Defiant Spirits
Page 45
Some of their greatest legacies lay beyond the walls of studios and art galleries. For many years they were at the forefront of a cultural awakening in English Canada, a stirring of artistic self-confidence that could never have developed as quickly or as richly without them. Many writers, and then later composers and musicians, tried to do in print and song what the group did in pigment. Self-consciously “Canadian” themes were rendered in vibrant and innovative forms. Much of the poetry of F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith would have been unthinkable without the pathfinding of the group. Smith’s most famous poem, “The Lonely Land,” was inspired by both a colour reproduction of The Jack Pine and works at the group’s 1925 exhibition.34
Ditto the Group of Seven’s influence on the plays of Merrill Denison and Herman Voaden. The latter, a playwright and director who married his Canadian nationalism to avant-garde literary techniques and experimental stagecraft, saw the painters as the heralds of far-reaching artistic developments in Canada. They were “the first to strike out boldly,” he wrote in 1928. “They carved new materials out of our landscape and evolved a different technique to handle them.” 35 Later, in music, came Harry Freedman, Claude Champagne and Violet Archer, all animated by visions of the group’s paintings. The architect Arthur Erickson, who designed the Canadian pavilion at Expo 67 and the Canadian Embassy in Washington, acknowledged the influence of Lawren Harris.36 More conspicuous still was Glenn Gould, who attributed his fascination with the North to their imagery, and who loved what he called the “Group of Seven woebegoneness” of Northern Ontario.37
The final judge of their importance should be the paintings themselves. If we forget the group’s nationalist agenda, if we forget the political agendas of their critics, and if we look at the canvases and panels themselves, only the most churlish could deny that they produced some works of virtuoso design and emotional intensity that would grace any art museum in the world: Jackson’s The Red Maple, MacDonald’s The Solemn Land, Harris’s Lake Superior paintings, Varley’s portraits and war scenes, Thomson’s sketches of Algonquin Park. Like the photograph of Donald A. Smith driving the Last Spike, or Terry Fox’s radiant silhouette in the soft-focus coronas of a police car’s beacons (another vignette of individual triumph over adversity), their works have become part of the national memory bank. Together, they have given us one of the best responses—however incomplete it must inevitably be in a country so differentiated and so vast—to that most difficult and most Canadian of questions: “Where is here?”
NOTES
Book i
CHAPTER 1: A WILD DESERTED SPOT
1. Quoted in Jasen, Wild Things, p. 108.
2. “2006 Census Highlights, Fact Sheet 2: Population Counts: Urban and Rural,” Ministry of Finance, Government of Ontario, http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/english/economy/demographics/census/cenhi06-2.pdf.
3. The Times, 24 May 1911.
4. Mark Robinson, transcript of interview, p. 1, in the Tom Thomson Collection, McMichael Canadian Art Collection Archives (hereafter cited as MCAC Archives). For Harry B. Jackson’s recollections of the expedition, see Harry B. Jackson to Blodwen Davies,
5 May 1931, Blodwen Davies Fonds, Vol. 11, MG30 D38, Library and Archives Canada,
Ottawa (hereafter cited as LAC).
5. R.P. Little, “Some Recollections of Tom Thomson and Canoe Lake,”
Culture 16 (1955), p. 213.
6. Ottelyn Addison and Elizabeth Harwood, Tom Thomson: The Algonquin Years
(Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1969), p. 13.
7. Quoted in Cole, “Artists, Patrons and Public,” p. 71. The Torontonian was Taylor Statten, the Secretary of Boys’ Work at the Toronto Central YMCA and later the founder of Camp Ahmek.
8. Harry B. Jackson to Blodwen Davies, 29 April 1931, Blodwen Davies Fonds.
9. S.H.F. Kemp, “A Recollection of Tom Thomson,” October 1955, typescript in the Tom Thomson Collection, MCAC Archives.
10. Fraser Thomson to Blodwen Davies, 19 May 1930, Blodwen Davies Fonds.
11. Quoted in Andrew C. Holman, “‘Cultivation’ and the Middle-Class Self: Manners and Morals in Victorian Ontario,” in Edgar-André Montigny and Lori Chambers, eds., Ontario Since Confederation: A Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), p. 111.
12. Kemp, “A Recollection of Tom Thomson.”
13. Albert H. Robson, Canadian Landscape Painters (Toronto: Ryerson, 1932), p. 138.
14. A.Y. Jackson, London, to J.E.H. MacDonald, 26 August 1917, MCAC Archives.
15. Marion Long to Robert and Signe McMichael, undated letter, MCAC Archives.
16. Mark Robinson to Blodwen Davies, 23 March 1930, Blodwen Davies Fonds.
17. Quoted in J. Murray, Tom Thomson: Design for a Canadian Hero, p. 36.
18. For Thomson’s family background, see Littlefield, The Thomsons of Durham.
19. Louise Henry to Blodwen Davies, 11 March 1931, Blodwen Davies Fonds.
20. Ibid.
21. J.E.H. MacDonald, “A Landmark of Canadian Art,” The Rebel (November 1917),
reprinted in Fetherling, Documents in Canadian Art, p. 39.
22. Louise Henry to Blodwen Davies, 11 March 1931, Blodwen Davies Fonds.
23. Quoted in Littlefield, The Thomsons of Durham, p. 38.
24. As late as the 1920s, almost 70 per cent of Canadian men earned less than $1,000 per year: see Cynthia R. Comacchio, The Infinite Bonds of Family: Domesticity in Canada,
1850–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 72. For Toronto house prices, see R. Harris, Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto’s American Tragedy, 1900–1950 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 225. For Canadian farm prices, see Bruno Ramirez, Crossing the 49th Parallel: Migration from Canada to the United States, 1900–1930
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 89.
25. Alan H. Ross to Blodwen Davies, 11 June 1930, Blodwen Davies Fonds.
26. Louise Henry to Blodwen Davies, 11 March 1931, Blodwen Davies Fonds.
27. Alan H. Ross to Blodwen Davies, 11 June 1930, Blodwen Davies Fonds.
28. Alan H. Ross to Blodwen Davies, 1 June 1930, Blodwen Davies Fonds.
29. See Robert Stacey, “Tom Thomson as Applied Artist,” in Reid, Tom Thomson,
pp. 50–51.
30. For the various (improbable) versions of this story, see J. Murray, Tom Thomson: Design for a Canadian Hero, pp. 32–33. For a critical eye on the legend, see Sherrill Grace’s comments in Inventing Tom Thomson, pp. 66–67, 80.
31. Alice Lambert, Women Are Like That (New York: Dell, 1934), pp. 20–21.
32. Robson, Canadian Landscape Painters, p. 138. Robson, later Thomson’s boss at Grip and then Rous and Mann, was at pains to point out that he himself found Thomson
“a most diligent, reliable and capable craftsman” (ibid.).
33. J. Murray, Tom Thomson: Design for a Canadian Hero, p. 36.
34. William J. Wood, Midland, ON, to Arthur Lismer, 2 January 1925, MCAC Archives.
35. Ibid. Wood specifically mentions “Broadhead, Varley, Thompsons [sic], MacLean,
Johnson [sic], Robson, Carmichael, MacDonald.”
CHAPTER 2: THIS WEALTHY PROMISED LAND
1. Quoted in Jarrett Rudy, The Freedom to Smoke: Tobacco Consumption and Identity (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), p. 51. For Thomson’s fondness for tobacco, see Harry B. Jackson to Blodwen Davies, 5 May 1931, Blodwen Davies Fonds.
2. Quoted in Stacey and Bishop, J.E.H. MacDonald, Designer, p. 1. The visitor was MacDonald’s son, Thoreau.
3. Typescript of Thoreau MacDonald’s recollections, Tom Thomson Collection,
MCAC Archives, p. 2.
4. William Smithson Broadhead, Correspondence addressed to members of the Broadhead family, LD 1980/29 and 32, Sheffield Archives, Sheffield, South Yorkshire.
5. Quoted in R. Cook, The Regenerators, p. 124. On Bengough’s career and platforms, see ibid., pp. 123–51. See also Christina Burr, “Gender, Sexuality and Nationalism in
J.W. Bengough’s Verses and Political Cartoons,” Canadian Historical Review 83
(December 2002), pp. 505–54.
6. Quoted in Michele H. Bogart, Artists, Advertising and the Borders of Art
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 114.
7. William Broadhead to the Broadhead family, LD 1980/28, Sheffield Archives.
8. Rupert Brooke, Letters from America (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1916),
pp. 79, 80, 82.
9. Toronto Globe, 16 March 1900.
10. Quoted in P.G. Mackintosh, “‘The Development of Higher Urban Life’ and the Geographic Imagination: Beauty, Art, and Moral Environmentalism in Toronto, 1900–1920,”
Journal of Historical Geography 31 (October 2005), p. 697.
11. Quoted in Norman Hillmer and Adam Chapnick, eds., “Introduction: An Abundance of Nationalisms,” in Canadas of the Mind: The Making and Unmaking of Canadian Nationalisms in the Twentieth Century (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2007), p. 3.
12. Quoted in R. Douglas Francis and Chris Kitzan, eds., “Introduction,” in The Prairie West as Promised Land (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2007), p. ix.
13. Montreal Daily Star, 16 September 1911.
14. J.M. Bumstead, Canada’s Diverse Peoples: A Reference Sourcebook (Santa Barbara:
ABC-CLIO, 2003), p. 162; and Paul Robert Magocsi, ed., Encyclopedia of Canada’s Peoples, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 144, 1093.
15. J. Burgon Bickersteth, Land of Open Doors: Being Letters from Western Canada (London: Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., 1914), p. x.
16. Quoted in Brown and R. Cook, Canada, 1896–1921, p. 73.
17. Strangers within Our Gates: Or, Coming Canadians (1909), reprinted with an introduction by Marilyn Barber (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), pp. 9, 244.
The author was the Methodist social gospeller J.S. Woodsworth, who would later
adopt a more tolerant attitude towards immigrants to the Prairies.
18. Quoted in Brown and R. Cook, Canada, 1896–1921, p. 165.
19. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. K.E. Fields
(New York: Free Press, 1995). For the lack of heroes in (English) Canada, see Ramsay Cook, Watching Quebec: Selected Essays (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 2005), pp. 98–100. Cook points out that early Canadian heroes—he cites
Brébeuf and Dollard des Ormeaux—“are nearly all French” (ibid., p. 99).
20. Richard Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries, ed. Jack Beeching (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 191.
21. Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), p. 73. This work was first published
(posthumously) in 1924.
22. Criterion, April 1924.
23. The Collected Writings of T.E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 53.
24. Sir John Douglas Sutherland Campbell, the Marquess of Lorne, Memories of Canada and Scotland: Speeches and Verse (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1894), p. 220.
25. The Canadian Magazine, November 1908.
26. Quoted in Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting, p. 124.
27. The young art student was A.Y. Jackson: A.Y. Jackson, Berlin, ON, to Georgina Jackson,
Montreal, 1 June 1910, Naomi Jackson Grove Fonds, LAC, MG30 D351, Container 96, File 12.
28. Quoted in Harper, Painting in Canada, pp. 215–16.
29. Morning Post, 4 July 1910.
30. Quoted in Hunter, “Mapping Tom,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 45.
31. For an Algonquin Provincial Park example, see Gaye I. Clemson,
Gertrude Baskerville, the Lady of Algonquin Park (Capitola, CA: Globalinkage, 2001), p. 1.
32. P.L. Simmons, Franklin and the Arctic Regions (London: George Routledge
& Co., 1853), pp. 44–46.
33. Quoted in Whiteman, J.E.H. MacDonald, pp. 14, 66.
34. C. Barry Cleveland to Joan MacDonald, 27 November 1932, MCAC Archives.
35. J.E.H. MacDonald, 40 Duggan Ave., Toronto, to F.B. Housser, unsent letter,
20 December 1926, MCAC Archives.
36. J.E.H. MacDonald, London, to Joan MacDonald, 15 July 1906, MCAC Archives.
MacDonald states that the painting was in the South Kensington Museum
(now the Victoria & Albert Museum).
37. The Canadian Magazine, May 1908.
38. Augustus Bridle, The Story of the Club (Toronto: Arts and Letters Club, 1945), p. 10.
39. Quoted in Karen A. Finlay, The Force of Culture: Vincent Massey and Canadian Sovereignty (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 95.
40. Quoted in Nasgaard, The Mystic North, p. 161. Jefferys’s comments come from a speech delivered in London, Ontario, in May 1944 and subsequently in Toronto in
March 1945.
41. The Lamps, November 1911.
42. Hamlin Garland, “Impressionism,” in Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger, eds., Art in Theory, 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 930.
43. Quoted in Kelly, J.E.H. MacDonald, Lewis Smith, Edith Smith, p. 12.
chapter 3: ein toronto realist
1. Lawren Harris, “The Group of Seven in Canadian History,” The Canadian Historical Association: Report of the Annual Meeting Held at Victoria and Vancouver, June 16–19, 1948 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948), p. 31.
2. A.J. Casson, “Group Portrait,” in Fetherling, Documents in Canadian Art, p. 59.
3. Hamilton Spectator, 11 February 1897.
4. Canadian Bookman, February 1924. For Harris’s early years, see Larisey,
“The Landscape Painting of Lawren Stewart Harris,” pp. 1–22.
5. Arthur Shadwell, Industrial Efficiency: A Comparative Study of Industrial Life in England, Germany and America (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1906), p. 159.
6. “The Beauty of Form and Decorative Art,” in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds.,
Art in Theory, 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 62.
7. Quoted in Sue Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006), p. 136.
8. Quoted in ibid., p. 138.
9. Quoted in Marion F. Deshmukh, “Max Liebermann: Observations on the
Politics of Painting in Imperial Germany, 1870–1914,” German Studies Review 3
(May 1980), p. 171.
10. Quoted in Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 38.
11. Quoted in Larisey, “The Landscape Painting of Lawren Stewart Harris,” p. 23.
12. Ibid., pp. 39, 44.
13. Quoted in Bess Harris and R.G.P Colgrove, Lawren Harris (Toronto: Macmillan, 1969), p. 219.
14. Emily Carr, Growing Pains, with an introduction by Robin Laurence and a foreword
by Ira Dilworth (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2005), p. 263. Growing Pains was originally published in 1946.
15. Shadwell, Industrial Efficiency, p. 159.
16. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, ed. José Harris, trans. Margaret Hollis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Émile Durkheim, The Division of
Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson (New York: Free Press, 1964).
17. Quoted in Larisey, “The Landscape Painting of Lawren Stewart Harris,” p. 29.
On
this urban aspect of Skarbina’s work, see Ralf Roth, “Interactions between
Railways and Cities in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Some Case Studies,” in Ralf Roth
and Marie-Noëlle Polino, The City and the Railway in Europe (Aldershot, Hants:
Ashgate, 2003), pp. 17–20; John Czaplicka, “Pictures of a City at Work, Berlin 1890–1930: Visual Reflections on Social Structures and Technology in the Modern Urban Construct,”
in Charles W. Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr, eds., Berlin: Culture and Metropolis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 4–17; and Shearer West,
The Visual Arts in Germany,
1890–1940: Utopia and Despair (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 41.
18. Quoted in Roth, “Interactions,” p. 16.
19. Quoted in Larisey, “The Landscape Painting of Lawren Stewart Harris,” p. 26.
For Wille and the notion of Heimatkunst in Germany at this time, see ibid., pp. 24–26.
20. Quoted in Adamson, Lawren S. Harris, p. 21.
21. Quoted in ibid., p. 22. For speculation that the unorthodoxy was theosophy, see Davis,
The Logic of Ecstasy, p. 22.
22. The Studio, 15 November 1907. This exhibition, at the Fritz Gurlitt Gallery in Berlin,
was probably seen by Harris.
23. For the 1906 Ausstellung Deutscher Kunst aus der Zeit von 1775–1875 and its probable influence on Harris, see Larisey, “The Landscape Painting of Lawren Stewart Harris,” pp. 50–52.
24. Quoted in Larisey, “The Landscape Painting of Lawren Stewart Harris,” p. 48.
25. Quoted in Adamson, Lawren S. Harris, p. 51. The letter in which Harris makes this claim dates from 1948.