Defiant Spirits

by Ross King

  To MacDonald he reported, “Tom is doing some exciting stuff. He keeps one up to time. Very often I have to figure out if I am leading or following. He plasters on the paint and gets fine quality.” 33 He even joked to Dr. MacCallum that Thomson was developing “decided cubistical tendencies and I may have to use a restraining influence on him.” 34 This was to lay it on rather thick, but in Thomson’s latest sketches, such as the gloriously ablaze Twisted Maple and Soft Maple in Autumn, the forms in the Algonquin landscape dissipated into bright colours—deep reds, primrose yellows, burnt oranges—that were a far cry from his low-keyed works from the autumn of 1912. He was also, as Jackson noted, adding his pigment in a lavish impasto whose texture revealed the deftly confident sweep of his brush.

  These works showed Thomson’s enthusiasm for capturing raw visual effects with a startlingly sensuous technique—the kind of “fearless brushing” and “crude colour” Margaret Fairbairn had already noted in the works of painters of “Young Canada” such as Harris and MacDonald. Even so, sketching did not always go well. Thomson still became frustrated and discouraged, and on one occasion, enraged at a poor day’s work, he hurled his box-easel into the bushes and vowed never to paint again. The next morning, following a change of heart, he and Jackson crawled through the brush in search of it. Once found, the box needed to be taken to one of the rangers for repair.35

  Despite Thomson’s example and the rude beauty of the surroundings, Jackson still found himself unable to paint anything worthwhile. “I am not in the mood to produce at all,” he wrote to J.E.H. MacDonald. The problem was partly that the failure of his Rocky Mountain paintings prevented him from working spontaneously. His problems were also related to the grim shadow that had fallen across Europe in the summer of 1914. He had learned of the outbreak of war while in the Rockies and since then had painted little of worth. “I think if the Germans got a good walloping I might brace up,” he told MacDonald.36

  THAT THE WAR in Europe should have been on Jackson’s mind was hardly surprising. For the previous few weeks the Toronto newspapers were emblazoned with headlines about the “Battle of Belgium.” It was clear that Canada, unable because of her constitutional position either to declare war or to conclude peace, would not escape the conflict. Three days before Britain declared war on Germany, the Duke of Connaught, the governor general, cabled the British secretary of state for the colonies to affirm that “the Canadian people will be united in a common resolve to put forth every effort and to make every sacrifice necessary to ensure the integrity and maintain the honour of the Empire.” 37 Torontonians eagerly affirmed the statement, with news of Britain’s declaration of war against Germany greeted by crowds pouring into the streets to sing “Rule Britannia.”

  By the end of August, optimism that the war would be over by Christmas—as so many statesmen initially predicted—was fading rapidly. The Toronto Daily Star began printing long lists of British casualties (1,600 died at the Battle of Mons on August 22) as well as hair-raising tales of German atrocities in Belgium. On August 25 one of its reports quoted Lord Kitchener’s ominous forecast that the “disastrous war” might well endure for as long as three years.38 In Ottawa, two orders-in-council were made to raise a Canadian fighting force for service overseas. No shortage of volunteers came forward. In Toronto, crowds besieged the city’s armouries, including many ex-servicemen hoping to rejoin their old regiments.39 By the beginning of September, two Toronto regiments alone, the 48th Highlanders and the Queen’s Own Rifles, had shipped more than 2,000 men east to the training camp at Valcartier near Quebec City. In the first week of October, 33,000 Canadian troops—many of them raw recruits with only the most basic training—departed for Europe.

  There was as yet no special urgency among the recruiters. So numerous were the volunteers that married men were turned away, along with those who (as the Toronto Daily Star reported) had “a foot not properly arched.” 40 For this reason, it was not unusual that in the first week of October two married men with jobs and children, Arthur Lismer and Fred Varley, joined Jackson and Thomson in Algonquin Park. They brought with them their wives and another Toronto painter, Beatrice Hagarty Robertson, a former studiomate of MacDonald and Bill Beatty who had exhibited flower paintings at the OSA. Jackson, a veteran of the prolific art colony at Étaples, was impressed by their industry. “Art is raging round here now,” he wrote to MacDonald. “No less than five OSA exhibitors on the job.” 41

  Mowat Lodge quickly became an impromptu exhibition gallery in October 1914.42 The painters propped their works against the wall for appraisal, turning the premises into a Canadian version of the Buvette de la plage, the boarding house in Le Pouldu decorated by Gauguin and Paul Sérusier in 1899, or the Hôtel Baudy in Giverny, where the dining room was filled with paintings by the resident Impressionists. Mowat Lodge did not, however, turn into a mutual admiration society. Bill Beatty had boasted to a journalist of a “bond of sympathy” between the artists, making them “encourage one another” in their efforts.43 But with so many red-blooded men jockeying for position, rivalries and differences were bound to show (as Beatty himself had discovered with Jackson).

  In Algonquin Park, it was Varley who frustrated the obstreperous Jackson. Varley had taken readily to life in Canada, and within days of arriving he wrote back to his wife: “I am already a Canadian.” He also wrote to his sister in England about how there was “a small party of us here, the young school, just 5 or 6 of us, and we are working to one big end.” 44 But despite his friendship with Thomson and his passion for “this outdoor country,” he was not as convincing as some of the other artists in his commitment to what Harris called “distinctly Canadian work.” Working full-time as a designer at Rous and Mann, and with a wife and two young children to support, he had little time for the lengthy canoe expeditions undertaken by Thomson or the railway journeys of Jackson and Beatty. Nor had he, like the others in the “young school,” journeyed into the Ontario backcountry. Before his trip to Canoe Lake, his experience of rural Canada barely extended beyond the Toronto Islands. His real preference was for figure paintings and portraits rather than landscapes. His most ambitious work to date—painted in Sheffield early in 1912—had been a dramatic female nude entitled Eden.

  For Jackson, who wished painters of the “Canadian School” to prospect the farthest-flung regions of the Dominion, Varley’s metropolitanism and his interest in the human figure were hindrances. The two men had little in common beyond their friendship with Thomson, and Jackson was contemptuous of Varley’s lack of experience in the bush. “Varley is most excited over the sketches which are the least suggestive of the north country, and as for my stuff,” he pouted to MacDonald, “he doesn’t like it at all.” 45 Jackson even sniffed at Varley’s decision to spend his nights with Maud in the comfort of Mowat Lodge rather than under the stars. “Varley would be a hot musher in a few weeks,” he complained to Dr. MacCallum, “if he would live outside.” 46

  In Jackson’s view, authentic landscapes required such canoe-and-sleeping-roll communions with nature. Thomson’s progress as a painter, which had coincided with his progress as a canoeist and outdoorsman, seemed to confirm his opinion. Although the “excellent beds” were available in Mowat Lodge, Thomson and Jackson pointedly pitched their tent a short distance away, in the middle of a birch grove beside the old mill. The two bachelors might have felt like outsiders in any case, since both the Lismers and the Varleys had brought their children with them, and Beatrice Hagarty Robertson was newly married. With their backwoods snobbishness, Thomson and Jackson might have used their tent to retreat from the “birthday cakes and water ice” effervescence that had recently driven Thomson from Go Home Bay.

  Whatever the tensions or rivalries, all concerned were awed by Algonquin in full autumn colour. Varley and Lismer, especially, were astonished by the blaze of colour. Varley, who was learning from Thomson how to paddle a canoe, wrote to Dr. MacCallum, “The Country is a revelation to me—and
completely bowled me over at first.” 47 Lismer wrote of the “glorious week of colour” but admitted how he found it “far from easy to express the riot of colour and still keep the landscape in a high key . . . Varley and I are struggling to create something out of it all.” 48

  The crimsons and yellows of the sumac and birch, in combination with the lucid atmosphere and expanses of clear water, created scenes quite different from the tonsured hedgerows and gorse-

  covered fells of the moorlands outside Sheffield, or for that matter from the vaporous hues and mellow orchards and pastures of Holland or France that had served so many landscapists in the past. Jackson, Harris and MacDonald all were stressing that a different approach to the landscape—something akin to the style of the “Norwegian-French protagonists”—was required to do the Shield country justice. Jackson and Thomson, following the Post-Impressionists, and Harris and MacDonald, taking their cue from the Scandinavian painters, were abandoning the colour harmonies and cursory brushwork of Impressionism in favour of bold lines and broad planes of clashing colours. If the intensely bright sunlight of the Midi inspired the chromatic outbursts of Van Gogh, Matisse and André Derain, the palettes of the Studio Building painters took their cue from the sumacs, tamaracks and maples.

  Varley wrote to his sister, “We are endeavouring to knock out of us all the preconceived ideas, emptying ourselves of everything except that nature is here in all its greatness.” 49 The desire to rid oneself of all influences and see the world anew was common among painters, especially modernists. Cézanne claimed he wanted to do paintings of the sort produced by someone who had never seen a work of art. Piet Mondrian wished to erase the history of art from his imagination, and Picasso, Vuillard and Bonnard all sought to recapture the freshness of a child’s eye, untainted by other pictures.50 Yet the painter’s mind can never be wiped clean. Every artist, no matter how original, is an amalgamation of influences. Despite their fantasies of artistic tabulae rasae, Bonnard was influenced by the Impressionists and Japanese prints, Mondrian (in his early works) by the painters of the Hague School and (in his later ones) by Picasso and Braque. Picasso, the most brilliantly innovative painter of the twentieth century, assimilated such predecessors as Velázquez, El Greco, Goya and Titian.

  It is hardly surprising that Varley failed to rid himself of his own preconceived ideas about what made a work of art. The product of his visit to the park was Indian Summer, a portrait of Maud against a background of birch trees. The bold pattern of flattened shapes shows the influence of Augustus John, one of his favourite painters, who was inspired in turn by Gauguin and Matisse.

  Lismer likewise revealed the imprint of previous painters, in his case the French Impressionists. Later he would claim—in what became a mantra for these painters of the Canadian north—that Impressionism “does not transplant well to Canada. It is emotionally unstable . . . in our clear air and amid our solid form of land and water.” 51 But this remark does disservice to his work in Algonquin Park in 1914. The Guide’s Home, Algonquin, however indebted to Impressionism with its dappled light, mauve shadows and stabs of colour, is a stunningly beautiful showstopper of a painting whose crystal-clear blue sky and stand of shimmering birch trees (one can almost hear the gentle applause of the leaves) suggest the Canadian autumn as vividly and powerfully as anything yet to come from the easels of his companions.

  THE LISMERS AND Varleys returned to Toronto in the middle of October, followed a week later by Jackson. With the onset of war, financial prospects for the painters looked bleak. Earlier in the year, the country began experiencing an economic slowdown as more than a decade of prosperous and expanding commercial activity gave way to inactivity in the exchanges and a contraction of the money markets. Now the war threatened to make the situation even worse. “I guess there is not much commercial work to do in Toronto,” Jackson wrote to Dr. MacCallum. Orders for brochures and posters for hotels and real-estate companies evaporated, others were cancelled, and the staffs of engraving houses drastically reduced. “If the war keeps on,” Jackson glumly mused, “conditions can only get worse. The only job will be handling guns.” 52

  Jackson’s artist friend Randolph Hewton was already preparing to do exactly that. In 1913 Hewton had been denounced in the Montreal press as a Post-Impressionist but then defended by Harold Mortimer-Lamb as an artist of “original outlook” and “unusual promise.” 53 Now he was enlisting with the Victoria Rifles and, along with the sixty thousand other Canadians who were in uniform by the end of 1914, preparing to ship overseas with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He was anxious for Jackson, his old sketching companion at Émile-ville, to join him. “I am not in any desperate hurry,” Jackson wrote to MacCallum. “The hero’s job is a pretty thankless one. There are a lot of institutions and big fat heads in this country not worth laying down one’s life to preserve.” 54

  Nor was Tom Thomson eager to enlist. After another month in Algonquin Park, he returned to Toronto in the middle of November. One day soon afterwards, he stood at the corner of Bloor and Yonge with Fred and Maud Varley watching as twelve thousand men marched by eight abreast. According to Varley, Thomson was “really upset” about what he took to be the dire fate of the young soldiers: “Gun fodder for a day.” He was equally pessimistic about the prospects for a swift end to the war, predicting it would last for three or four years.55

  Thomson’s pessimism about the war and his disillusionment with the flag-waving crowds were shaped in part by a book he read a year or two earlier, Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage. Angell was an Englishman who immigrated to California in 1889 at the age of seventeen. He worked at a series of frontier-style jobs—ditch digger, prospector, buckaroo—before turning to journalism. In 1903, revolted by the age’s patriotism and jingoism, he published Patriotism under Three Flags: A Plea for Rationalism in Politics. It was followed six years later by another attack on jingoism and empire building, Europe’s Optical Illusion, a pamphlet expanded into a book the following year and retitled The Great Illusion. The “great illusion,” he argued, was the belief that a nation’s financial and industrial stability relied on its ability to defend itself against the aggression of other nations who would invade because they believed—in another great illusion—that they would thereby “increase their power, prosperity and well-being, at the cost of the weaker and vanquished.” 56 One economic fallacy was therefore being used to combat another, and such logical blunders were leading to a militarism that threatened the stability of the entire world.

  Praised by reviewers as “one of the most profound, as well as the most acute, pleas against war and armaments that has ever appeared,” 57 The Great Illusion ultimately sold more than 2 million copies. In about 1912, according to Stanley Kemp, it became a topic of discussion among the designers at Grip Limited. Angell’s view of the contradictions and absurdities of militarists and empire builders—Jackson’s “big fat heads”—won a sympathetic audience in Thomson even before the Great War. According to Kemp, Thomson “was of the opinion that war was a snare and a delusion” and that “militarism” and “preparedness” were “quite wrong.” 58

  Kemp claimed Thomson was not alone in his views, but as the artist stood with Varley and his wife among the cheering crowds at the corner of Bloor and Yonge, watching the young Torontonians marching in lockstep towards their doom, he must have felt in very much of a minority. He must also have realized that his group of fellow painters, who had so recently come together and offered him such advice and support, were now threatened with dispersal or extinction as “Young Canada” was drawn into the lunatic and dangerous quarrels of the Old World.

  BOOK II

  1 MEN WITH GOOD RED BLOOD IN THEIR VEINS

  ALTHOUGH THE WAR in Europe meant that artists such as Randolph Hewton were shipping overseas, the hostilities brought one young Canadian painter back home.

  Franklin Carmicha
el was the red-haired son of an Orillia carriage maker. After taking art lessons in Orillia from Canon Richard W. Greene (reputedly the model for Dean Drone in Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town),1 he had arrived in Toronto in 1911, at the age of twenty-one, to further an artistic career limited until then to painting crests and racing stripes on the vehicles manufactured by his father. For the next two years he worked at Grip Limited as an office boy and apprentice designer while taking lessons from those stalwarts of Toronto art education, William Cruikshank and George A. Reid. He frugally put away $5 a week (his salary was $15 per week) until in the summer of 1913 he had saved enough to begin studies, on their advice, at the alma mater of Arthur Lismer and Fred Varley, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. He spent nine months in Belgium (whose neutrality wrongly suggested it would be a safe destination) before travelling to England in the summer of 1914. He was in England when Germany invaded Belgium and so returned to Toronto, to the design firm of Rous and Mann, in October. Soon afterwards he became a tenant in the Studio Building.

  Carmichael’s arrival in the Studio Building was a welcome one for Tom Thomson, Bill Beatty and Arthur Heming. “We really have an enjoyable time as we visit one another and gab away like so many geese,” Carmichael wrote to his girlfriend.2 He was valued for other reasons as well. With painting commissions and the demand for graphic design in short supply, some Studio Building tenants were embarrassed for funds. To the cash-strapped artists, the state-of-the-art Rosedale studios, with their kitchens and bathrooms and enormous windows, suddenly seemed a costly and unnecessary extravagance. As early as October 1914 Jackson was hoping to have the responsibility for paying the rent taken off his hands. He was planning to return for reasons of economy to his mother’s house in Montreal but feared leaving Thomson—who was “getting to the end of his tether” financially—responsible for the rent on their shared studio.3 The arrival of Carmichael meant a replacement had been found. Before the end of the year Jackson had cleared out of the Studio Building and returned home.