAD ULTIMATELY reached Lake Nipissing after his solo voyage and, after navigating its southern shore, turned into the South River and paddled another eighty kilometres south, reaching Canoe Lake in the middle of September. He and Jackson immersed themselves in the grim beauty of the Algonquin wilderness. Taking along their sketching equipment, they canoed and camped at Smoke Lake and then on its southern neighbour, Ragged Lake.

  The experiences of paddling a canoe and sleeping in a tent were as novel for Jackson as for Lismer on these same waters four months earlier, and he took to it with a similar delight. Like Lismer, he was impressed by Thomson’s abilities in the canoe. A friend at Grip Limited described Thomson as “tall and big and strong,” 30 and Jackson was struck by the physical strength that allowed him to row for an entire day without fatigue while Jackson—a bantamweight a full six inches shorter—idled in the bow and kept a lookout for likely subjects. Besides berries and fish, Thomson was fuelled by a carbohydrate-rich diet of bannock, flapjacks and doughnuts.31

  Jackson was equally impressed by his fellow traveller’s paintings. Not having seen the sketches Thomson produced in Algonquin Park and Georgian Bay, he was struck by the vibrancy of his friend’s new style. If Thomson had suffered an artistic block in Georgian Bay, his creative energies were released in Jackson’s company in Algonquin Park. His bold new style was achieved in part by creating furrows and other textures on his panels by dragging a dry brush or even the point of the wooden handle through his paint to produce works that were, Jackson informed Dr. MacCallum in a letter, “very different from last year’s stuff.” 32