by Ross King
Just as MacDonald was making sketches of his garden at this time, several of Thomson’s works were brilliantly coloured close-ups of Ontario wildflowers—marguerites, wood lilies, vetch and water irises.36 His interest in botanical subjects no doubt went back to the influence of his great-uncle, Dr. William Brodie, the great naturalist with whom he used to collect specimens along the bluffs and in ravines around Toronto. He painted with enough detail that the species of the individual flowers were identifiable, though his strong patterning and decorative style—the bright patchworks of colour—indicate an interest in visual effects rather than horticultural particulars.
These tranquil images of wildflowers were atypical of Thomson’s work in the summer of 1915. He was continuing to work in radiant colour, but the peaceful panoramas of previous years—the calm, reflective lakes and distant shores in silhouette—had been replaced by agitated images of tumultuous clouds and churning waters. Works such as Evening, Hot Summer Moonlight and (especially) Sunset showed spectacles of ebullient colour, with great breakers of cloud tinged puce, gold and (in the case of the last painting) mercurochrome red.
There were probably geological and meteorological reasons for these molten sunsets. On May 22, 1915, in what became known as “The Great Explosion,” Lassen Peak erupted in California, showering volcanic ash for hundreds of miles and veiling the northern hemisphere in stratospheric aerosols that caused the spectacular sunsets seen by Thomson a short while later. He was only the latest artist whose sunset paintings recorded the after-effects of volcanic eruptions. Turner painted some of his trademark incandescent skies following eruptions in the Philippines and Nicaragua in the 1830s, and the blood-red sky of The Scream was influenced by “tongues of fire” seen by Munch in the sky above Christiania a few months after Krakatoa’s 1883 eruption.37
Another of Thomson’s sketches, Fire-Swept Hills, a moonscape of livid purples, mauves and pinks, showed an even clearer environmental influence: the aftermath of one of the forest fires that regularly swept through the Canadian woods in summer. The sketch undoubtedly illustrates a scene witnessed by Thomson, but in this eerie image of scorched earth and burned trees it is not difficult to see an allusion to the Great War not unlike MacDonald’s more straightforward depictions in Forward with God or Belgium. Reports of the horrors of the war filled the newspapers in the summer of 1915, with Canadian troops seeing further action at the Battle of Festubert in May and the Battle of Givenchy in June.
One of his sketches was particularly haunting. Thomson painted a number of logging scenes in the summer of 1915. The lumber industry was traditionally hazardous, with the Mattawa having once claimed the lives of seven men as they tried to clear a logjam.38 Innovations such as timber slides and caulked boots with quarter-inch spikes lessened the death toll, but logging was still a risky occupation, and its violence and tragedy were captured by Thomson in Crib and Rapids. A timber crib was a large raft assembled, for ease of transporting lumber, from as many as two dozen squared logs. The crib, typically thirty-two feet long, would be floated along the river and, in one of the industry’s most treacherous procedures, steered down wide timber slides by a pole-wielding raftsman—a manoeuvre likened by the plucky hero of Oxley’s The Young Woodsman to “tobogganing on water.” 39 A raftsman missing the slide would find himself and his crib going through rapids or over a falls, causing the crib to break up and the raftsman to become a statistic.40
Thomson’s Crib and Rapids shows the aftermath of such an incident. As logs from a disintegrated crib eddy in the churning waters, two are forced upright and intersect to form a Latin cross.41 The sketch is an image of peril and death, a testimonial to the hazards of the lumber industry and—with the thirteen crosses beside the French River in mind—rapids in general. The air of mortality about the painting also suggests anxieties about the war. How Canadians who fell in foreign lands should be commemorated was a topic of much debate at the time. In Canada and Britain both, patriotic faith in the “sacred cause” of the war meant that, despite the massive casualties, the elaborate mourning rituals of the Victorian era were abandoned, and mothers were urged not to mourn their lost sons. Sir Edmund Walker even balked at plans for the government to present a Latin cross to the mothers of fallen soldiers, saying that such funereal symbols would not “serve the purpose.” 42
But Latin crosses did make their way into the public consciousness. In early May 1915, John McCrae composed “In Flanders Fields,” with its description of “the crosses, row on row, / That mark our place.” The poem was not published in Punch until early December, but by the autumn Thomson must have known how the temporary grave marker for a casualty of the Great War was a simple wooden cross with a painted inscription, usually done by surviving members of the regiment. A front-page report in the Toronto Daily Star in early May, for example, reported how the graves of Canadian soldiers in Belgium and France were marked with “nothing but a little wooden cross,” to which chaplains and surviving members of the regiment sometimes added “little flags with a maple leaf.” 43
At first an emblem of death, the wooden cross quickly became a symbol of the war itself, reinforced by such things as the giant wooden calvary at Ypres that miraculously survived German shelling, and ultimately by Roland Dorgèles’s novel Les Croix de bois.44 Although wayside crosses appeared as votive symbols all over Britain during the Great War, in some parts of Canada these crossroad calvaries possessed a different meaning: many Québécois erected wayside crosses to ask protection from the army’s recruiters.45 It was a gesture with which Thomson, conflicted in his feelings about the war, would have been in some sympathy.
3 WHITE FEATHERS AND TANGLED GARDENS
THE “SILENT SIXTIETH” trained at Camp Valcartier for four months. Along with the 1,024 other men in the battalion, A.Y. Jackson learned how to march, shoot and fight hand-to-hand with bayonets. His daily rations included an ounce of cheese, an ounce of tea, two ounces of sugar and, as the weather cooled in autumn, a cubic foot of wood. The “ill-assorted, motley crowd of civilians” recruited in Montreal was gradually transformed into a “sunburned, hardened, disciplined” battalion.1 On November 6, 1915, the men boarded SS Scandinavian to ship overseas.
The war on the Western Front was proceeding miserably as the Allies failed drastically in their autumn offensive against the Germans. The French suffered massive casualties of nearly 150,000 men in the Battle of Artois, while the British fared little better in their efforts at Loos, with 50,000 dead or wounded. With ever more troops needed in the trenches, the British secretary of state for war, the Earl of Derby, began threatening unmarried men with compulsion should they fail to volunteer by the end of November.
Arriving in England, the 60th Battalion was detached to the 9th Infantry Brigade of the newly formed Canadian 3rd Division. Jackson began further training “in the mud and rain” at Bramshott Camp in Hampshire, sixty kilometres southwest of London.2 He was among the first Canadian arrivals, since Bramshott Camp—known as “Mudsplosh Camp”—opened to Canadian troops only in October. It featured wooden huts for barracks, a corrugated-iron ymca and a recreational facility dubbed “Funland,” complete with billiard tables and a rifle range. There was also a cockney bayonet instructor who urged his students to “Fink it’s yer muvver-in-law” as they lunged at sack dummies.3 The men were forced to rise at 4:30 in the morning and march ten kilometres to the rifle range before marching back to camp. “It’s very interesting,” Jackson wrote pluckily to his mother, “but also very strenuous.” 4 To MacDonald he was less doughty: “Someday it may seem heroic but at close range it seems to be made up of filth, irreverence, booze, and petty authority.” 5 A natural rebel like Jackson must have chafed under this petty authority, especially since, according to one of Jackson’s fellow recruits, the future economic historian Harold Innis, the British officers treated their Canadian underlings with “insolence and brutality.” 6
These lessons lasted three months. In the third week of Feb
ruary 1916, after a “rather chilly trip across the Channel,” lashed by sleet and snow, Jackson and his battalion landed in France.7 They joined the fifty thousand other Canadian troops serving in the field. One day earlier, a million German troops had begun their assault on Verdun.
THE SITUATION FOR Canadian artists was made ever more discouraging when on February 3, 1916, a fire on Parliament Hill destroyed the Centre Block. Reconstruction began almost immediately, but in the meantime Parliament took over the space in the Victoria Memorial Museum occupied by the National Gallery. As Eric Brown lamented, in 1916 the National Gallery “passed out of existence.” 8
With the National Gallery’s quarters commandeered and its budget slashed, the artists in the Studio Building could at least count on their other faithful patron. In the autumn of 1915 Dr. James MacCallum commissioned MacDonald, Thomson and Lismer to paint murals for his cottage on Go Home Bay. Dr. MacCallum envisaged, as a surprise for his wife and children, a series of murals running in a metre-high frieze around the top of the living room walls. The wall space was broken up by windows, a door and, on the west wall, a large stone fireplace topped by a stone chimney breast. In the middle of October the three painters went to Georgian Bay to take measurements (slightly inaccurately, as it turned out) and sketch the layout of the living room.
The three men were busy in the Studio Building over the next few months as they worked on the commission, for which MacDonald (recently forced to borrow money from his father-in-law) received a much-needed $140. Thomson and Lismer worked together in near-indigence in the shack. Lismer did several lighthearted cartoons illustrating their life. One showed Thomson smoking a corncob pipe and stirring a steaming pot on a cast-iron stove as Lismer looked on. Another, called “Too Much Mulligan,” featured the pair looking dazed and replete, with Thomson sprawled on a chair and Lismer sitting head in hands. But the men’s luxuries were few. When M.O. Hammond, city editor of the Toronto Globe, visited the shack in December, he found the premises “awfully bare.” The two men, he wrote, “work together and are about bankrupt.” They did without a fire, Thomson explaining that the stove did not draw well for want of a longer pipe. “But I perceive the real reason is no money for fuel.” 9 Tellingly, “Too Much Mulligan” showed Thomson wrapped for warmth in a greatcoat.
All three men painted their murals on beaverboard, a material used for insulation (Harris had lined the walls of Thomson’s shack with beaverboard). MacDonald executed two large panels, each almost 2.5 metres high, to go on either side of the chimney breast. Rather than landscapes, they were vignettes of Canadian history. He already had experience at historical scenes, since in 1912 he and
C.W. Jefferys produced illustrations for The Index and Dictionary of Canadian History, part of the twenty-volume “Makers of Canada” series published by George N. Morang (who regarded his work as “an exercise in nation-building”).10 For MacCallum’s cottage, MacDonald chose historical scenes of local importance, showing both the past and the present inhabitants of Go Home Bay. One mural featured Hurons, a French explorer and a Catholic missionary beneath arching jack pines, the other a trapper, a fisherman and a lumberjack. The lumberjack, a sturdy if gloomy fellow grimly clutching an axe, a kind of saturnine Paul Bunyan, was a portrait of Thomson, whom Hammond had found a “well built chap with . . . the hands of a woodsman.” 11
MacDonald also paid a tribute to another of his friends in a small panel called A.Y. Jackson Sketching. The work showed Jackson, booted and wearing a hat, standing before a pine-topped cliff, busy at his sketchbook as a mass of threatening storm clouds rolls in. The small scene was an acknowledgement of the artistic inspiration provided by Go Home Bay as well as a tribute to his friend who had gone overseas.
Lismer painted two panels that memorialized his own first visit to the “happy isles” two years earlier. The “Skinny Dip” and The Picnic were idyllic scenes from summer holidays played out under blue skies and white cumulus clouds—the kind of Georgian Bay scenes, in other words, that Thomson had belittled as “North Rosedale.” More fancifully, Lismer painted a dragon for the gable of the doctor’s boathouse.
Thomson’s contribution to the effort was more modest than that of his colleagues: seven panels showing trees and undergrowth (the incorrect measurements meant four of them were too big and were therefore never installed). These presented, in thick outlines and bright autumn colours, a series of stylized images of profuse, intertwining plants. The heavy outlining of the clusters and stems—an effect recalling the lead joints in stained glass windows—reveals a debt not only to the “cult of the line” of Art Nouveau but also to European movements such as Cloisonnism, developed by the Gauguin-inspired Pont-Aven School in the 1890s and characterized by one practitioner, Paul Sérusier, as “this craze for using large dark-blue outlines to emphasize the form.” 12 It was a style to which Thomson would return in one of his larger paintings.
besides their murals, the painters were busy on other works in the winter of 1915–16. Thomson was able, despite his straitened circumstances, to purchase several large canvases on which to work. In the last weeks of 1915 he painted In the Northland, a kind of reworking of Northern River showing a lake through a screen of birch trees. It was a study in clashing colours, the chill blue of the lake contrasting with the school-bus yellow of the birch leaves. Thomson probably knew how the yellow-against-blue combination had been a trademark of Van Gogh, who used these complementary colours to enhance the brilliancy and visual dynamism of his canvases.
These same contrasts show up in other works Thomson was painting at the time, such as Spring Ice (yellow rocks against a blue lake) and Autumn’s Garland. The latter canvas was almost as stylized in design as the vegetation panels for Dr. MacCallum’s murals. A rich feast of shades of yellow and orange—persimmon, gamboge, burnt orange—it featured swags of crimson foliage draped across a forest of blue-trunked trees and (more clashing colours) vivid planes of orange. Like Northern River, with its allusion to Henrik Krogh’s tapestry, Autumn’s Garland revealed how Thomson did not approach nature with a blank mind as well as a blank canvas. The scene was self-consciously composed, from the flattened background with its lack of spatial recession to the choice of colour and the application of paint with a wide brush. It was not the work of a traditional landscapist so much as the confection of a theatrical set designer.
In his atelier at the top of the Studio Building, MacDonald was likewise preparing works for the 1916 osa exhibition. One of them, The Elements, was a striking portrait of an eerie wilderness. Based on a sketch done on Georgian Bay the previous October, it was dramatically different from a prettified work like Autumn’s Garland in its approach to the landscape of the Precambrian Shield. The work shows the harsh contours of rock overhung by an equally forbidding tower of thundercloud. Two figures (probably Thomson and Lismer) huddle before a campfire, their small forms dwarfed and seemingly menaced by a pair of looming jack pines. The fact that these scarecrow pines resemble the spectral tree silhouettes in the background of Belgium suggests that this image of human vulnerability in the face of powerful and oblivious forces had another significance for MacDonald as he painted it during some of the bleakest days of the Great War.
Another painting MacDonald was completing for the exhibition was a large version of the sketches made the previous summer in his garden at Four Elms. Called The Tangled Garden, it was painted on the same kind of beaverboard used for the MacCallum murals—an indication of how MacDonald was forced to economize with his materials. Showing sunflowers drooping in arabesques over a bright blaze of asters, the painting promised to be one of the most chromatically adventurous paintings ever put on show in a Toronto exhibition. More spumes of colour were found in another of his entries, Rock and Maple. This latter work, based on sketches done in the Haliburton Highlands, exhibited daring brushwork and, if anything, an even more audacious use of colour—a giddying rush of water streaked with rust, yellow, green and cobalt blue. Above this m
ulticoloured stream, among green-tinged boulders, MacDonald added foliage of intense yellows and oranges.
MacDonald must have worried about the possible reception of these paintings. Reviewers had so far shown sympathy for what he called the “distinctly Native art” emerging from the Studio Building. But would Torontonians, nourished on snuff-brown landscapes, be ready for The Tangled Garden or Rock and Maple?
Visitors to Canadian art galleries did not expect to be assailed by bright colours. In Canada as elsewhere, traditionalists regarded colour as less important than design, drawing, perspective and subject matter. A connoisseur once lectured John Constable, “A good picture, like a good fiddle, should be brown.” 13 Colour was viewed as decadent and meretricious, addressing the baser senses rather than the intellect. The French Impressionists introduced brighter colours into their canvases, thanks in part to the advances in chemistry that resulted in new pigments such as coal-tar mauve and alizarin red. Still, as recently as 1905 a group of painters led by Matisse and Maurice de Vlaminck caused outrage when their brilliantly hued works appeared in Paris. The point of their garish and often unexpected uses of colour was a visual and emotional impact they believed Old Master hues could not deliver. “The chief function of colour,” as Matisse proclaimed, “should be to serve expression as well as possible.” 14 They quickly became derided as les fauves (wild beasts).
Those who regarded landscapes as a pictorial balm for weary eyes and shattered nerves were shocked by the savage colours and tentacular lines of the Fauves and other Post-Impressionists. French critics claimed—probably quite sincerely—that the swirls and colours left them overstimulated and seasick. A critic for the conservative journal Le Figaro once reeled out of a display of paintings by the Nabis feeling “exhausted, sick, exasperated, my nerves on edge.” 15
