by Ross King
what a Canadian minister called “that extravaganza of religion” 15—during his studies in Germany. The German Theosophical Society was active under the leadership of Rudolf Steiner, who, beginning in 1904, gave a series of lectures in Berlin on spiritualism and the “destructiveness of materialist science in respect to the soul.” 16 Theosophists were a rarer breed in Canada, numbering under a thousand, though in 1891 the first Theosophical Society Lodge opened in Toronto and by 1918 two more had appeared. The painter and educator George A. Reid was an early member, hosting meetings in his studio in the Arcade building on Yonge Street.17
Harris already had connections in Toronto’s theosophical community. A friend from the Arts and Letters Club, the theatre director Roy Mitchell, was a prominent member who would found the Blavatsky Institute of Canada in 1924. Mitchell had moved to New York in 1916 to become technical director of the newly founded Greenwich Village Theatre. Harris’s trip to New York might well have been timed to coincide with the theatre’s maiden production, the Danish playwright Hjalmar Bergstrøm’s Karen Borneman, which opened in the first week of January 1918.18
Harris also had other theosophical connections. An older and even closer friend, Fred Housser, a schoolmate from St. Andrew’s College and the financial editor of the Toronto Daily Star, was likewise a theosophist. Inspired and perhaps counselled by these friends, and in the midst of his spiritual crisis, Harris too began to turn to theosophy as a way of penetrating the alluring impermanencies of the material world.
HARRIS’S MENTAL DISTURBANCE worsened dramatically with the news in February 1918 of the death of his only brother, Howard, a captain in the Essex Regiment. A decorated veteran of the Somme and Passchendaele, thirty-one-year-old Captain Harris was killed during a reconnaissance mission near Bapaume.19 This devastating loss, combined with the death of Thomson less than a year earlier, left Harris extremely anxious and depressed. He began suffering from a sleep disorder, what he later described as “troublous, somewhat terrified tossings and turnings and apprehensive opening of the eyes.” 20 By the spring he had suffered a complete nervous breakdown, and on the first of May he received a medical discharge from the army.
One of the first things Harris did following his discharge was to wander through Toronto’s neighbourhoods with his sketchbook. As always, he had no interest in painting what Rupert Brooke called the “public-school-and-’varsity” aspect of Toronto—the parts of the city in which he himself was raised. He sought instead the picturesque squalor of more down-at-heel precincts. Since most of his old sketching ground, the Ward, was demolished in 1913 to make way for the Toronto General Hospital, he went north to the area around Dufferin and St. Clair. In this mushrooming neighbourhood he found a suitable bedragglement. The poor suburb had been settled a decade earlier by working-class English immigrants who christened it “Earl’s Court” (soon condensed to Earlscourt) in an ironic reference to West London’s upscale Victorian suburb. To more well-heeled and well-housed Torontonians it was “shacktown,” because it consisted of dozens of small, ramshackle houses—many similar in design to Tom Thomson’s shack—built by their owners on narrow plots of land. Many had no water, sewer, gas, electricity or sidewalks, and the first paved roads arrived only in 1913.
Harris described Earlscourt as a “picturesque semi-slum.” 21 He might have known of it from a 1914 Saturday Night article that described these squatters’ dwellings as “toy houses . . . ludicrous in size and shape.” 22 But he could also have heard about Earlscourt from many of the young men who passed through Camp Borden or the District School of Musketry, because the area had one of the highest enlistment rates per capita in the British Empire: one English newspaper called it a “colony of soldiers.” 23 It had suffered, noted the paper, “very heavy casualties,” with many men returning home maimed both physically and psychologically. In 1917 a special Veterans’ Burial Plot was opened in nearby Prospect Cemetery, and so famous was the area for its sacrifices that in 1919 the Prince of Wales would visit the cemetery to plant a silver maple in honour of Earlscourt’s dead.
Harris made a number of oil sketches in the area, eventually producing a larger canvas in his studio, Outskirts of Toronto. The work shows a small clutch of houses at the foot of a hill, with another row of higgledy-piggledy shacks perched on the horizon. Like so many of the Algonquin Park School’s paintings of the Shield country, Outskirts of Toronto shows a place of solitude. There are no lively crowds or dramatic perspectives, only the faintly downtrodden stillness of his downtown urban scenes. The duckboards placed across the churned-up yellow mud and the woman stooped beside a washing line in the treeless landscape testify to the poverty and grimness of this part of Toronto. They also allude to the ooze and slime of the trenches in places such as Passchendaele—whose “evilly yellow” mud Paul Nash had graphically described in a letter to his wife24—that claimed the lives of so many Earlscourt residents.
IF THE SHACKS of Earlscourt were alluring impermanencies, Harris also sought more enduring things. In this time of crisis he sought solace in what he would later call “the ample replenishing North,” which he regarded as a “source of spiritual flow” and “eternal values.” 25
Sometime in May 1918, he and Dr. MacCallum set off by train for the North. Avoiding Algonquin Park because of its painful reminders of Tom Thomson, they travelled to Manitoulin Island on Lake Huron. Wilfred Campbell in his 1910 guidebook described the island as “rugged, lofty, and precipitous . . . The scenery is magnificent.” 26 But Harris was unimpressed, and so he and Dr. MacCallum pressed restlessly northwards, crossing the North Channel by boat and then catching a westbound cpr train to Sault Ste. Marie. On the following day the two men boarded the Algoma Central Railway and travelled into the Algoma district, swinging inland from Lake Superior and journeying north along a trestle-bridged line completed only a few years earlier.
Harris probably first learned of Algoma and its remarkable railway from Frank Johnston, who in 1916 took the acr to the end of the line at Hearst, a small town 370 kilometres north of Sault Ste. Marie. In any case, Harris found in this land of moose and muskeg the replenishment he craved. His friend Fred Housser described Algoma a few years later as country “charted on a grand scale, slashed by ravines and canyons through which run rivers, streams, and springs . . . Granite rocks rise to noble heights—their sides and tops solidly covered with hardwood, spruce and pine, a perfect glory to the autumn.” 27 Harris wrote enthusiastically to MacDonald that on leaving Sault Ste. Marie and “climbing into that paradise” it was possible to “forget entirely to give your health or state of mind even a passing thought.” The only thing necessary for peace of mind was to “give up to drinking in gorgeousness with your eyes, sweet, woodsy sounds with your ears and crisp, clean air with your lungs.” 28
If Algoma was a paradise, it was a typically Canadian one whose beauties had been harvested for many decades by commerce and industry. There were sawmills and fisheries, and each spring timber was herded down the Magpie and Michipicoten rivers into booms on Lake Superior. Hydroelectric plants on both rivers supplied the iron ore and gold mines near Wawa. Algoma Steel used the pig iron from the Helen Mine to make rails and, during the war, artillery shells. Near Goudreau, an American chemical company operated a pyrite mine. Despite these activities, the area was far from populous. Although acr officials had hoped to promote agricultural and settlements along the line, the land was unsuited to farming and towns of any size had failed to develop. Still, the area had long been visited by city slickers like Harris and Dr. MacCallum. American tourists had made their way to Sault Ste. Marie since the 1850s to shoot the rapids in canoes, and Superior’s eastern shore was so popular with visitors that Rupert Brooke, passing through Algoma in 1913, spotted bathing and boating parties along the shorelines, along with picnickers and campers “who rushed down the beach in various deshabille . . . Everyone seemed cheerful, merry and mildly raucous.” 29
Harris and Dr. MacCallum eventuall
y travelled nearly two hundred kilometres north of Sault Ste. Marie on the acr, staying for a few days in a lumber camp and visiting Michipicoten Harbour, near Wawa on Superior’s eastern shore. By the time they returned south, Harris’s recuperation had truly begun. He reported in July that he was “irritatingly healthy” and “extremely busy.” He spent much of the rest of the summer at Woodend, his family’s summer property at Allandale, on Kempenfelt Bay near Barrie. He felled trees, fitted the house with screen doors and windows, and reassembled the dock. He also began designing a 120-yard-long urban landscape for raw U.S. Army recruits—almost 700,000 of whom were called up in 1917—to use in target practice. It comprised, he wrote to MacDonald, “a ruined village, trenches, shell holes, wire and general junk,” for which he was “giving all thinkable details.” 30
Harris was also trying to paint landscapes but found the agricultural countryside around Kempenfelt Bay uninspiring: he complained to MacDonald of “the meagreness of material at hand.” What he wanted was to return to paint in Algoma. Meeting Dr. MacCallum by chance on the platform at Allandale Station, he began planning another expedition. He invited MacDonald along: “If you can possibly arrange to get away for two weeks nothing would delight me more and I hope & pray you can make the grade.” Knowing that MacDonald, too, was convalescing, he promised they would not exactly be roughing it: they would stay in either an acr caboose or one of “several quite cosy log cabins scattered along their line.” He explained, in case MacDonald was unfamiliar with rolling stock, that a caboose was “a most comfortable box. Pleasant bunks, stove, tables, chairs, and all the solid, essential comforts of home save all outdoors acts as the plumbing.” Dr. MacCallum would be happy to tackle the domestic duties “and leave us free to paint. So long as we are painting it will be a pleasure to him to care for our tummies and the utensils, fire and food required to provide us with fuel.” The idyllic arrangement had only a single drawback: “The Doc. snores on occasion.” 31
A few weeks later, at the end of August, Harris wrote MacDonald with good news. “Well James, me boy, down on your knees and give great gobs of thanks to Allah!—sing his praises, yell terrific hallelujahs that they may reach even unto His ears—we have a car waiting us on the Algoma Central!!! A car to live in, eat in and work out of. They will move us about as we desire and leave us on auspicious sidings that we may proceed to biff the landscape into a cocked hat at our sweet will.”
Harris had indeed planned for everything. Besides a stove and cooking utensils, this “movable home” would even have one bunk separated from the others so that “the Doc. may snore in arrogant seclusion.” 32
HARRIS’S PROMISES ABOUT the comforts and conveniences of the boxcar journey into Algoma must have been welcome to MacDonald. Still recovering from his stroke the previous November, he was also nursing a delicate financial condition that early in 1918 required him to move his family from the “small and rotten rickety house” in York Mills and into the Studio Building. He was also obliged to move from his top-floor studio—whose fifty-step climb he could no longer manage—and into one on the ground level.
The first months of his recuperation MacDonald spent not painting or designing but, on the advice of its editor, Barker Fairley, composing articles on Canadian art for The Rebel, a University of Toronto publication. Unable to paint, he could at least propagandize. In their exasperation and asperity, many of his pieces were worthy of A.Y. Jackson. One of them, “A Whack at Dutch Art,” lampooned the typical Canadian collector who spurned Canadian landscapes because the clear light of Georgian Bay was “too crude and clear for him in pictures, although he actually enjoys such things in his fine yacht, the Flim-Flam.” He deplored how this kind of connoisseur would happily part with $700 for a foreign work while Canadian paintings with more modest prices remained unsold. The upshot was that “men of great talent,” discouraged by the poor prospects and slight esteem, were turning their efforts elsewhere. His article ended on a positive note, comparing lovers of Canadian art to the early Christians in the catacombs beneath the streets of pagan Rome: “They are developing the faith of the future in secret, and the ground will open with them some day.” 33
MACDONALD WAS FINALLY well enough to paint by the early summer of 1918. He sketched on the waterfront of Lake Ontario and in York Mills, and later in the summer he travelled north to Muskoka. On Moon River, near the village of Bala, he painted a sketch for Cattle by the Creek, revealing a palette magnificently undimmed by either illness or the reproaches of the critics.
MacDonald was persuaded to join the boxcar expedition to Algoma despite his worries that his physical condition would hamper the efforts of the others. Also present for the journey, besides Harris and Dr. MacCallum, was Frank Johnston, now thirty years old. He had received a perfunctory invitation from Harris several weeks earlier: “Jim informs me that he has informed you that we intend going North a-sketching this fall. We would be delighted to have you join us.” 34
Harris jokingly called Johnston “the anemic, doddering Frank,” 35 but in fact Johnston fitted the profile of the husky, red-blooded Canadian painter. He had been athletic as a child growing up on Shaw Street, playing baseball and excelling on the sports field.36 His beefy physique was offset by his flamboyant dress and manner. A Lismer caricature, done about 1915, showed him wearing an extravagant bow tie and wideawake hat à la Oscar Wilde. He cultivated a Vandyke beard and a thick forelock. On social occasions he donned the claret-coloured velvet smoking jackets and flowing ties of a Victorian aesthete. (“That kind of outfit made Lawren wince,” a friend later recalled.)37 He was rarely without a cigarette, smoking as many as a hundred a day. A lover of theatre, he attended vaudeville at Shea’s Hippodrome and gave star turns at the Arts and Letters Club’s dramatic evenings, cartwheeling across the stage and performing burlesque stripteases.
This florid behaviour belied a sedate and satisfying domestic life. Johnston had married in 1910, was deliriously in love with his wife, and quickly produced four children, the youngest of whom was named for Lawren Harris. He was (like MacDonald’s wife, Joan) a devout Christian Scientist. He attended the First Church of Christ, Scientist on St. George Street and, after the service, used to “stand on the church steps and powwow about art.” 38
Johnston’s dandyish comportment also belied his love of the countryside. Although he studied under Robert Henri, famous for his New York scenes, Johnston ignored Toronto’s streets in favour of landscapes in the Don and Humber valleys. In the summer of 1915, urged by Dr. MacCallum to explore the province’s more northerly latitudes, he travelled to Bon Echo, a resort on Mazinaw Lake, in the Kawartha Lakes district of eastern Ontario. A year later he journeyed much farther north, taking the ACR in the middle of winter to Hearst. This expedition gave him certain bragging rights: none of the painters in the Studio Building, not even Thomson, had ventured to such a remote and northerly location in Ontario. The journey resulted in his first major sale. Since returning to Toronto in 1915 he regularly showed landscapes at the annual OSA exhibitions, albeit without attracting the same attention or ire as Jackson or MacDonald. In 1917, however, the National Gallery paid $250 for A Northern Night, based on studies of the aurora borealis made at Hearst. Its scrupulous handling and poetic calm suggest the influence of his teacher Daniel Garber.
Johnston was turned down by the Canadian army for service in the war—the reason is unknown—but in the summer of 1918 he, like Jackson and Varley, became a war artist. The cwmf wished to document events on the home front as well as overseas, and so Johnston received an assignment to record the manoeuvres of the Royal Flying Corps at their training bases around Toronto. Since the remuneration was slight, he kept his job at Rous and Mann, making sketches on evenings and weekends at the airfields in Armour Heights and Leaside. At the end of the summer, the man who recruited him into the cwmf, Sir Edmund Walker, supported his appeal to take leave from his duties at the airfields to travel to Algoma.39 Walker had obviously earmarked Johns
ton as one of Canadian art’s coming men and, like Dr. MacCallum, he believed that Canada’s artistic destiny lay to the north.
THE FOUR MEN, accompanied by Harris’s dog Prince, departed from Union Station early in September on an overnight cpr train to Sault Ste. Marie. At the Soo a specially equipped boxcar awaited them, a mobile studio conveniently fitted, as promised by Harris, with bunks, windows and lamps, cupboards, a stove, a sink and a water tank. The men also had use of a canoe and a jigger, a three-wheeled vehicle with which they could propel themselves along the tracks until, as MacDonald wrote, “some attractive composition of spruce tops or rock and maple” called for sketching.40
Their boxcar was hitched to a northbound acr train and then uncoupled 180 kilometres later on a siding near Canyon, where the steel was laid as recently as the winter of 1911–12. After several days of sketching near the Agawa River they were collected by a southbound train and shunted onto sidings 30 kilometres later at Hubert. A second southbound train then took them 25 kilometres to their final stop at Batchawana.
The painters were mesmerized by the sight of winding rivers, thundering waterfalls and vertiginous granite canyons covered in radiant autumn colour. Harris found in the scenery “a richness and clarity of colour” that made everything in southern Ontario seem “grey and subdued.” 41 MacDonald was even more smitten. “It is a land after Dante’s heart,” he wrote to Joan on September 11, describing how Algoma had “all the attributes of an imagined Paradise,” with the sky and “that smooth shimmering infinity of waters” resembling “a glimpse of God himself.” To describe his helpless feelings of wonder he used a metaphor from (and here we get some of his erudition) the Revelation of St. Paul, one of the Apocrypha that describes how the apostle was swept into the third heaven to witness a series of visions: “It reminds one of Paul,” he told Joan, “being caught up and hearing unutterable things.” 42
