by Ross King
The composition of the jury should have reassured Charlesworth and Horne Russell. A number of younger artists were included: Lismer, Randolph Hewton and the American-born sculptor Florence Wyle. But the others, all five of them members of the rca, were drawn from among the most eminent figures in Canadian art. There was Horatio Walker (winner of numerous international medals), Clarence Gagnon, Franklin Brownell, Frederick Sproston Challener (credited in 1913 with having “perhaps the keenest sense of light and brilliancy of colour of any of the Canadian painters”),32 and the portrait painter
E. Wyly Grier, president of the osa between 1908 and 1913. Although he painted in a conservative style, Grier was a friend of Brown, a fellow Christian Scientist who once called him the “wise head of the tribe.” 33 Horne Russell himself sulkily refused the offer of a seat on the jury.
As the jury set to work choosing the selection of paintings for Wembley, the members of the Group of Seven must have been apprehensive. They would be prominently featured in the display: there could be no doubt of that. But success at Wembley would be vital for the group. With no new group exhibitions planned for Toronto in either 1923 or 1924, the British Empire Exhibition offered one of the few stages—and a major one at that—on which they might prove themselves.
IN THE MIDST of these debates, the painter who already made his mark in London, however ephemerally, was suffering his habitual difficulties. Augustus Bridle wrote in his review of the 1922 Group of Seven that Varley seemed uninterested in most of the things seen in the north. But one year later, in the summer of 1923, Varley was forced into a sudden and intimate acquaintance with Shield country. Evicted from their Toronto house for missing mortgage payments, he and his family took refuge in a tent in the Kawartha Lakes. Their rescuer—the man who offered the tent—was E.J. Pratt, the endpapers for whose collection of poetry, Newfoundland Verse, Varley had illustrated several months earlier.
Varley’s financial problems stemmed, according to Sir Edmund Walker, from the fact that he worked “fitfully instead of industriously.” 34 But Varley had been more industrious than fitful in 1922 and 1923. With portrait commissions few and far between, he had taught summer school for the oca and accepted numerous commercial commissions. He also turned his hand to book illustration for The Ryerson Press.
Varley’s design work for The Ryerson Press brought him into contact with the kind of cultural nationalism prevailing in the Studio Building. Lorne Pierce, Ryerson’s chief editor since 1920, was hoping to do in the realm of literature what the Group of Seven was attempting in the visual arts. An ordained Methodist minister from Ontario, he had taught summer school in Saskatchewan in 1909 and 1910. His experiences on the immigrant mosaic of the Prairies—so different, with its Mennonites, Doukhobors and black farm labourers, from the Anglo-Saxon Ontario of his youth—convinced him of the need for a distinctive Canadian literature to shape a national identity that might encompass and indoctrinate these hundreds of thousands of newcomers. A national literature could further serve, he believed, to heal the rift between English and French Canada. The introduction to his 1922 anthology Our Canadian Literature asserted (with sublime optimism) that English and French Canadians “speak two languages, yet we have but one passionate loyalty—Canada!” 35 Inspired by the nationalism of the Group of Seven, he turned, naturally enough, to the painters themselves to design and illustrate his books. With MacDonald busy working on McClelland & Stewart’s list (Bliss Carman’s Later Poems in 1921, Pauline Johnson’s Legends of Vancouver, Isabel Ecclestone Mackay’s Fires of Driftwood in 1922 and Rogers’s Stories of the Land of Evangeline in 1923), Pierce enlisted the services of Varley.
Pratt’s poetry captured what Augustus Bridle would have called the “essential virilities” of life in a vital and dangerous northern land by the sea. Like Lampman and Campbell, Pratt was haunted by the harshness and hostility of nature—the fateful animus he glimpsed in the sinking of the Titanic off Newfoundland in 1912 (the subject of one of his later poems) and the drowning of his friend and teacher George Blewett four months later at Go Home Bay. The first poem in Newfoundland Verse, “The Ice-Floes,” grimly imagined a real-life tragedy whose aftermath he witnessed in 1898, when ss Greenland steamed into St. John’s with its flag at half-mast, its decks stacked with the bodies of twenty-five dead seal hunters, and another twenty-three missing. His poem describes how a day of killing seals (“From the nose to the tail we ripped them, / And laid their quivering carcasses flat / On the ice; then with our knives we stripped them”) ended with a shrieking gale, gusts of snow, desperation, madness and, finally, mass death.
Newfoundland Verse appeared to great critical acclaim in the spring of 1923. Calling it a welcome change from the “usual fifth-rate, airy, fairy stuff” that passed for poetry in Canada (presumably, the lyric poetry of Bliss Carman and others), one critic hailed it as “vigorous, red-blooded verse.” 36 With one poetic bound, forty-one-year-old Ned Pratt, a lecturer in English with anemia, a heart murmur and a doctoral dissertation on Pauline eschatology, landed four-square among the virile makers of Canadian culture. Like them, he was helped along in his efforts to describe what he called a land “not charactered . . . by History’s pen” by an acquaintance with an international avant-garde, in his case the free verse and Imagist poetry of Ezra Pound and T.E. Hulme.37
Pratt and Varley already knew each other from the Arts and Letters Club. Varley’s ongoing behaviour—his drinking, his temper, his libertinism—“caused a certain amount of estrangement” (according to Mills) from other members of the Group of Seven.38 He appears to have found in the Newfoundland-born Pratt a more reliable and congenial friend than he had in the group. Pratt came to the rescue, at any rate, when the bailiffs appeared at the door of the Varley home on Colin Avenue. A year earlier, Pratt and his wife had purchased a cottage in Bobcaygeon, 170 kilometres northeast of Toronto in the Kawartha Lakes, where Pratt enjoyed shooting ducks and playing golf. On one side of his property was his friend, the poet Arthur Phelps, author of A Bobcaygeon Chapbook and the man who first introduced him to free verse and Imagism; on the other was a vacant lot in which Varley and his family—consisting now of four children between the ages of two and thirteen—were invited to pitch a tent.
Just as MacDonald, a devotee of Henry David Thoreau, once ended up immersed in a Walden-like world of enforced privation and self-sufficiency, Varley, who idealized gypsies like his hero Augustus John, suddenly found himself leading the impecunious and nomadic life of a Romany. He had been fascinated by gypsies, those romantic symbols of individual freedom and vagabond living, ever since he saw their caravans as a boy in the Peak District outside Sheffield.39 It is not difficult to see what he identified with in these outcasts who lived hand-to-mouth existences on the margins of society with their broods of children and their proverbial love of music and, when in funds, drink.
Several years after dressing a woman named Goldthorpe in gypsy costume for the expressive portraits Gypsy Blood and Gypsy Head, Varley painted a scene in Bobcaygeon casting members of his own family as campfire castaways. Evening in Camp shows Maud by a campfire with thirteen-year-old Dorothy and the infant Peter, their tent behind them against a twilit sky. The trio is bathed in ruddy firelight, with Maud staring sadly into the fire and swaddling two-year-old Peter on her lap. The scene is almost religious, a
modern-dress Rest on the Flight into Egypt with Maud cast as a bob-haired Madonna. Most of all, it is a tender family portrait in which Dorothy’s awkward pose and Maud’s sad meditation sum up the uncertainty faced by the Varleys in the summer of 1923.
VARYLEY’S CAMPFIRE IDYLL in the Kawarthas was soon interrupted. Before the summer was out, he was hurrying back to Toronto for an unusual assignment. An Anglican minister, the Reverend Lawrence Skey, had given MacDonald an intriguing commission: the decoration of St. Anne’s Anglican Church in the Parkdale district of Toronto.
Unlike several other members of the Group of Seven, MacDonald was not partic
ularly religious (he once claimed that his religion was the Arts and Letters Club).40 But he took to this task with gusto. He began his designs—twenty-one scenes for the pendentives and apse—and put together a team of painters that included his twenty-two-year-old son, Thoreau, and his students from the oca (one a promising artist named Carl Schaefer). When the students departed for their summer holidays, Varley and Carmichael were conscripted into service.
A major decorative program in a Protestant church in Canada was an unusual commission. In the 1870s and 1880s the Italian-born Luigi Capello painted murals in many Catholic churches in Quebec; one of his students, Ozias Leduc, went on to decorate thirty others over the course of a long career. But Protestant churches in English Canada generally made do with humbler decorations. MacDonald noted that the working-class Orangemen in the pews of St. Anne’s possessed “a restricted idea of colour of display.” 41 But he and Reverend Skey envisioned something eye-catching. MacDonald wanted his cycle of paintings to provide “religious vitality” 42—to inject into the getting-and-spending world of twentieth-century Toronto a much-needed dose of spirituality. What the Orangemen would make of the work of the painter of The Tangled Garden remained to be seen, but Skey claimed to be confident that MacDonald would “produce a colour scheme, which would be reverent, harmonious and in keeping with the traditions of the architecture of the church.” 43
Painting the panels took MacDonald and his team through the late summer and autumn of 1923. He and Thoreau worked in the Studio Building, using palettes of crimson, Venetian red, yellow ochre and ultramarine blue. MacDonald took three scenes for himself: Stopping the Tempest, The Transfiguration, and The Crucifixion. Thoreau tackled The Raising of Lazarus, his choice of pigments, because he was colour-blind, no doubt closely supervised by his father. Down the corridor in the Studio Building, Carmichael worked on The Adoration of the Magi and The Entry into Jerusalem. Some of the panels were almost five metres high, and since Eden Smith had not designed the building to accommodate such enormous paintings, getting them through the door and along the narrow corridor to the exit must have been something of a struggle.
Varley’s mural was The Nativity. Varley the libertine painting an image of the Holy Family was, in many respects, ironic. MacDonald’s design called for Mary to be dressed in ultramarine blue with the Christ Child in her lap, two angels flanking her, a lamb at her feet, and two worshippers—one of them presumably Joseph—gazing in adoration. Varley faithfully (and beautifully) executed the design. But he added a small touch of his own: the worshipper on the left is, in the finest Renaissance tradition, a self-portrait of the artist.
7 WEMBLEY
PREPARATIONS FOR THE exhibition of Canadian art at Wem-
bley were interrupted by the death of Sir Edmund Walker from pneumonia on March 27, 1924. “A giant oak has fallen and all Canada mourns the loss of a great native son,” reported the Toronto Globe. His sudden passing robbed the Group of Seven of one of their most powerful supporters. Lawren Harris, writing in Canadian Bookman, praised him as someone “of almost incalculable value. He was the first and only man of position to detect that in the modern movement in Canadian art the country had found the beginnings of a distinctive, significant, and bold expression.” 1
A few weeks after Walker’s funeral, on April 23, St. George’s Day, the British Empire Exhibition opened at Wembley. First proposed in 1913 but delayed more than a decade because of the Great War, the British Empire Exhibition was intended as both an indication of Britain’s imperial achievement and a sign of national renewal after the war. Never before had the pink spaces on the world map come together for such a vast display. The official guidebook boasted that the grounds at Wembley would “reproduce in miniature the entire resources of the British Empire. There the visitor will be able to inspect the empire from end to end.” 2
The exhibition presented an eclectic array of attractions against which the paintings in the Palace of Arts—a modest building tucked away in a corner of the 216-acre site and dwarfed by the gigantic ferro-concrete hangars making up the Palace of Industry and Palace of Engineering—would struggle to compete. Besides the national pavilions, there was an amusement park featuring a waterslide, a mile-long scenic railway, a giant aquarium, and a ninety-foot-high Ferris wheel. Also on display was the “Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen,” a burial chamber filled with wood and plaster replicas of the boy-pharaoh’s throne, chariot and sarcophagus. Despite the mockery of literati such as Virginia Woolf and P.G. Wodehouse, and the efforts of the “Won’t Go to Wembley Society,” 100,000 people a day passed through the turnstiles. Some 17 million people would visit the exhibition during its seven-month run.
Originally the brainchild of a Canadian, Lord Strathcona, the former president of the cpr, the British Empire Exhibition offered Canada yet another opportunity to assert itself on the world stage. Yet Canada’s participation in the exhibition had been a matter of some doubt. The nationalism stirred by Canada’s successes in the Great War and its quest for diplomatic and political independence were attenuating some of the links—both political and sentimental—with the Mother Country.
The fact that Canada took seriously its new role as an autonomous nation with (as Resolution ix had put it) “an adequate voice in foreign policy” was brought home to the British in September 1922. When Lloyd George called on the dominions for military help against the Turkish nationalists threatening the British garrison on the Dardanelles, Canadians declined to fall smartly into step as they had in 1914. Instead, Mackenzie King insisted that the Canadian Parliament, not the British prime minister, should decide “whether or not we should participate in wars in different parts of the world.” 3 This independent stance was affirmed six months later when the Canadian minister of marine and fisheries, Ernest Lapointe, signed an agreement with the United States on the conservation of halibut stocks—the first treaty negotiated by Canada not bearing the signature of the British ambassador.
This emergent nationalism, coupled with the high costs of mounting a display, meant some Canadian politicians and businessmen responded to the idea of Wembley with a notable lack of enthusiasm. Even so, when the curtain finally rose on Wembley, Canada made its presence emphatically known in a 120,000-square-foot pavilion beside the new sports stadium. Although still sheathed in scaffolding and dust wraps on opening day, the pavilion did not fail to impress the first visitors, guarded as it was by what one newspaper hailed as “Canada’s finest exhibit”: a detachment of Royal Canadian Mounted Police.4 These six-footers patrolling their turf in black breeches and red serge offered a compelling image of Canadian masculinity. “Six feet of stirring romance,” swooned one correspondent.5
Inside, the pavilion offered attractions such as a 4,400-pound lump of silver from a mine near Cobalt. The country’s vast and varied landscape, with all its beauty and riches, was the keynote. The main corridor was lined with bas-relief panoramas of cornfields, prairies, forests and mountains, all done in kernels of wheat. Travel films of Canadian scenery played alongside a mock-up of Niagara Falls. In what was reputedly among the most popular of all Wembley’s attractions, the pavilion featured in a refrigerated glass display case a statue of the Prince of Wales carved from Canadian butter. The sight of so much butter (3,000 pounds were used to depict the life-sized prince standing with a horse before his ranch house in Pekisko) did little to harm Canada’s image as a land of plenty. One visiting Londoner told a reporter that one of the prince’s ears would “keep us a week.” 6
Lord Burnham, owner of the Daily Telegraph, called the Canadian Pavilion “the best piece of national advertising that has ever been attempted.” 7 This celebration of butter, wheat and mountains omitted, however, references to certain Canadians, most conspicuously First Nations people. Hitherto “Red Indians” (as the British knew them) were mainstays of both Canadian exhibitions abroad and, in the guise of spectacles such as members of the Stoney Reserve performing ritual dances at strategic points along the CPR line
through the Rockies, the Canadian tourist trail.8 Some sections of the Canadian press, anxious that no one should come away from Wembley with the “false impression that our country is still largely peopled by savages,” did not mourn their absence. As a journalist in the Montreal Herald put it, Canada should no longer be advertised “by representations of Indians in war paint.” 9 Québécois observers were distressed, though, by the scanty representation of Quebec and the complete lack of French in the pavilion’s signage. Some British visitors, meanwhile, were puzzled by the absence of winter scenes.10 More than a quarter century after Kipling’s “Our Lady of the Snows,” showing a Canadian landscape under snow was still seen as tactless and unwise.
CANADA’S ADVERTISEMENTS for itself as a beautiful and thoroughly modern nation were continued a few hundred yards away from the Canadian Pavilion, in the Palace of Arts. This building (soundproofed against the hoopla of the crowds beyond its walls) displayed the art of Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India and Burma. According to the man in charge of the British exhibits, the architect Sir Lawrence Weaver, this panoply was intended to showcase not artistic individuality but rather “how the Daughter Nations have developed their art from the English School.” 11 The English School was amply represented by six rooms of Hogarth, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Constable, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites; works by contemporary painters—Paul Nash, Roger Fry, Edward
Wadsworth, Augustus John—hung in a separate room.
