Defiant Spirits

by Ross King

  Whitman duly fulfilled this wish in literature: in “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” he described how a “Phantom” appeared to him beside Lake Ontario and urged him to “Chant me the poem . . . that comes from the soul of America”—a task that kept him busy for the next thirty-five years.40 The visual arts, however, remained in the thrall of European models. The Civil War blighted much American nationalism and patriotism, and convictions that the United States was a cultural backwater sent aspiring young American painters overseas to train in Parisian ateliers. Once back home, they produced images—like their Canadian counterparts—scarcely distinguishable from their European models. American collectors, happily assured of the superiority of the European product, ignored their work.

  American art took a nationalist turn at the end of the nineteenth century. The National Arts Club was founded in New York in 1898 with the aim of weaning collectors from foreign works and persuading them to buy American art. The commonplace that America offered few compelling subjects (“American life is so unpaintable,” lamented the Monet disciple Theodore Robinson) was urgently challenged. America was not without subjects to paint, protested one critic in 1894, simply because “she had no castles and donjon keeps.” Critics began calling for distinctively American scenes that were, as a Boston newspaper critic demanded, “racy of the soil.” Soon American painters were hastily shaking the dust of Europe from their shoes. Theodore Robinson, back from Giverny, discovered that America did in fact have subjects to paint: Vermont mountains, canals in upstate New York, sailboats on Long Island Sound. “I am only beginning to see its beauties and possibilities,” he wrote in 1895.41

  By the first decades of the new century, many American painters foreshadowed the Group of Seven’s preoccupation with landscape painting and national identity. The country’s most famous and successful artist at the turn of the century, Childe Hassam, was renowned for his patriotism. “I am an American!” he once proclaimed. “I would rather have that said of me than anything else.” 42 Seeking what he believed were typically American subjects, he often worked in a clapboard shack in Old Lyme, Connecticut, where he painted en plein air while stripped to the waist. He was a skilled canoeist and fisherman, and when he embarked on a painting trip to the Oregon desert in 1908, a local newspaper breathlessly reported how the great man had “camped for two months on the Blitzen River, 40 miles from a post-office, hundreds of miles from any railroad . . . where he painted 40 canvases.” 43 This combination of physical vigour, patriotic fervour and bare-chested depictions of far-flung locations was exactly the formula that the painters in the Studio Building were prescribing for Canadian art.

  Hassam further demonstrated his patriotism by painting his famous “flag series” during the Great War. Patriotism was, if anything, even stronger among American artists after the war, as Americans rejected European culture. In New York, Alfred Stieglitz turned from an international avant-gardism to a cultural nationalism in which the land—the “spirit and soil” of America—was supposed to lead to an American art unfettered by European influences. Having introduced Cézanne and Matisse to America, Stieglitz now wanted “America without that damned French flavour.” 44 (Following the demise of 291 he would found a new gallery called, tellingly, An American Place.) In the summer of 1918 one of his proteges, Marsden Hartley, set off for New Mexico in search of haunting and austere landscapes that would help him forge a uniquely “American” art. “I am an American discovering America,” Hartley wrote (though he took the precaution of studying Courbet and Cézanne for ideas on how to tackle the landscape). He hoped others would follow his trail westward: “There will be an art in America only when there are artists big enough and really interested enough to comprehend the American scene.” 45 It was precisely the same kind of journey of artistic inspiration and national discovery, albeit with a Yankee accent, as members of the Group of Seven took to Georgian Bay and Algoma—with similar (often unacknowledged) debts to European predecessors.

  Would American sympathies for a more homegrown style of art extend across the border? Complimentary reviews and a few high-

  profile sales could shame reticent Canadians into a more zealous support for the Group of Seven.

  THE Exhibition of Paintings by the Group of Seven Canadian Artists opened at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts in the first week of November 1920. A wire-manufacturing city of 150,000 people sixty kilometres west of Boston might have seemed an obscure and unlikely venue for the group to launch themselves in the United States. Under its director Raymond Wyer, however, the Worcester Art Museum provided a congenial home for progressive art. A New York Times interview in the summer of 1920 quoted Wyer’s ambition to challenge “intellectual stagnation” and appeal to an “unprejudiced and broad-visioned” public by exhibiting paintings that revealed “a combination of strength, subtlety and modern spirit which is indispensable to art of a vital nature.” 46 The museum had already hosted a selection of war paintings by Nevinson, Nash and Wyndham Lewis, and its exhibition of contemporary American artists such as John Sloan, a member of The Eight, had closed earlier in the year. The Group of Seven’s paintings were to be Wyer’s latest offering of the “modern spirit.”

  The Group of Seven’s American tour began well. Much modernist painting in Europe was a response to the disintegration of traditional society in the industrialization and urbanism of the machine age. The loss of social cohesion and spiritual meaning led to alienation, despair and meaninglessness—crises self-consciously reflected in the agitated brushwork and jangling colours of Post-Impressionism. Little of this pessimism and alienation touched the Group of Seven, most of whom (Harris with his urban scenes was the obvious exception) were still marked by the national pride and the infectious optimism of the booming Laurier years. The Canadian painters used expressive brushwork and European innovations in colour perception not to record disintegration and dysphoria but to proclaim their excitement, optimism and wonder—and sometimes their foreboding and disquiet—at the “wildness of beauty” in the northern landscape.

  This combination of modernist technical innovation and New World optimism played well with an American audience. The thirty paintings in the exhibition were well received by the critic for the Worcester Telegram. What some Toronto critics had deplored as an ugly landscape and an even uglier style of painting was celebrated by the American reviewer as conveying “a splendid feeling of the freshness and the joy of living in this beautiful world of ours.” Jackson’s Terre sauvage was singled out for inspiring in viewers “the feeling of grandeur and solitude in a new world,” and Thomson’s The West Wind was extolled as a “powerful canvas.” The reviewer added that the works were painted “in the most modern way”—no mean compliment in view of how the likes of Nash, Nevinson and Sloan had only recently vacated the museum.47 The exhibition was due to close at the end of November. From Worcester it would move to Boston, followed by museums in cities such as Rochester, Toledo, Indianapolis and Cleveland.

  Meanwhile, another exhibition of art by the Group of Seven was simultaneously beginning its advance through Western Canada. This whistle-stop tour took a collection of their smaller sketches to Fort William, Brandon, Moose Jaw, Calgary and Edmonton. Museum-

  goers on the Prairies no doubt were puzzled that this “national” school of art purporting to celebrate the Canadian landscape included not a single glimpse of countryside west of Wawa. The serial paintings of the Precambrian Shield would have spoken to the thousands of migrants to Western Canada merely of interminable vistas glimpsed through the windows of the cpr trains that transported them across hardscrabble tracts of forest to the abundant promise of the Prairies. The scrub-and-boulder landscape above Sault Ste. Marie must have been, to most westerners, an unvarying hiatus of economic infeasibility stretching between the factories of southern Ontario and the farmlands of the West. That such an unfertile and underpopulated region was to be celebrated as the quintessence of Canada could have aroused only incre
dulity. Then, of course, there was the Hot Mush style. A critic in Edmonton, although able to appreciate the beauty of Ontario’s rivers and waterfalls, objected to the way the painters were abusing “the talent the Lord gave them” by distorting “His handiwork, making it hideous in the eyes of the people.” 48

  The curious and courteous response in Moose Jaw was, however, more typical of the reception in Western Canada. The fifty works by members of the group, including five works by Thomson, went on display in, for want of a gallery, the show rooms of John Bellamy’s furniture store (the setting could have been worse: Bellamy also owned a funeral parlour). They were joined by twenty-five works, complete with five sketches by F.M. Bell-Smith and two by Homer Watson, from the collection of William Grayson, a local barrister and landowner. The Moose Jaw Evening Times reported Grayson’s opening address. After speaking about “the various European schools of art,” he discussed “the efforts being made by Canadian painters to break away from the older traditions and the methods of their masters and establish a school of art distinctly Canadian that would depict in true-to-nation tints the crystalline atmosphere, vivid colourings of our inimitable sunsets and autumn woods, and the rugged magnificence of our mountains.” 49

  The newspaper’s correspondent was at least as knowledgeable as Grayson. On the eve of the opening, the Evening Times carried a long article introducing the various members of the group. Harris was identified as “the recognized leader,” MacDonald “the poet-colourist,” Johnston “the foremost painter in tempera in America,” and Jackson was known for “sketches made in inaccessible places with the thermometer many degrees below zero.” The paper hailed Thomson, who received at least as much publicity as the others, as “the most unique, spontaneous and remarkable of them all.” According to the paper’s correspondent, he was the group’s “martyr, its great genius, its founder, its champion, its dominating influence.”

  The wide publicity and the newspaper’s positive reviews (the group’s “splendid works of art” were celebrated as “a great contribution to the artistic life of Canada”) brought large numbers of people into Bellamy’s; a late-night opening was even required to accommodate the visitors.50 When the paintings left Moose Jaw, Harris’s The Drive remained behind, in the lecture room of the public library, as a loan from the National Gallery.

  ALONGSIDE THESE TRAVELLING exhibitions, a second Group of Seven show was planned for the Art Gallery of Toronto in the spring of 1921. It and the future of the group as a whole were, however, soon placed in jeopardy. The American and Western Canadian exhibitions siphoned some of the best work from their studios, and by the autumn of 1920 Jackson was fretting about whether the yield of his fellow painters would be enough to warrant a new show in Toronto. “Varley and MacDonald are the non-producers,” he complained to Eric Brown. “Lismer is pretty well tied up with the school and has to paint with a rush. Harris and I will be the big contributors.” 51

  Many of these contributions would come from the Algoma hills. The autumn of 1920 saw Jackson, Harris and Johnston departing on yet another voyage—Harris’s fifth—along the ACR tracks, again to Mongoose Lake. They stayed in the same cottage as before and enjoyed remarkable weather. “We only had half a day of rain on our whole Algoma trip . . . A more wonderful autumn there never was,” Jackson reported to Catherine Breithaupt.52 Johnston was, as usual, the most prolific, managing as many as eight sketches per day.53 Although he had missed the spring jaunt to Algoma, his presence on this latest expedition indicated a lack of any ill will between him and other members of the group. Events, though, soon led him to distance himself from his colleagues. Jackson later claimed the “bad publicity” over the first exhibition caused Johnston to resign from the Group of Seven: “From an economic standpoint he had difficulty in earning a living from his painting. People were afraid to buy pictures that were the subject of ridicule.” 54

  Economic considerations no doubt played a part in Johnston’s resignation, though the full story was more nuanced. Not only was there little ridicule over the first Group of Seven exhibition, but also, Johnston suddenly found himself able to sell his work. An invitation to exhibit two hundred of his tempera paintings at the picture gallery in Eaton’s in December 1920 resulted in respectable sales. His tempera paintings had a clear appeal to a clientele weaned on the prettified images of painters such as Georges Chavignaud. Toronto buyers proved welcoming to a painter who, as a reviewer observed, was more decorative and pictorial than “his ultra-radical companions.” 55 As another critic noted, Johnston’s “imaginative temperament that delights in allegories and fairy tales” had rendered him “extremely popular” with the public, and the Worcester Telegram praised his “delicately drawn, decorative compositions” with their “very pleasing combinations of colour.” 56 Even some of their names—Rhapsodie, Dream Days, Land o’ Dreams—suggested poetic associations at odds with the more vehement interpretations of the landscape issuing from the ateliers of the Studio Building.

  Johnston seems to have worried that further association with a collective billed in some sections of the press as “ultra-radical” might dent his popularity and jeopardize his commercial prospects among Toronto’s skittish picture-buying public. One of his Christian Scientist friends later explained why he left: “It was purely financial. It was because he was supporting his family, and because he felt that he would . . . have to do potboilers, a bit. That he would have to do that in order to support his family. And he knew that there were certain pictures of his that everybody fell for and liked . . . that would sell more.” 57

  Whether or not he had anything to fear, much was at stake for Johnston financially by the start of 1921. The last few years had been anni mirabiles for him. He enjoyed the active support of Eric Brown and Sir Edmund Walker, he was paid $1,500 for his work for the Canadian War Records Office, he was represented in the National Gallery and he was elected to an associate membership in the RCA. Best of all, much critical praise, and even a little money, had been lavished on his work. In the spring of 1919, around the time of the Algoma exhibition, he left his job as a designer to paint full-time. “I am very glad to hear that you are starting out on your own,” wrote Brown, “and I do not think you need have any fear of the future.” 58

  Buoyed by his successes, Johnston had ambitious plans for housing his family. After several years of living on Keewatin Avenue, near Yonge and Eglinton, he began designing and building a much larger home. A grand affair on St. Germain Avenue, in an upscale neighbourhood north of Yonge and Lawrence, it would feature a large studio and cathedral windows. With its $22,000 price tag making it nearly fourteen times the cost of the average Toronto house, Johnston evidently reasoned he could not risk alienating the public.59 He decided to go it alone. The Group of Seven would become a group of six.

  4 MULTIPLES OF UGLINESS

  HANGING IN THE parlour of Geneva Jackson’s Kitchener home was a painting by Cornelius Krieghoff, done about 1847. Called The Ice Bridge at Longue-Pointe, it was a classic Quebec scene: toque-wearing habitants in blanket coats crossing a frozen lake in horse-drawn sleighs, with a steepled church and several humble dwellings in the background.

  A.Y. Jackson professed a great admiration for Krieghoff, who died in 1872. His grandfather Henry Jackson, a railway engineer who lived at Longueuil, Quebec, seems to have known the Dutch painter. Jackson eulogized him as “the leading pioneer painter of Canada . . . There was something wild in him, something of the coureur-du-bois and of the colonist.” 1 This description did little justice to Krieghoff, a velvet-suited, beaver-hatted, flute-playing bohemian whose Quebec scenes owed as much to the sledging and ice-skating paintings of seventeenth-century Dutch artists like Adriaen van de Velde as they did to any real-life toque-and-toboggan excursions along the snowy lanes of rural Quebec. But for Jackson, determined to make Krieghoff in his own image, the Dutchman’s work marked the high-water mark in nineteenth-century Canadian art. For many years after his death, in Jackson’s view
, “painting in this country produced nothing of consequence.” 2

  Jackson was dismissive of much Quebec painting apart from Krieghoff. Between 1913 and 1920 he made no secret of his preference for both Toronto’s artistic milieu and the Ontario landscape. But by the early 1920s his interest in Quebec suddenly revived. Part of this enthusiasm could have been a simple nostalgia for the vanishing world depicted by Krieghoff in his aunt Geneva’s parlour and more recently portrayed with great success in Louis Hémon’s novel Maria Chapdelaine, published in 1916 with illustrations by Suzor-Coté (Clarence Gagnon would illustrate an even more celebrated edition in 1933). Jackson complained that in rural Quebec “beautiful old types of house architecture are giving way to bungalows and other nondescript forms.” 3 Unlike Harris, he showed no interest in Ontario’s architecture, but suddenly he was seized with the desire to capture some of these beautiful old habitant dwellings on canvas before the “nondescript forms” of the modern world swept them away.

  Jackson’s interest in Quebec’s artistic scene was further raised by the formation in Montreal of a loose coalition of young (mostly anglophone) painters called the Beaver Hall Group, after the communal studio several of them shared, in self-conscious emulation of the Studio Building, at 350 Beaver Hall Hill. Jackson met some members for the first time in Montreal in the autumn of 1920, a few months after they elected him president. Unhappy circumstances took him back to the city. His sketching holiday in Algoma was cut short when he learned via telegram that his beloved mother—the woman addressed in his letters as “little Marmoo” and “my dear darling little Mater” 4—was gravely ill. The Beaver Hall Group was led by Jackson’s friend Randolph Hewton and included a half-dozen former students of his old teacher William Brymner. Unlike the Group of Seven, this Montreal coalition included a strong contingent of women, including Nora Collyer, Emily Coonan, Prudence Heward, Mabel May, Kathleen Morris, Lilias Torrance Newton, Sarah Robertson and Anne Savage.