Defiant Spirits

by Ross King

  An exhibition, planned for early in 1921, was slated to feature the work of eleven men and eight women. Jackson eagerly began conducting interviews on their behalf. “I wish every artist would focus on painting, describing and expressing the region where he lives,” he declared in La Presse. “In Toronto, seven or eight of us have endeavoured to depict northern Ontario. I wish they would do the same here in Quebec.” 5

  The art-wise people of Montreal must have been taken aback to learn that the landscape of Quebec was not being painted. Horatio Walker had been doing pastoral scenes of the Île d’Orléans since the late 1870s, and Cullen and Suzor-Coté both specialized in scenes of the snow-swathed Quebec countryside. By 1920 the great star of Quebec landscape painting was Gagnon, still only thirty-nine (a year older than Jackson). He had returned to Montreal in May 1919 after living for much of the previous fourteen years in Paris, though he had regularly criss-crossed the Atlantic by steamship to make his studies around his beloved Baie-Saint-Paul. The fact that he moved through Charlevoix country on skis, carrying a gun as well as a palette, should have made him an attractive and sympathetic figure for the painters in the Studio Building. But Gagnon did not meet the house style imposed by the Toronto painters. Although he had long since graduated from the turbid colours of his friend Horatio Walker to a more luminous and high-keyed palette, for Jackson his style was probably still too derivative of French Impressionism.

  Jackson’s hopes for the Beaver Hall Group doing in Quebec what the Group of Seven were attempting in Ontario ultimately went unfulfilled. His role as president did little to encourage the cultural nationalism or commitment to northern landscapes prevailing in the Studio Building. Heward, Coonan, Newton and Robertson, as well as one of the men, the twenty-eight-year-old Edwin Holgate, were all talented figure painters. The association nonetheless had pleasant repercussions for Jackson since he was immediately attracted to one member, twenty-four-year-old Anne Savage. A former student at the Art Association of Montreal and the Minneapolis School of Art, she had recently begun teaching art at Baron Byng High School in Montreal. It was to be the start of a long and extremely rewarding friendship that would survive, a dozen years later, Savage’s rejection of Jackson’s rather unconvincing proposal of marriage.

  HIS INTEREST IN his home province refreshed, early in February 1921 Jackson set off on a sketching expedition in what he called “the French part of Quebec.” 6 He went to the village of Cacouna, near Rivière-du-Loup, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, two hundred kilometres northeast of Quebec City. “A nice cool spot I expect,” he wrote to Catherine Breithaupt before departing, “but if Canadians live there, Canadians can paint there.” 7

  Although Cacouna was undoubtedly cold in the middle of winter, Jackson was not exactly exploring a rustic and uncharted habitant frontier. Cacouna had been a bustling tourist resort—at least in summer—since the Maison des bains opened in 1845. It was soon followed by other hotels that accommodated the hundreds of tourists who arrived each summer by train and steamboat. William Dean Howells in his 1873 novel A Chance Acquaintance described how Cacouna attracted “great numbers of Canadians who flee their cities during the fierce, brief fever of the northern summer.” 8 By the end of the nineteenth century, rich Montreal businessmen were building themselves palatial summer homes overlooking the St. Lawrence at Cacouna. Among them were Sir George Drummond’s Gads Hill and Sir Montagu Allan’s rambling neoclassical mansion, Montrose. By the 1920s, when Jackson arrived, a six-hundred-room hotel bulked over the river.

  Jackson took his ease more simply in the boarding house of a couple named Plourde. By day he roamed the countryside on snowshoes, accompanied by the Plourdes’ dog Bustare; evenings were spent playing cards and eating unstinting dinners of chicken, cream and maple syrup. After a few weeks he moved into a small hotel, deserted in the off-season but for its proprietor, M. Lafleur, and his extended family. Bored with their company, Jackson appealed to Albert Robinson, a friend from his days in St. Malo and Carhaix. Robinson enlivened the stilted atmosphere at the Lafleurs by dancing vigorous reels with Lafleur’s sister-in-law—“who must at some time have been kicked by a horse, as she had a broken nose and impaired speech” 9—as one of the daughters bashed the piano.

  Jackson and Robinson slogged through the countryside on snowshoes, doing plein-air sketches of Cacouna’s snow-heaped rooftops. In what seemed an occupational hazard for Canadian landscapists, even after the war, they found themselves mistaken by the locals for spies. Disabused of the notion, the Cacounois nonetheless remained bewildered that the two men should paint old houses and barns rather than Montrose, Gads Hill or the various other villas dotting the area. But Jackson was determined to capture an enchanting Krieghoff world of sleighs, old barns and steepled churches. He returned to Toronto with sketches of Cacouna’s brightly painted houses seen from afar and studies of children tobogganing in the shadow of the village church. Lacking the “eerie wilderness” mood of his Ontario paintings, the works show the Quebec landscape as a place of homely comforts and charming domesticity: less a terre sauvage than a vision from Maria Chapdelaine.

  JACKSON’S PREDICTION THAT he and Harris would be the only significant contributors to the 1921 exhibition did not prove entirely true. MacDonald spent part of the winter working on several large Algoma paintings despite the fact that he was hired by Lismer to teach commercial design at the Ontario College of Art (Lismer later claimed he engaged his friend to “teach artistic lettering with fine artistic insight, quote Whitman, the Bible, and East philosophy”).10 Gleams on the Hills, an undulating landscape incandescently green, orange and crimson, he created from sketches done along the Batchawana River in 1918. In another, Batchawana Rapid, whitewater in close-up purls over rocks against a background of brilliant autumn colour.

  His most remarkable work was The Solemn Land. It would be his best effort at expressing his quasi-religious experience in Algoma, the “glimpse of God himself” captured amid the infinity of waters and uprearing eminences of stone. The painting was based on several small sketches done from a vantage point (undoubtedly alongside the ACR tracks) high above a wide expanse of the Montreal River. In the finished work—at 1.5 metres wide by 1.2 metres high, one of his largest—the perspective plummets down a wooded hillside spiked with pinnacles of pine and along the river to a radiant sugarloaf painted by autumn foliage and a revelatory sunlight. He decided to send it to the 1921 OSA exhibition, along with a price tag of $700. It was the most he had ever asked for one of his works.

  While MacDonald was painting the paradisal majesty of Algoma, Harris busied himself with more infernal visions. In the spring of 1921 he travelled to what was for him the terra incognita of the Maritimes. The poet and fiction writer Charles G.D. Roberts in his 1895 guidebook The Land of Evangeline and the Gateways Thither described Nova Scotia as a “wonderland of artists” that offered the painter “subjects which are new both in line and colour.” 11 Jackson and Lismer had certainly enjoyed working in this wonderland, producing seascapes and harbour scenes and interesting themselves in quaint Nova Scotia fishing villages. Even the American urban realist George Luks, visiting Nova Scotia in 1919 for a spot of sketching and salmon fishing, was captivated by the coastal landscape and swiftly flowing rivers. In 1920 the Kraushaar Galleries in New York exhibited to great critical applause his series of watercolours featuring the “sparkling radiance” of the moonlight on Lake Rossignol and the rapids gushing past giant boulders at the area called the Screecher.12 Harris, though, was drawn to other aspects of Nova Scotia. Typically, he looked for down-at-heel neighbourhoods. What he found in Halifax, in a part of the city not mentioned in Roberts’s guidebook, inspired some of his most remarkable urban paintings so far.

  Halifax’s equivalent of the Ward or Earlscourt was Africville, a group of rundown houses and wooden tenements in the north end of the city, beside Bedford Basin and near the site of the 1917 explosion. The area was settled in the 1830s by descendents of b
lack refugees from the War of 1812 who bought their land from white merchants, including former slave-traders. The inhabitants of the community, soon dubbed Africville, worked as fishermen, stevedores and stonemasons, but by the twentieth century this self-sufficient and hard-working neighbourhood had fallen into a shameful neglect. A railway line cut it in half, a “night soil” disposal pit was situated on its eastern perimeter, and noxious industries—a tar factory, a bone mill, two slaughterhouses—had been allowed to expand into the area. The residents were denied water and sewage, and a 1919 request for fire and police protection was turned down by the Halifax authorities. The result, by the time Harris arrived in 1921, was Canada’s worst slum.13

  Whereas the other members of the Group of Seven saw as their mandate a celebration of Canada’s solitary and inhospitable wilderness, only Harris was determined to show brutal and unforgiving urban environments—those corners where Canadians suffered prejudice and economic hardship. He produced two remarkable studies of Africville, Elevator Court, Halifax and Black Court, Halifax. The scenes were stark depictions of poverty and neglect. The respectable but weathered-looking clapboard houses planted in fields of mud lack the quirky charm of many of his Toronto neighbourhood scenes. Unlike the Toronto pictures, too, where the buildings are parallel to the picture plane, the Africville paintings feature a spatial recession that draws the viewer into the claustrophobic scene in the same way Skarbina did in paintings such as The Matthiasstrasse in Hamburg. Munch-like clouds swim through the background of Black Court, and a smokestack looms behind the buildings in Elevator Court, an intimidating monolith the omnipotence of which is underscored by the rays of the setting sun with streaks of cloud and a radiating light whose sharp orthogonals match those of the melting snowbanks and the drab, almost featureless tenements.

  Earlier, Harris had celebrated Canadian industry in works such as The Eaton Manufacturing Building and The Gas Works. A decade on, he was less sanguine about belching chimneys, seeing them as monuments to greed that poisoned both the air and the soul. His poem called “Tall Stark Chimneys,” probably written about this time, described “the aspirations of men / going up / in soot and smoke and flame / and God be damned.” Another described the “black smoke, poison fumes and mad, intensified fires” of chimney stacks.14

  The age’s most famous painting of tenement life was George Bellows’s 1913 Cliff Dwellers, a snapshot of bustling immigrants in the slums of the Lower East Side. Harris used the same oblique angles as Bellows but showed none of the laundry-festooned, handbill-

  plastered, fire-escape-thronged overcrowding that makes Cliff Dwellers so enthralling. Harris’s Halifax scenes expose a terrible vacuity and stillness from which virtually all animate life is drained (only a few children appear in Black Court). Whereas Bellows’s painting carried a strong social indictment (it was based on an illustration called Why Don’t They Go to the Country for a Vacation? done by Bellows for the socialist journal The Masses), art historians have been swift—undoubtedly too swift—to discount any reproachful comment in Harris’s urban scenes.15 Although Harris’s paintings might not have had the same agenda as the members of The Eight, he clearly wanted his paintings—like his poems—to throw a light on deplorable social conditions in Canada, whether the British immigrants in Earlscourt or the even more impoverished residents of Africville. One of his friends, Doris Mills, claimed such scenes of poverty profoundly distressed Harris, a “wealthy young man” who was “frightfully sensitive.” He wanted, she claimed, “to reform the whole world.” 16

  Harris’s social concerns arose in tandem with his interest in theosophy, whose system of beliefs overlapped with reform movements like socialism and feminism. Their otherworldliness might have made theosophists seem strange bedfellows for radicals and reformers, but in fact many theosophists could be found among the ranks of socialists, suffragettes and other reformers. The socialist and freethinker T. Phillips Thompson joined the Toronto chapter of the Theosophical Society in 1891, firm in the belief that theosophy offered a coherent philosophy for socialism. His magazine Labour Advocate published articles with titles such as “Theosophy Considered in Relation to the Great Social Problem.” 17 The links were also apparent in the case of the president of the Theosophical Society, Annie Besant, a former worker for the trade union movement and a campaigner against child and female labour. “I do desire to suggest to you,” she wrote, “that a profound economic change is absolutely necessary, that unless that change is brought about the civilization cannot last, nor ought it to last with the canker of poverty eating out the very life great masses of our people.” 18

  Yet theosophy did not stop at economic change: a job still remained to be done once the canker of poverty was healed. As Besant wrote in a 1912 article called “The Future Socialism,” economics alone “are not enough to make a nation prosperous and free. Important as economics may be and are, behind economics lie men and women, and unless these men and women are trained into a noble humanity, economic schemes will fail as hopelessly as any political scheme can possibly do.” 19

  The material view of history, for theosophists, was incomplete. They believed human spiritual development—the progress towards a noble humanity—was the true motive force of history. Concerns about the “canker of poverty” led to wider and graver concerns about spiritual impoverishment, or what Harris called “the soul’s degradation.”

  FROM NOVA SCOTIA, Harris went to Newfoundland, its shoreline cliffs and small fishermen’s huts the perfect combination for him of rugged scenery and humble domestic architecture. Such views recently drew a number of American painters to Newfoundland. The Post-Impressionist Dodge Macknight (a one-time friend of Van Gogh) painted the huts and fish houses in 1906 and 1909. Then Rockwell Kent, craving “the golden North,” 20 moved to the fishing village of Brigus and created powerful northern seascapes such as Ice Floes, Newfoundland and Newfoundland Ice before being deported in 1915 as a suspected German spy.

  The fact that Harris went to Newfoundland in springtime suggests he too was hoping to paint icebergs, later to become one of his (as well as Kent’s) favourite subjects. Icebergs were prominent in the news in the first months of 1921. A mild winter meant more drifted down to Newfoundland in any year since 1912 when the Titanic was sunk. But Harris had no luck sighting icebergs, or at any rate none appeared in his work in 1921. He was awed nonetheless by the majesty of the ocean as seen from Newfoundland’s coast. It was around this time that he wrote the poem “The Sea Wind,” which contrasted the “soul-stirring voice” of the sea to the crude and ugly civilization built by man, with its “steel and sweat and grime” and the “life plundering rhythm of a billion machines.” Not only was the natural world compared favourably to the brutal processes of the machine age, but also the sea was described as the repository “of many bygone, golden ages—/ Wondrous, lost golden ages,” that slumbered “beyond the far horizons” and awaited their “radiant resurrections” when men would again become great.

  All nationalisms, it has been argued, need the concept of a golden age—a mythical period of heroism and creativity that is key to understanding and recouping a people’s “true self.” 21 But Harris’s poem, with its evocation of a wretched and repulsive civilization turning helplessly to a long-lost golden age, paints a bleak picture of Canada sharply at odds with the optimism and idea of progress underpinning the country’s nationalist temper after the Great War.

  THE SECOND GROUP of Seven exhibition, which opened on

  May 6, 1921, featured only eighty-nine works, some fifty fewer than the inaugural show a year earlier. The reviews for the most part were, if unenthusiastic, at least respectful and judicious. Sympathetic critics like Augustus Bridle and Fred Jacob covered the exhibition in, respectively, the Daily Star and the Mail & Empire; M.O. Hammond wrote it up in the Globe. No review appeared in Saturday Night: Hector Charlesworth continued to keep his powder dry. The painters were nonetheless expecting criticism to turn hostile. A few
weeks after arriving back from Cacouna, Jackson wrote to Eric Brown that he expected a backlash. “The 7 Group are not loved very much by their confrères,” he wrote on April 24, “and it will only be a matter of time before opposition takes a definite form.” 22

  Jackson’s prediction proved correct, though the first real attack came from a politician rather an artistic colleague. Three days after he wrote his letter to Brown, a Liberal mp from Ottawa named Charles Murphy rose in Parliament to condemn the purchasing policy of the National Gallery. A colleague described the fifty-eight-year-old Murphy as “a fighting Irishman, whose shillelagh very seldom slipped in his hand.” To a historian he was a man who “loved, hated and schemed with narrow, provincial intensity.” 23 In 1921 his hatred was fixed on Sir Edmund Walker, whom he accused in Parliament of turning the National Gallery into “a haven for special pets” and “a place where genteel graft is handed out.” 24

  Murphy objected, like Senator Boyer, to the National Gallery’s patronage of the Group of Seven. The three works bought from the 1920 exhibition were merely the latest in a long line of the Gallery’s acquisitions from artists in the Studio Building. Brown and Walker were staying true to their word that the gallery would support the younger artists. Four years after Harris made his (unfair) complaint about the gallery ignoring Canadian painting, MacDonald could note with satisfaction that the trustees “have shown themselves keenly interested in the movement.” 25

  MacDonald knew whereof he spoke. One of his works had departed for Ottawa each year from 1914 through 1918, and by the time of the first Group of Seven exhibition no fewer than six of his paintings were in the national collection. Every member but Carmichael was represented. Budget constraints and closed doors in 1918 did not prevent the gallery from acquiring Thomson’s The Jack Pine and Autumn’s Garland as well as twenty-seven of his sketches. And the patronage was ongoing: MacDonald’s The Solemn Land was purchased from the 1921 osa exhibition, along with a portrait by Varley of his son John. It was probably the announcement of these last two purchases—and the fact that The Solemn Land went for $700—that brought the obstreperous Murphy to his feet.