by Ross King
Although enormously influential across Britain and America, Ruskin’s ideas were especially powerful and popular in the Sheffield of Lismer’s youth. In 1871 Ruskin had founded the Guild of St. George to provide working-class men with a liberal education as well as what he called a “beautiful, peaceful, and fruitful” way of living.15 In 1875 the guild’s museum, ultimately known as the Ruskin Museum, was established in a Sheffield suburb. It housed Ruskin’s collection of paintings, drawings and manuscripts, but also minerals, ornithological prints and architectural mouldings—all assembled by Ruskin to stimulate the eyes and minds of working-class men and women.
Lismer owned copies of Ruskin’s works,16 and as a young man he must have visited the Ruskin Museum. In any case, he approached his task in Halifax with the same evangelical zeal as Ruskin, making himself, as Sir Edmund Walker correctly predicted, “useful in a community.” Within a few months he was reporting to Dr. MacCallum that things were “going pretty fair,” and that the school was “shaping a little into some recognized appearance of an art school.” He missed the comradeship and excitement of the school of artists coming together in Toronto, however, and quickly realized the scale of his mission in a city that seemed to care little for the arts, particularly in wartime. As he repined to Dr. MacCallum, “The town is provincial and wholly inartistic.” 17
In fairness, wartime Toronto scarcely offered better prospects. Lismer’s nostalgia for Toronto must have been jolted when he received a letter from MacDonald at Christmas. Unable to sell his paintings and still in the financial doldrums, the controversial author of The Tangled Garden was reduced to designing an exhibit for Simpsons on the theme of “Mother Goose’s Village.” He was planning and painting, he told Lismer, 280 feet of “quaint house fronts” to go around the store’s toy section. The task involved designing fifty figures from Mother Goose: painted wooden cut-outs with moveable arms and legs attached. The display would include “a windmill in motion” and “a waterfall of real water.” He explained how he had pressed his son, Thoreau, into service, and how Roy Mitchell—the “Prankmeister” of the Arts and Letters Club who specialized in directing avant-garde drama—was arranging for an actress dressed as Mother Goose to recite nursery rhymes to passing Christmas shoppers.18
MacDonald was (no doubt justifiably) proud of his handiwork. But that the painter of The Tangled Garden should be expending his efforts on Little Bo-Peep and Georgie Porgie plainly announced how hard times had befallen Canada’s artists.
THOMSON REMAINED IN Algonquin Park until late October or early November 1916, returning to Toronto only after the snow fell. Altogether he had spent seven months in the bush, sketching and working as a fire ranger. This protracted spell in the northlands—the longest he is known to have spent away from “civilization”—suggests that he was deliberately avoiding Toronto, with its recruiting sergeants and other reminders of war.
Soon after returning to the shack behind the Studio Building, he began his usual process of painting canvases based on small oil sketches done in the previous months. Jackson later wrote that at this time, with Lismer in Halifax and Harris in the Royal Grenadiers, Thomson was “very much alone” in Toronto.19 That was not exactly true, since Thomson still had not only Carmichael, Johnston and Heming for company but also a number of visitors to the shack. At some point during the winter he hosted Florence McGillivray, a landscape painter from Whitby. Until 1911 McGillivray taught art at the Ontario Ladies’ College in Whitby, where one of her students was Rosa Breithaupt. Thomson might have come to know her through Jackson’s Breithaupt connections because McGillivray was friends with the family, once giving them a painting as a gift.20 But he might have known her through his own connections in Whitby, where his father was born and his grandmother lived.
Thomson had a tremendous admiration for McGillivray’s work. “Quite confidentially,” he told a friend, “she is one of the best.” 21 The fact that Thomson’s esteem needed to be confidential suggests that other painters in the Studio Building either did not appreciate her work or else—given the prevailing masculine environment—did not believe a woman capable of serious or important artistic achievements. There was something else about McGillivray that Thomson no doubt kept secret from his friends in the Algonquin Park School: “She was the only one who understood immediately what I was trying to do,” he told a friend.22
McGillivray was therefore an important mentor to Thomson. At some point she gave him her calling card and an invitation to her forthcoming exhibition in Toronto. He placed both, like cherished billets-doux, in his paintbox. No evidence exists for any romantic attachment between the pair, but their admiration was clearly mutual and sincere. Unfortunately, most details about their relationship have—like so many other details of Thomson’s life—slipped into the historical vacuum.
There is little doubt that McGillivray, who was fifty-two years old in 1916, was an accomplished painter. She originally studied with Thomson’s old instructor William Cruikshank, and in 1913 she went to Paris to study under Émile-René Ménard at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, an atelier libre opened in Montparnasse in 1904 (Matisse was an early student). Ménard specialized in dreamy pastoral scenes inspired by classical antiquity, but McGillivray worked in a more adventurous Post-Impressionist style. Her avant-garde technique was developed partly from her familiarity with work by the Gauguin-inspired School of Pont-Aven (she travelled and painted in Brittany in 1915) and partly, no doubt, from her extramural studies in Paris. She came into contact with many young painters in Paris thanks to her position as president of the International Art Union (she was only the second woman to hold the post). This union staged exhibitions of young painters, awarded them prizes, bought their works to donate to institutions, and in general promoted their careers both in Paris and abroad. As her interest in Thomson indicates, this mentoring continued when she returned to Canada.
One of McGillivray’s paintings, Contentment, appeared at the Salon de la Société nationale des beaux-arts and then, after her return to Whitby in 1916, at the osa. It conjured the Pont-Aven painters in both its subject matter (a rosary-clutching nun whose habit recalls the costumes of Gauguin’s Breton peasants) and its heavily painted planes of blacks and whites. She even used a palette knife à la Cézanne to apply some passages. The painting failed to sell in either Paris or Toronto, but another, Afterglow, the National Gallery purchased in 1914. It too revealed her French experiences. It featured a stand of bare trees, their trunks accentuated with Cloisonnist-style outlines. In the background, using divided touches, she painted a goldenrod sunset.
McGillivray probably gave Thomson advice and encouragement as he tackled his latest paintings. Several were simple but dramatic scenes of jack pines and maple trees on the edge of a lake. The first, The West Wind, was inspired by the sketch executed during the fierce thunderstorm on Little Cauchon Lake. It is the dynamic and potentially destructive force that (according to legend) nearly killed him, as well the violence and fragility of nature, that Thomson captures. With its threatening sky, white-capped waves and scarecrow shapes, The West Wind, like Jackson’s Terre sauvage, is an image of the Canadian north as an eerie wilderness. The lake and sky are painted naturalistically, a legacy of Thomson’s vigorous plein-air pursuits and supposedly near-death experience beside Little Cauchon Lake. The three pines in the foreground receive a different treatment. They are two-dimensional, their foliage thickly outlined in crimson and their krummholz trunks and branches (like the trees in McGillivray’s Afterglow) with black. The middle tree reprises in more compressed form the S-shape of the leaning spruce in Northern River, and the stylized outlines recall Thomson’s decorative designs of forest undergrowth for Dr. MacCallum’s cottage.
Like his murals for the cottage, The West Wind is decorative rather than naturalistic or descriptive. Anyone believing Thomson always simply “painted what he saw”—the bromide used by so many painters to defend their techniques—should be disabuse
d of this notion by the sight of this trio of whiplashing pines. Thomson and his companions were not going into lands unfamiliar to most Canadians and then returning with “realistic” images of the barrens. Instead, they were venturing into lands familiar to many Canadians—through tourism, industry, painting, literature and film—and returning with paintings done in what was to most Canadians an unfamiliar style.
Thomson’s icon of the Canadian landscape owes a good deal to contemporary ideas about the nature of easel painting and the purpose of art—ideas he would have absorbed from Jackson, Harris and McGillivray, or through his reading of art journals such as The Studio. For the modernist artist, as Signac noted, painting a landscape was not a matter of sitting down in nature and faithfully transcribing the view. In 1891 a critic took Monet to task for doing precisely that—for, in effect, pointing his easel almost randomly at a landscape and taking a picture. The critic put this approach down to a misplaced honesty that made the painter say, “The place was like that, and I had no right to alter it.” Such scrupulousness, though admirable in legal testimony, was a “negation of art.” 23
The Post-Impressionists, by contrast, composed their views self-consciously and artificially, using the landscape as a jumping-off point for more floridly imaginative compositions. The operative word was “decorative.” Roger Fry defined Post-Impressionism as a conception of art in which “the decorative elements preponderate at the expense of the representative.” 24 A few years earlier, at the 1906 Salon des Indépendants, the critic Louis Vauxcelles wrote, “Our young landscapists see truthfully because they see decoratively. The site is for them a pretext, a setting in which the figures are to be enclosed by arabesques.” Another critic at the same exhibition praised painters (he was thinking of the Fauves) who “ask of the spectacle of nature pretexts to realize decorative compositions.” 25
Following Gauguin and Van Gogh, young French painters rejected faithful transcriptions of nature in favour of simplification and transformation. They created what were known as paysages décoratifs, or “decorative landscapes,” where topographical accuracy was happily sacrificed for dazzling ornamental effects of line and colour. Signac compared decorative landscapes—which he defined as the creation of “pure colour within rhythmic lines”—to tapestries and oriental rugs, which served the same ornamental function in the household.26 Another painter claimed the word décoratif was the tarte à la crème, or catchphrase, among modern French artists.27
Jackson’s observation to MacDonald in February 1914 that Algonquin Park was “full of ‘decoratif motifs’” proves the phrase was a tarte à la crème in the Studio Building too.28 Jackson also stated the aim and technique of the Canadian painters in terms that echoed the precepts of Signac and other French avant-gardists: “We felt that there was a rich field for landscape motives in the North Country if we frankly abandoned any attempt after literal painting, and treated our subjects with the freedom of the decorative designer . . . We tried to emphasize colour, line, and pattern . . . It seemed the only way to make a right use of the wealth of motives the country offered.” 29
Like the motifs on oriental tapestries and rugs, these landscapes sometimes tended towards abstraction. Vauxcelles claimed the Fauve painter André Derain, in his quest for pure decoration, “turns his back upon nature” and “plunges into the abstract.” 30 The abstract figure on which the decorative landscape was based was the kind of arabesque—the wavy line—so prominent in The West Wind. As the painter and sculptor André Lhote (a teacher at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière who began his long career working in a Fauvist style) described his method of landscape painting in 1907, “The general rhythm of nature . . . I will express in a fictional way, by arabesques that intertwine, that bisect one another harmoniously, that divide up musically.” 31
The arabesque, or figura serpentinata, has a long artistic history. It stretches back to classical antiquity and Islamic decorative art, and runs forward through the corkscrewing poses of Italian Mannerist sculpture and William Hogarth’s “line of beauty.” At the end of the nineteenth century, it reappeared in the fluent lines of Gauguin and Van Gogh, and in the spiraloid designs of Art Nouveau. But for some artists, these sinuous flourishes were not meant to be merely pleasing and decorative. In the Islamic world, arabesques were symbols of the Gardens of Paradise in the afterlife and therefore representations of a permanence and eternity beyond the transient visible world.32 Signac used them in the same way, as an expression of an authentic reality transcending the material world. In 1890 a critic wrote that Signac’s work “sacrifices anecdote to the arabesque.” 33
Matisse put the arabesque to self-conscious use in early masterpieces such as Luxe, calme et volupté (1904) and Le Bonheur de vivre (1905–6). The arabesque represented what he called an “impassioned impulse” and “the most synthetic way to express oneself in all one’s aspects.” 34 Its expressive form not only gave elegance to objects in his paintings—the tendrils of the nasturtium in The Red Studio (1911), the wrought-iron grillwork in The Piano Lesson (1916)—but also conveyed certain emotions and abstract ideas, such as vitality and voluptuous pleasure. Some critics saw darker emotions at work. When Matisse showed Harmony in Red at the 1908 Salon d’Automne, one writer believed he glimpsed in the tortuous patterns on the tablecloth and wallpaper “an expression, acute to the point of tragedy, of modern torment.” 35
THE WHIPLASHING CURVES of The West Wind certainly express more modern torment than voluptuous pleasure. The scene is one of struggle, of an elemental tug-of-war for existence. Thomson was a reserved and inarticulate man who gave little away in his letters or his conversation. He expressed himself through his paintings instead, and these windblown jack pines suggest his own turmoil—the emotional tumult caused by his financial and artistic struggles as well as the horror and pointlessness of the war, the “machine” that had swallowed both Jackson and Harris, along with tens of thousands of other young Canadians.
The war was impossible to escape or ignore in Toronto at the end of 1916. If Thomson managed to avoid the news reports in Algonquin Park, reminders would have been ever-present when he returned to the city and began painting The West Wind. The papers and newsreels were filled with reports on the twenty-week-long Battle of the Somme, an Allied offensive that finally ended in the middle of November. Letters from soldiers describing the horrors of the battle appeared in the Toronto newspapers. Beginning in October, 14,000 people a day packed the 1,600-seat Regent Theatre in Adelaide Street to watch the British documentary The Battle of the Somme, screened virtually around the clock for weeks on end. “The whole panorama is one nerve-straining spectacle,” wrote the reviewer in the Toronto Globe. “The spectators watch men moving along communication trenches with fixed bayonets, alive and healthy, and the next moment we see them emerge on the sky line silhouetted in death.” 36
The dreadful war of attrition along the Somme cost more than 620,000 Allied casualties, including, on the first day alone, two out of every three men from the Royal Newfoundland Regiment. Tales of Canadian heroism abounded, acts of bravery and fortitude such as the assault on the French town of Courcelette and the capture of Desire Trench. In the words of a United Press correspondent, the Canadians “fought like bearcats” at the Somme.37 Such was their ferocity and determination that they were now marked out as storm troops: henceforth the Canadian battalions would be in the vanguard of every Allied attack on the Western Front.
This heroism came at a terrible price, with 24,029 casualties. In the eleven weeks between early September and mid-November, 8,500 Canadians died at Courcelette. Long lists of the dead and the wounded appeared in the Toronto newspapers. Almost 3,000 Toronto men were killed or wounded in October alone. The papers of October 24 recorded the names of 200 local men—Toronto’s worst day yet.38 One casualty of war that Thomson certainly would have known about was A.Y. Jackson, since in September 1916, while recuperating with relatives in England, Jackson wrote a long letter to MacD
onald describing in full the horrors of Sanctuary Wood.
By the end of the year, with the Somme offensive a costly failure for the Allies, the war had reached a horrific stalemate. Much of the early jingoism had evaporated. No longer was it so easy for Canadian newspapers and politicians to claim, as they did after the Second Battle of Ypres, that the dead had “something heroic and almost divine about them,” or that “there rose steady and clear the voice of thankfulness to God . . . that they were permitted in their death to make so splendid a sacrifice.” 39 Even the new British prime minister, David Lloyd George, questioned the point of such horrendous loss of life, accusing General Douglas Haig of “squandering” the lives of the soldiers. As one young British officer glumly observed at the beginning of 1917, “the war seemed likely to go on for ever.” 40
IF THIS TRAGEDY and pessimism about the war found expression in the turbulent sky, ruffled waters and fragile, struggling pines of The West Wind, another painting Thomson did at this time, although almost identical in subject, was different in composition and mood. The Jack Pine presents the elegiac symbol of a tree sharply silhouetted against a glowing sunset. If Thomson was derided as unpatriotic by contemporaries because of his failure to enlist, The Jack Pine, with its near-mythical reverence for the beauty of the Canadian landscape, could be seen as his riposte.
