by Ross King
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the shores of Gitche Gumee were in danger of being forgotten by tourists and artists alike. The development of resorts such as Muskoka and the tourist facilities in the Rockies meant the romance and popularity of the Shield country north of Superior—and its place in the popular imagination—began to fade. Jackson and Harris therefore encountered the terrain with a freshness and lack of expectation, and with all the evangelical enthusiasm of pioneers and explorers. The terrain astonished them. “I know of no more impressive scenery in Canada for the landscape painter,” Jackson later wrote of the North Shore. “There is a sublime order to it, the long curves of the beaches, the sweeping ranges of hills, and headlands that push out into the lake.” 20 Harris was equally awed. The pristine skies over Lake Superior possessed a “singing expansiveness and sublimity” that he believed existed nowhere else in Canada.21 If Algoma was where MacDonald indulged his Edenic fantasies, for Harris the land north of Superior came to hold the deepest spiritual allure, its seemingly primeval purity the flipside of the degradation witnessed several months earlier in Africville.
If the scenery was transcendent, the accommodation, compared with the cozy Algoma excursions, was primitive. “It was a strenuous life,” Jackson boasted.22 That autumn they camped beside frigid lakes, digging a trench in the middle of their tent and filling it with hot embers for warmth. Weasels and whisky jacks invaded the campsites and stole their food. Fortified against the cold and wet by Harris’s favourite breakfast cereal, Dr. Jackson’s Roman Meal (a mixture of wheat, rye, flaxseed and bran), they plunged into Superior’s famously cold waters. Harris remained relentlessly optimistic, even on the many days it rained. “It is clearing in the west” became his catchphrase.23
They made numerous sketches, with Harris in particular inspired by the harsh northern landscape. Its stark majesty was imbued, in his eyes, with a numinous significance. Rockwell Kent once wrote that he craved “snow-topped mountains, dreary wastes and the cruel northern sea” because they revealed “wonders . . . a thousand times more eloquent of the eternal mystery than those of softer lands.” 24 Doris Mills, a friend to both Harris and Kent, later claimed the two men were “spiritual brothers,” and for Harris, too, the North was a place to be celebrated for what he called “mystery and bigness.” 25 By the early 1920s he was likewise beginning a quest to uncover the more spiritual dimensions of the snow-capped northern landscape.
Kent’s journeys to the rugged continental margins—Newfoundland, an island off Alaska, Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego—were voyages of artistic and personal discovery having little to do with any kind of nationalism. But for Harris the spiritual was never completely detached from national or at least geographical considerations. He believed that viewing a northern Canadian landscape of lakes and hills allowed an artist to glimpse the universal relations that were the proper business of the artist. The sight of the Precambrian Shield gave the Canadian artist “a different outlook from men in other lands.” The clear air, the soil and rocks, the rearing mountains and plummeting temperatures—these geographical and atmospheric features “move into a man’s whole nature,” he wrote, “and evolve a growing, living response that melts his personal barriers, intensifies his awareness, and projects his vision through appearance to the underlying reality.”
Exactly how and why these unique artistic and spiritual insights about hidden realities should be vouchsafed to those who made their way into granite-capped latitudes or onto snowy elevations was not explained beyond vague references to the “top of the continent” as a “source of spiritual flow” that radiantly bathed Canadians (or, at least, the Canadian painter with a cpr ticket and a pair of hiking boots) at the expense of “the southern teeming of men.” 26
HOW DID ONE paint a physical world that, no matter how alluring, was merely a surface to be X-rayed by the artist seeking an “underlying hidden reality”?
Back in Toronto, Harris began working in a simpler and more pared-down style in order to reintegrate form and spirit and discover the “eternal mysteries” behind the blue-sky-and-basalt natural world. Sometime in the autumn of 1921 he began work on Above Lake Superior, one of his most important paintings. The flowing lines and flaming colours that had been the hallmarks of the Hot Mush painters were replaced by glacial tones and stark forms suggesting—not the swirling agitation of the earlier canvases—but a magnificent and revelatory stillness. The expressive energy of his brushwork disappeared as the voluminous shapes of the landscape hardened into geometric abbreviations. A self-conscious rigour controlled the entire composition. A horizon line split the painting exactly in two, with the top half further sliced into strips of cirrus cloud. In the foreground, bare tree trunks, elongated and alien looking, stretched yearningly upward. Placed with symmetrical precision in the middle of the painting, and dominating the whole, was the mass of a distant hill, a brooding hummock shaped like a truncated pyramid.
Harris’s geometrized hill in Above Lake Superior was intended as a piece of theosophical symbolism. The sonorous fancies of theosophy had already been translated to the picture plane by Kandinsky and Mondrian, and more recently by Nicholas Roerich, a one-time Ballets Russes set designer (and the man who in the 1930s would persuade Henry A. Wallace to put the pyramid and “all-seeing eye” onto the American one-dollar bill).27 Pyramids and triangles functioned as important theosophical symbols: the seal of the Theosophical Society featured two interlaced triangles. A series of articles on the “Symbolism of the Triangle” appeared in the American Theosophist in 1913, and the opening chapter of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art recounted how the triangle represented “the life of the spirit” (and triangles and acute angles are scattered through Kandinsky’s compositions). The apex of the triangle marked, for Kandinsky, the “joyful vision” of a spiritual and artistic avant-garde, the base an uncomprehending multitude in need of elevation.28
Although not yet a member of the Toronto Theosophical Society, for several years Harris had been, as his friend Doris Mills put it, “studying the masters”—theosophists such as Blavatsky and Besant as well as Rabindranath Tagore and various other “eastern Johnnies.” He even stopped smoking and drinking alcohol. “He wanted to be so pure,” claimed Mills, “that the wings of God would sweep straight through him and find no obstruction at all.”
Theosophy was a source of solace to Harris. Although recovered from his breakdown, he was still deeply troubled. Mills sensed a “great sorrow” beneath his outward cheer. About this time she wrote a poem, “To lsh,” catechizing his “exquisite agony of sorrow” and the “pain of the world beating and pulsing” within him. Although the pain was partly his distress at the economic and spiritual deprivation of places like Earlscourt and Africville, an increasingly anguished personal life also darkened his mood. By the early 1920s he and Trixie had been married for more than a decade. During that time the “nice, gay little thing” (as Mills patronizingly called her) changed little in her outlook and priorities. While Harris went “deeper and deeper and deeper . . . Trixie just stayed where she was,” according to Mills. “She didn’t grow. She was just a nice, nice woman but she didn’t grow, and she couldn’t possibly follow him. She couldn’t follow what he was doing. She couldn’t follow what he was thinking. She couldn’t do it, and it meant that at home there was no one very close to him . . . not really close.” 29
Harris found like-minded companionship with Mills and her husband, Gordon, an amateur writer and musician who was a member of the Arts and Letters Club. He also enjoyed the friendship of his old school friend Fred Housser and Housser’s beautiful and talented wife, Bess, a painter and journalist. He painted Bess Housser’s portrait early in 1920, when she was thirty, and later that year displayed it at the Group of Seven’s first exhibition. It was probably as he worked on this portrait, if not earlier, that he fell in love with her. He never sold the portrait or showed it in public again, and his feelings for Bess likewise need
ed to be concealed from the public gaze: Fred Housser was his friend, after all, and divorce in Toronto in the 1920s was almost unthinkable. Although the divorce rate in Canada had risen slightly since the first three decades of Confederation witnessed fewer than ten cases a year, the number was still statistically minuscule.30 Often it was necessary to prove adultery or immoral behaviour before a divorce could proceed. Such requirements involved private detectives and, inevitably, journalists. A decade later, these laws resulted in farcical scenes: private detectives wielding flashlights burst into the Toronto apartment of the man with whom Dr. Frederick Banting’s wife was having an affair. As a friend of Dr. Banting observed, the unseemly divorce action sent the Nobel laureate, at the time the most famous man in Canada, tumbling from the pinnacle to the gutter.31
For Harris, divorce would have been socially awkward and embarrassing; not the least of the victims would have been his ten-year-old son. And so, as Mills (also a close friend of Bess) wrote in her poem, he carried on with his heart “bleeding within him.”
AFTER LEAVING THE Group of Seven, Frank Johnston put geographical as well as artistic distance between himself and his former colleagues. In the summer of 1921 he moved to Winnipeg to become principal of the Winnipeg School of Art, founded eight years earlier. The perceived apostasy of his departure rankled his former colleagues. According to Doris Mills, the other members “were very disgusted about him” because they believed his motives were financial. “It seemed not idealistic enough.” 32
At times, though, it must have seemed that Fred Varley, not Johnston, was the absent member of the Group of Seven. Reviews of their shows sometimes failed to mention his name, and he in no obvious way shared the regnant nationalism of some of his colleagues. Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay was an anomaly: since returning from Europe he had been concentrating on portraits, not forests and lakes. Besides his portrait of Vincent Massey, he completed those of Massey’s father, Chester, and father-in-law, Sir George Parkin; of Barker Fairley; of Fairley’s wife, Margaret; of a woman named Ethel Ely, the wife of a Toronto haberdasher; and of a working-class Yorkshire immigrant named
Mrs. Goldthorpe, whom he outfitted in a red kerchief and open-necked red blouse so that she could masquerade as an Augustus John–style gypsy in a work called Gypsy Blood.33
Regular commissions notwithstanding, Varley’s domestic and professional life remained as precarious as ever. No sooner was Stormy Weather sold in 1921 than the painter faced turbulent weather of his own. Doris Mills claimed that whereas the rest of the Group of Seven were “angels, morally,” Varley “was much more of a libertine.” 34 Shortly after Maud Varley gave birth to their fourth child, his libertinism came to light: intercepting a letter from London, Maud discovered her husband’s infidelity with Florence Fretton. She was deeply distressed but ultimately powerless (as Harris was discovering in the midst of his own marital unhappiness). Indeed, as a woman with little money, and as an immigrant with few family connections in Canada, she was far more powerless than Harris. Varley confessed his “follies & indulgence,” claiming that Florence was the first person with whom he had “besmirched” himself.35
The couple resolved to carry on as before. Within the year, using Maud’s modest inheritance, they arranged a mortgage on a house on Colin Avenue, a few blocks north of Upper Canada College, on the fringes of Forest Hill. Calm did not descend on the household. Whatever money Varley earned—sometimes sizable amounts from his society portraits—quickly disappeared. Sheets were tacked to the windows for want of curtains, the children ran about “like wild things,” and “tremendous parties” at the house witnessed both Varley and Maud drinking heavily despite the fact that Maud was a Christian Scientist.36
Varley’s artistic career remained thwarted. His champion, Barker Fairley, fretted over his slim chances for success in Canada. “I have come to the conclusion that Varley’s prospects as a painter are just as precarious as they were ten years ago,” he wrote to Eric Brown, “and that there seems nothing for it but to try to push him out of Canada into London or New York. The support Varley received here in the past two or three years . . . all reduces itself to the enthusiasm of a handful of people, including yourself, whose united efforts do not seem to suffice to carry the man indefinitely.” The portraits for the Massey family brought money and acclaim, but Fairley recognized the limited market for his friend’s skills since “his work is not unoriginal enough for commissions to come in unsought.” 37
Fairley did manage to find work for him. By the end of 1921 Varley was at work on portraits of such worthies as Irving Heward Cameron, a recently retired professor of surgery at the University of Toronto. Known as the “philosophical surgeon,” Dr. Cameron had served overseas with John McCrae, with whom he made translations from Latin and Greek.38 A more debonair sitter was Huntley Gordon, the
Montreal-born star of Hollywood films such as The Million Dollar Dollies, The Frisky Mrs. Johnson and My Lady o’ the Pines. As if to compensate for his folly and indulgence, Varley also began a series of portrait sketches of Maud and the children.
6 GYPSIES, LEPURS, AND FREAKS
THE GROUP OF Seven’s tour of American art museums ended in January 1922 in Muskegon, Michigan. Once known as the “Lumber Queen of the World,” Muskegon made an apt location to conclude an exhibition featuring so many scenes of Canada’s timber-producing regions. In Muskegon, as elsewhere, from Worcester to Moose Jaw, the painters earned their reputation as modernists. The reviewer for the Muskegon Chronicle praised the “crudeness” and “ruggedness” of “these big splotchy things” as evidence that the Group of Seven were “radical in their methods” and had “seceded from the older schools.” Gratifyingly, he declared that the thirty paintings “make evident with a loud clear voice that Canada has something to say in the realm of painting.” 1
The American tour may have been a critical success, but after fifteen months of travel, the hoped-for sales to American collectors and museums failed to materialize, and all but one of the paintings returned to Toronto. The lack of sales to institutions should not have been surprising or discouraging. American museums were not yet committed to buying Post-Impressionist art—even works by Cézanne or Matisse, or homegrown artists such as Marsden Hartley—in any quantities. Although the first Cézanne entered an American public collection (the Metropolitan Museum of Art) in 1913, almost no other examples of European or American modernism were purchased by American museums prior to the early 1920s.2 It was in fact a rare coup that Lawren Harris’s A Side Street was bought in 1921 by the Detroit Institute of Arts. But it proved the lone sale (and even it was eventually rejected, repatriated across the Peace Bridge in 1956). Commercial prospects were scarcely better in Canada, apart from those to the National Gallery or a few cognoscenti such as Dr. MacCallum and Vincent Massey.
Casting a cold eye on this dearth of commercial success, Hector Charlesworth pronounced for the first time on the Group of Seven as a collective. The artists had only themselves to blame, he wrote, because “they keep on producing stuff that people will not buy.” People did not want to hang on the walls of their homes pictures of swamps and slums: they wanted “horses hitched to a logging sleigh; the familiar old snake fence, with a woods in the distance.” 3 In fact, this appraisal was too sanguine about public tastes, since few Canadians wanted images of Canadiana of any kind on their walls. In 1910 Frances Anne Hopkins had lamented, “I have not found Canadians at all anxious hitherto for pictures of their own country.” 4 A decade later, little had changed. In the early 1920s, only 2 per cent of all paintings sold in Canada were done by Canadian artists.5
LACK OF COMMERCIAL success or international impact failed to bring about a change in tactics. By 1922 the painters had settled into what had become an undeviating routine. In March they showed a small number of works at the osa exhibition, followed by a larger display for the third Group of Seven exhibition in May. The foreword to their catalogue repeated many now-familiar doctrines about ch
allenges to convention, new methods, the impossibility of a European style capturing the autumn pageantry of our northern woods, and so forth.
Two new invitees appeared at the group’s 1922 exhibition, but neither did anything to expand the collective’s profile or heighten its aesthetic power or credentials. They were merely made up of two friends, the painter and printmaker William J. Wood and the historian and teacher Percy J. Robinson, an amateur painter and a member of the Madawaska Club. Their inclusion was disappointing in view of the calibre of other painters who received no invitations. Florence McGillivray, now living in Ottawa, would have been an inspired choice to enhance the exhibition. Likewise Peter Sheppard, a gifted painter of wilderness landscapes, maritime scenes and majestic Toronto cityscapes. The latter in particular, in works like The Building of the Bloor Street Viaduct (1916) and The Arrival of the Circus (1919), marked him out as a rare talent, well versed in modern painterly techniques and possessed of a visionary approach to the urban landscape.
Nor were invitations issued to any of the Beaver Hall painters, despite the critic for La Presse praising them (the women in particular) as the most exciting and accomplished artists showing work in Montreal. The approach of these Montreal painters, who eschewed nationalism in favour of individual expression, probably disqualified them from the holy-old-mackinaw tone of the Toronto shows. In any case, no safety rope linked Beaver Hall Hill and the Studio Building. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was to be no breakthrough for the Group of Seven in 1922. Attendance was much the same as in previous years—some 2,800 people—and no sales were made.
