by Ross King
(Victoria: Trafford, 2002), pp. 41, 43.
54. Quoted in Hill, “Tom Thomson, Painter,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 124.
55. Lismer, “Tom Thomson (1877–1917), Canadian Painter,”
Educational Record of the Province of Quebec 80 (1954), p. 171.
CHAPTER 10: THE YOUNG SCHOOL
1. Quoted in Ord, The National Gallery of Canada, p. 68.
2. Toronto Globe, 4 June 1914.
3. The Studio, February 1913.
4. Quoted in Davis, “The Wembley Controversy,” p. 55.
5. Toronto Daily Star, 28 February 1914.
6. Quoted in Tippett, Art at the Service of War, p. 40.
7. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 27.
8. Wilfred Campbell, The Beauty, History, Romance and Mystery of the Canadian
Lake Region (Toronto: Musson Book Co., 1910), p. 99.
9. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 85.
10. Globe and Mail, 16 May 2003. This painting was sold in 2003 by Helen MacCallum
Dodd’s granddaughter.
11. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 25.
12. Quoted in Joan Murray, “Tom Thomson’s Letters,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 298.
13. Franklin Carmichael reported in a letter of 27 May 1915 that Thomson had told him that “last summer he could not do anything for nearly two months.” Letter of
Franklin Carmichael to Ada Went, 27 May 1915, MCAC Archives.
14. J. Murray, “Tom Thomson’s Letters,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 297.
15. For some of the logistics of Thomson’s voyage, see Wadland, “Tom Thomson’s Places,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 105; and Hill, “Tom Thomson, Painter,” in Reid, Tom Thomson,
p. 126. Wadland suggests that much of the journey was made via steamship and rail, whereas Hill believes that Thomson canoed the entire distance between Go Home Bay,
Lake Nipissing and Canoe Lake.
16. Brooke, Letters from America, p. 118.
17. W. Campbell, The Beauty, History, Romance and Mystery of the Canadian Lake Region,
p. 107.
18. See Landry, The MacCallum-Jackman Cottage Mural Paintings, p. 32.
19. Alexander Henry, Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories
between the Years 1760 and 1776 (New York: I. Riley, 1809), p. 32.
20. Jennet Roy, The History of Canada (Montreal: Armour and Ramsay, 1850), p. 202.
21. Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 177. Northrop Frye argues that the quest myth is the one from which “all literary genres are derived”: see “The Archetypes of Literature,” in Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1963), p. 17.
22. For the quest myth’s application to America in the Age of Discovery, see Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1680–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973), pp. 28–29.
23. For the classic statement of this myth, see Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), first published in 1949. For Canadian versions, with specific reference to the canoe (but only a passing mention of Thomson), see William C. James, “The Quest Pattern and the Canoe Trip,” in
Bruce W. Hodgins and Margaret Hobbs, eds., Nastawgan: The Canadian North by
Canoe & Snowshoe (Willowdale, ON: Betelgeuse Books, 1987), pp. 9–23.
24. A.Y. Jackson to Dr. James MacCallum, A.Y. Jackson manuscripts, MG30 D 259, LAC.
25. Wyndham Lewis, “Canadian Nature and Its Painters,” in Fetherling, Documents in Canadian Art, p. 111. Lewis’s article was first published in The Listener in 1946.
26. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 37.
27. A.Y. Jackson, Canoe Lake, to J.E.H. MacDonald, Studio Building, 5 October 1914,
J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 2.
28. Carl Schaefer, interview with Charles Hill, 11–12 October 1973, Canadian Painting
in the Thirties Exhibition Records, National Gallery of Canada Fonds, National Gallery
of Canada Library and Archives.
29. Quoted in Naomi Jackson Groves, A.Y.’s Canada (Toronto: Clarke Irwin, 1968), p. 148.
30. Kemp, “A Recollection of Tom Thomson.”
31. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 38.
32. Quoted in Hill, “Tom Thomson, Painter,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 126.
33. A.Y. Jackson, Canoe Lake, to J.E.H. MacDonald, Studio Building, 5 October 1914,
J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 2.
34. Quoted in Hill, “Tom Thomson, Painter,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 126.
35. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 38. See also Housser, A Canadian Art Movement,
p. 96.
36. A.Y. Jackson, Canoe Lake, to J.E.H. MacDonald, Studio Building, 5 October 1914,
J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 2.
37. Quoted in Colonel G.W.L. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1919
(Ottawa: Queen’s Printer and Controller of Stationery, 1964), p. 4.
38. Toronto Daily Star, 25 August 1914.
39. Toronto Daily Star, 5 August 1914.
40. Toronto Daily Star, 25 August 1914.
41. A.Y. Jackson, Canoe Lake, to J.E.H. MacDonald, Studio Building, 5 October 1914,
J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 2.
42. Saunders, Algonquin Story, p. 169.
43. Toronto Daily Star, 28 February 1914.
44. Quoted in Tippett, Stormy Weather, pp. 59, 70.
45. A.Y. Jackson, Canoe Lake, to J.E.H. MacDonald, Studio Building, 5 October 1914, J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 2.
46. A.Y. Jackson to Dr. James M. MacCallum, 13 October 1914, Dr. James M. MacCallum Papers, National Gallery of Canada Archives, Ottawa.
47. F.H. Varley to Dr. James M. MacCallum, c. 31 October 1914, Dr. James M.
MacCallum Papers.
48. Arthur Lismer to Dr. James M. MacCallum, 11 October 1914, Dr. James M. MacCallum Papers.
49. Quoted in Tippett, Stormy Weather, p. 70.
50. See Richard R. Brettell, Modern Art, 1851–1929: Capitalism and Representation
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 83.
51. Quoted in Duval, Canadian Impressionism, p. 124. Lismer made this claim in 1942.
52. A.Y. Jackson, Canoe Lake, to J.E.H. MacDonald, Studio Building, 5 October 1914,
J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 2. For the difficulties of commercial designers
at this time, see William Colgate, Two Letters of Tom Thomson, 1915 & 1916
(Weston, ON: The Old Rectory Press, 1946), p. 10.
53. Montreal Daily Star, 29 May 1913; The Studio, 15 February 1914 and 15 September 1914.
54. A.Y. Jackson to Dr. James M. MacCallum, 13 October 1914, Dr. James M. MacCallum Papers.
55. Tippett, Stormy Weather, p. 85.
56. Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage (London: William Heinemann, 1912), p. 26.
57. Ibid., p. v.
58. Kemp, “A Recollection of Tom Thomson.”
Book ii
CHAPTER 1: MEN WITH GOOD RED BLOOD IN THEIR VEINS
1. Megan Bice, Sunlight & Shadow: The Work of Franklin Carmichael
(Kleinburg: MCAC, 1990), p. 10.
2. Franklin Carmichael to Ada Went, 1 February 1915, MCAC Archives.
3. A.Y. Jackson, Canoe Lake, to J.E.H. MacDonald, Studio Building, 5 October 1914,
J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 2.
4. Quoted in R. Harris, Unplanned Suburbs, p. 152.
5. For these
details of Thomson’s life in the shack, see the typescript of Thoreau MacDonald’s recollections held in the Tom Thomson Collection, MCAC Archives; Housser, A Canadian Art Movement, pp. 115–16; and Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 52. Peter Mellen states that Thomson moved into the shack only at the end of 1915 in The Group of Seven,
p. 49. However, a May 1915 letter from Franklin Carmichael to Ada Went (in the MCAC Archives) indicates that Thomson had moved in by that date. As well, a drawing by Arthur Lismer in the National Gallery of Canada, entitled “Frank Johnston in T.T.’s Shack” and dated 1914, shows Thomson in his shack. Johnston was studying in Philadelphia and New York between 1912 and 1915, and so it is likely that Lismer drew the sketch at Christmas 1914. Against this latter evidence it must be allowed, as Charles Hill has pointed out to me, that Lismer sometimes made dating errors in his sketches (personal email communication,
17 September 2009).
6. Bice, Sunlight & Shadow, pp. 8, 24.
7. William Broadhead to the Broadhead family, LD 1980/8, Sheffield Archives.
8. Franklin Carmichael to Ada Went, 1 February 1915, MCAC Archives;
Thoreau MacDonald’s recollections, Tom Thomson Collection, MCAC Archives.
9. Laing, Memoirs of an Art Dealer, vol. 1, pp. 24–25. For Heming’s abstemious
and retiring nature, see Chalmers, “Arthur Heming.”
10. Franklin Carmichael to Ada Went, 6 February 1915, MCAC Archives.
11. Toronto Daily Star, 28 February 1914.
12. Toronto Globe, 13 April 1912.
13. Terry Chapman, “‘An Oscar Wilde Type’: ‘The abominable crime of buggery’
in Western Canada, 1890–1920.” Criminal Justice History 4 (1983), pp. 97–118.
14. On Baden-Powell, see Allen Warren, “Popular Manliness: Baden-Powell, Scouting
and the Development of Manly Character,” in J.A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds., Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1987), pp. 199–219. On schoolmasters: Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989),
p. 89. On Robert Henri: Rebecca Zurier, Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 109–20. On the artistic
search for “masculine vigour”: Ysanne Holt, British Artists and the Modernist
Landscape (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 49–50. And for John’s red-blooded behaviour: Michael Holroyd, Augustus John (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), pp. 79–81.
15. Harper’s Weekly, 16 September 1911.
16. Franklin Carmichael to Ada Went, 23 March 1915, MCAC Archives.
17. Toronto Daily Star, 22 March 1915.
18. See Brian H. Peterson, ed., Pennsylvania Impressionism (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
19. This similarity is noted in Town and Silcox, Tom Thomson, p. 44.
20. The influence of this design on Thomson seems to have been noted first in Hubbard, The Development of Canadian Art, pp. 88–89.
21. Arthur Lismer, Halifax, undated and unfinished letter on stationery headed
“Victoria School of Art & Design,” MCAC Archives.
22. William Broadhead to the Broadhead family, LD 1980/36 and 32, Sheffield Archives.
23. The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942–1955, ed. Robert D. Denham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. 736. See also the numerous references to Stanley Kemp in
The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932–1939, ed. Robert D. Denham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).
24. Quoted in Littlefield, The Thomsons of Durham, p. 35.
25. For Richard Hovey, see D.M.R. Bentley, “‘The Thing Is Found to Be Symbolic’: Symboliste Elements in the Early Short Stories of Gilbert Parker, Charles G.D. Roberts, and Duncan Campbell Scott,” in Gerald Lynch and Angela Arnold Robbeson, eds., Dominant Impressions: Essays on the Canadian Short Story (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1999), p. 27. For Duncan Campbell Scott, see More Letters, ed. Arthur S. Bourinot (Ottawa: Arthur S. Bourinot, 1960), p. 24. Scott’s letter (to Pelham Edgar) dates from June 1904. For the influence of Maeterlinck on Scott, see D.M.R. Bentley, “A Deep Influx of Spirit: Maurice Maeterlinck and Duncan Campbell Scott,” Studies in Canadian Literature 21 (1996),
pp. 104–19. Robert Stacey has argued that Thomson’s illustration of Maeterlinck might have
been a trial piece he executed in order to get his job at Grip: see “Tom Thomson as
Applied Artist,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, pp. 53–54.
26. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M.T.H. Sadler
(New York: Dover, 1977), pp. 14–15, 55.
27. On Maeterlinck and Carpenter, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “Mysticism as the
‘Tie that Binds’: The Case of Edward Carpenter and Modernism,” Art Journal 46
(Spring 1987), p. 32. Carpenter wrote about Maeterlinck in his 1920 work Pagan
and Christian Creeds.
28. Ontario Society of Artists: Catalogue of the Forty-Third Annual Exhibition
(Toronto: Ontario Society of Artists, 1915).
29. The Studio, 14 December 1918; Voltaire, Candide, trans. Roger Pearson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 65; and Jefferys, quoted in Stacey, “A Contact in Context,” p. 43.
30. Toronto Daily Mail & Empire, 13 March 1915; Saturday Night, 20 March 1915.
31. Minnie Henry to Blodwen Davies, 2 February 1931, Blodwen Davies Fonds, MG30 D38,
LAC. For the costs of pigments, see Frank Johnston’s account scribbled on the back of a letter from George Wilson, 30 May 1922, Mary Bishop Rodrik and Franz Johnston Collection, R320, Volume 1, File 10, LAC. Johnston records paying $24 for twenty-one tubes of paint.
32. The Studio, February 1915.
33. Franklin Carmichael to Ada Went, 23 March 1915, MCAC Archives.
34. F.H. Varley to Dr. James M. MacCallum, October 1914, Dr. James M. MacCallum Papers.
35. Chalmers, “Arthur Heming,” pp. 9–10.
36. William Broadhead to the Broadhead family, LD 1980/6 and 34, Sheffield Archives.
37. Comacchio, The Infinite Bonds of Family, p. 72
38. Franklin Carmichael, Bolton, ON, to Ada Went, 25 May 1915, MCAC Archives.
CHAPTER 2: THE GREAT EXPLOSION
1. Quoted in Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1919, p. 62.
2. Colonel A. Fortescue Duguid, Official History of the Canadian Forces in The Great War, 1914–1919, 2 vols. (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1938), vol. 1, app. 851.
3. The Times, 15 May 1915.
4. Martin Gilbert, The First World War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994), p. 162.
The veracity of the crucifixion story, disputed by the Germans at the time, has never been established. For a discussion of the episode, see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 117–18, where it is described as a “fiction.”
5. A.Y. Jackson, 69 Hallowell Ave., Westmount, Montreal, to Arthur Lismer,
4 February 1915, MCAC Archives.
6. Ibid.
7. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 41.
8. Terry Copp, “The Military Effort, 1914–1918,” in David MacKenzie, ed., Canada and the First World War: Essays in Honour of Robert Craig Brown (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), p. 59, note 32.
9. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 41.
10. Franklin Carmichael to Ada Went, February 1915, MCAC Archives.
11. Darroch, Bright Land, p. 25.
12. Stacey and Bishop, J.E.H. MacDonald, Designer, p. 119.
13. Thoreau MacDonald Collection, The Papers of L. Bruce Pierce, Binder 1, File 25,
MC
AC Archives.
14. Albert H. Robson, J.E.H. MacDonald (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1937), p.4.
15. Canadian Courier, 22 July 1916. MacDonald’s poster design for Belgium was printed
in this issue as a black and white illustration to a poem by Sidney Low, “From the
Body of This Death.”
16. Quoted in J. Murray, “Tom Thomson’s Letters,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 301.
17. R.P. Little, “Some Recollections of Tom Thomson,” p. 218.
18. Mark Robinson, transcript of interview, p. 7.
19. Minnie Henry to Blodwen Davies, 2 February 1931, Blodwen Davies Fonds.
20. Ian Hugh Maclean Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief: Torontonians and the Great War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), pp. 71, 79. On Carmichael’s rejection,
see Bice, Sunlight & Shadow, p. 17.
21. Percy Ghent, “Tom Thomson at Island Camp, Round Lake, November 1915,”
Toronto Evening Telegram, 8 November 1949.
22. E.E. Godin to Blodwen Davies, 15 June 1931, Blodwen Davies Fonds. Godin was
with Thomson in the summer of 1916 and insisted, “I know up until that time
he had not tried to enlist.”
23. Toronto Daily Star, 13 October 1914.
24. Winnifred Trainor to George Thomson, 17 September 1917, Tom Thomson Collection, Vol. 1, File 5, MG30 D284, LAC.
25. Quoted in J. Murray, “Tom Thomson’s Letters,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 300.
26. See, for example, the Toronto Daily Star, 12 July 1916.
27. Mark Robinson, transcript of interview, p. 9.
28. Quoted in J. Murray, “Tom Thomson’s Letters,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 302.
29. Louise Henry to Blodwen Davies, 11 March 1931, Blodwen Davies Fonds.
30. Hill, “Tom Thomson, Painter,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 131.
31. Dr. James M. MacCallum Papers, National Gallery of Canada Archives, quoted in
J. Murray, “Tom Thomson’s Letters,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 302.
32. Ibid., p. 301.
33. Henry, Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories, p. 29.
34. L. George Thomas, Edward Thomas: A Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 242, 248; and The Life and Letters of Edward Thomas, ed. John Moore
(London: Heinemann, 1939), p. vii.
