by Ross King
(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), pp. 30, 31, 58.
42. Quoted in Susan G. Larkin, “Hassam in New England, 1889–1918,” in H. Barbara Weinberg, ed., Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2004), p. 119.
43. Quoted in H. Barbara Weinberg, “Hassam’s Travels, 1892–1914,” in Weinberg,
Childe Hassam, pp. 188–89.
44. Quoted in Donna M. Cassidy, Marsden Hartley: Race, Region, and Nation
(Lebanon, nh: University Press of New England, 2005), p. 20. For Stieglitz and
nationalism after the First World War, see Matthew Baigell, “American Landscape
Painting and National Identity: The Stieglitz Circle and Emerson,” Art Criticism 4 (1987),
pp. 27–47.
45. Quoted in Emily Ballew Neff, The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890–1950 (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2006), p. 159. On Hartley’s work in New Mexico and its nationalist implications, see also Heather Hole and Barbara B. Lynes, Marsden Hartley and the West: The Search for an American Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
46. New York Times, 1 August 1920. In 1922 Wyer changed his name to Raymond Henniker-Heaton.
47. Worcester Telegram, 8 November 1920.
48. Edmonton Journal, 2 April 1921.
49. Moose Jaw Evening Times, 13 May 1921.
50. Moose Jaw Evening Times, 11, 13 May 1921.
51. Quoted in Hill, The Group of Seven, p. 100.
52. A.Y. Jackson to Catherine Breithaupt, 17 January 1921, Catherine Breithaupt
Bennett Papers.
53. William J. Wood, Midland, ON, to Arthur Lismer, 3 November 1920, MCAC Archives. Wood has just been visited in Midland by Jackson—who “looked particularly fit”—
and so was able to report Jackson’s comments about the trip.
54. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 65.
55. Toronto Daily Mail & Empire, 18 December 1920.
56. Moose Jaw Evening Times, 11 May 1921; Worcester Telegram, 8 November 1920.
57. Doris Speirs, interview with Charles Hill.
58. Eric Brown, Ottawa, to Frank Johnston, Toronto, 13 March 1919, Mary Bishop Rodrik
and Franz Johnston Collection, R320, Volume 1, File 7, LAC.
59. For the price of the house, see Harold R. Watson, Toronto, to Mrs. F.H. Johnston, 96 Keewatin Avenue, Toronto, 28 September 1920, Mary Bishop Rodrik and Franz Johnston Collection, R320, Volume 1, File 35, LAC.
CHAPTER 4: MULTIPLES OF UGLINESS
1. Quoted in Marius Barbeau, “On Krieghoff,” in Fetherling, Documents in Canadian Art,
p. 21. Jackson claimed that it was “probable” that his grandfather knew Krieghoff (A Painter’s Country, p. 1). On this count, see also J. Russell Harper, Krieghoff (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 29.
2. Quoted in Barbeau, “On Krieghoff,” in Fetherling, Documents in Canadian Art, pp. 21–22.
3. Quoted in Hill, The Group of Seven, p. 290.
4. A.Y. Jackson, 4149 Michigan Ave., Chicago, to Georgina Jackson, Montreal,
11 November 1906, Naomi Jackson Groves Fonds, Container 96, File 3; and A.Y. Jackson, London, to Georgina Jackson, Montreal, 18 June 1905, ibid., Container 96, File 1.
5. Quoted in Wayne Larsen, A.Y. Jackson: A Love for the Land (Montreal: XYZ Publishing, 2003), pp. 81–82.
6. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 71.
7. A.Y. Jackson, Montreal, to Catherine Briethaupt, Boston, 17 January 1921,
Catherine Breithaupt Bennett Papers.
8. William Dean Howells, A Chance Acquaintance (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1873),
pp. 18–19.
9. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 70.
10. Quoted in Whiteman, J.E.H. MacDonald, p. 66.
11. Charles G.D. Roberts, The Land of Evangeline and the Gateways Thither (Kentville:
Dominion Atlantic Railway, 1895), p. 2. The phrase “wonderland of artists” appears in
an advertisement for the Dominion Atlantic Railway on the book’s inside cover.
12. New York Times, 11 January 1920.
13. Jennifer J. Nelson, Razing Africville: A Geography of Racism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 9–12. See also Donald H. Clairmont and Dennis William Magill, Africville: The Life and Death of a Canadian Black Community (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1999).
14. Betts, Lawren Harris in the Ward, pp. 79, 70.
15. Mellen argues that these paintings offer no social commentary; rather they are simply formal experiments in which Harris concentrated on “deep, three-dimensional space. He uses space, form and colour to create a mood of timelessness and mystery” (The Group of Seven, p. 112). Jeremy Adamson likewise agrees that there is no political activism in the works: “While he was deeply moved by the material poverty he witnessed in Toronto and several Maritime cities, it was the idea rather than reality that attracted his attention. Harris was not committed to social change or to leftist political ideologies” (Lawren S. Harris, p. 106). Elsewhere in his study Adamson reassures us that “there are no overt Marxist overtones” in Harris’s work (ibid., p. 25). Inexplicably, neither Mellen nor Adamson mentions Africville by name, despite the fact that their studies were completed within a decade of the neighbourhood’s controversial destruction in the 1960s.
16. Doris Speirs, interview with Charles Hill.
17. For theosophy and social reform in Canada with reference to Phillips Thompson, see R. Cook, The Regenerators, pp. 167–68; and Richard Allen, The View from the Murney Tower, p. 191. For theosophy and feminism, see H. Murray, Come, Bright Improvement! p. 116; and Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 123.
18. Quoted in Rohit Mehta, Theosophical Socialism (Ahmedabad: R. Mehta, 1937), p. 1.
19. Quoted in ibid., p. 19.
20. Rockwell Kent, It’s Me, O Lord (New York: Dodd Mead & Co., 1955), p. 204.
21. See Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 190–217.
22. Quoted in Hill, The Group of Seven, p. 134.
23. Gratton O’Leary, “The Right Honourable Arthur Meighen,” Manitoba Historical Society Transactions 3 (1970–71), available online at http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/transactions/3/meighen_a.shtml; and Henry Ferns and Bernard Ostry, The Age of Mackenzie King (Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1976), p. 174.
24. Quoted in Davis, “The Wembley Controversy,” p. 65.
25. The Rebel, March 1918.
26. Douglas Cole and Maria Tippett, eds., Phillips in Print: The Selected Writings of Walter J. Phillips on Canadian Nature and Art (Winnipeg: Manitoba Record Society, 1982), p. 66.
27. Toronto Daily Star, 7 May 1921.
28. Toronto Globe, 9 May 1921.
29. Quoted in Hill, The Group of Seven, p. 105.
CHAPTER 5: BY THE SHINING BIG-SEA-WATER
1. Merrill Denison, “That Inferiority Complex,” The Empire Club of Canada Speeches,
1948–1949 (Toronto: Empire Club of Canada, 1949), p. 260.
2. Ibid., p. 256.
3. For histories of the Denisons and Bon Echo, see Lacombe, “Songs of the Open Road,”
pp. 152–67; Robert Stacey and Stan McMullin, Massanoga: The Art of Bon Echo
(Ottawa: Penumbra Press, 1998); and John Campbell, The Mazinaw Experience: Bon Echo and Beyond (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2000).
4. Flora MacDonald Denison, “A Dedication and a Death,” in Cyril Greenland and John Robert Colombo, eds., Walt Whitman’s Canada (Willowdale, ON: Hounslow, 1992), pp. 196–200.
5. Canadian Bookman, March 1923.
6. Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, Thought-Forms (London: Theosophic
al Publishing Society 1905), p. 4.
7. The Sunset of Bon Echo, April 1920.
8. The Sunset of Bon Echo, Summer 1919.
9. Quoted in Stacey and McMullin, Massanoga, p. 58.
10. “An Artist’s View of Whitman,” J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 3, File 28.
This is the (undated) draft copy of a paper read before the English Association at the
Toronto Central Reference Library. An incomplete version of a later draft (which does not include the “smutty old man” reference) is found in Container 3, File 29.
11. Current Literature, February 1909.
12. See R.M. Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (Philadelphia: Innes & Sons, 1905).
13. Doris Speirs, interview with Charles Hill; Davis, The Logic of Ecstasy, p. 46.
14. “An Artist’s View of Whitman,” J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 3, Files 28 and 29.
15. Quoted in Hole and Lynes, Marsden Hartley and the West, p. 44. For Whitman’s influence on Hartley, see Ruth L. Bohan, Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art,
1850–1920 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), pp. 143–64.
16. On Whitman and American modernism, see Bohan, Looking into Walt Whitman, p. 5; and Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), pp. 62–63. For Whitman’s admiration of Millet, see Bohan, pp. 76–77. “I nourish active rebellion” is found at line 211 of “Song of the Open Road,” in Murphy, The Complete Poems. For his discussion of the absorption of Canada into the United States, see Specimen Days (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1882), p. 142.
17. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 57.
18. Scott L. Cameron, The Frances Smith: Palace Steamer of the Upper Great Lakes, 1867–1896 (Toronto: National Heritage Books, 2005). For Lake Superior tourism at the end of the nineteenth century, see Jasen, Wild Things, pp. 80–104.
19. Quoted in Peter Morris, Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema,
1895–1939 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978), p. 36.
20. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 57.
21. Harris, “The Group of Seven in Canadian History,” p. 34.
22. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 58.
23. Ibid.
24. Quoted in Constance Martin, “Rockwell Kent’s Distant Shores: The Story of an Exhibition,” Arctic 55 (March 2002), p. 104.
25. Doris Speirs, interview with Charles Hill; The Lamps, October 1911.
26. Canadian Theosophist, 15 July 1926.
27. On Roerich and the American dollar, see Robert Chadwell Williams, Russian Art and American Money, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 111.
28. American Theosophist (January, February, March 1913); Kandinsky, Concerning the
Spiritual in Art, pp. 6–9.
29. Doris Speirs, interview with Charles Hill. Doris dated her poem 7 September 1922.
30. Comacchio, The Infinite Bonds of Family, p. 61.
31. Quoted in Michael Bliss, Banting: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), p. 203.
32. Doris Speirs, interview with Charles Hill.
33. For a discussion of this latter work, see Atanassova, F.H. Varley, pp. 44–47.
For Varley’s society portraits in the early 1920s, see ibid., pp. 49–59.
34. Doris Speirs, interview with Charles Hill.
35. Quoted in Tippett, Stormy Weather, pp. 146–47.
36. Quoted in ibid., p. 144.
37. Quoted in Hill, The Group of Seven, p. 154.
38. Historical Bulletin 6 (May 1941), pp. 3–4.
CHAPTER 6: GYPSIES, LEPERS, AND FREAKS
1. Muskegon Chronicle, 11 January and 14 January 1922.
2. See Judith Zilczer, “The Dissemination of Post-Impressionism in North America,”
in The Advent of Modernism, pp. 36–39.
3. Saturday Night, 24 December 1921.
4. Frances Anne Hopkins, 95 Fitzjohns Ave., London, to David Ross McCord,
12 July 1910, File 5031, McCord Family Papers, McCord Museum, Montreal.
5. Canadian Bookman, September 1924.
6. Toronto Daily Mail & Empire, 6 May 1922; Saturday Night, 1 April 1922; Toronto Telegram,
6 April 1922.
7. Quoted in Kelly, J.E.H. MacDonald, Lewis Smith, Edith Smith, p. 21.
8. Quoted in Paul Poplawski, Encylopedia of Literary Modernism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003), p. 36.
9. For these critiques, as well as the attack on literary modernism in Canada in the 1920s, see Don Precosky, “‘Back to the Woods Ye Muse of Canada’: Conservative Response to the Beginnings of Modernism,” Canadian Poetry 12 (Spring/Summer 1983), pp. 40–45.
10. Canadian Forum, January 1923; and Hildi Froese Tiessen and Paul Gerard Tiessen, eds.,
After Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery’s Letters to Ephraim Weber, 1916–1941
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), p. 110.
11. Quoted in E. Holly Pike, “(Re)Producting Canadian Literature: L.M. Montgomery’s Emily Novels,” in Gammel and Epperly, L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture, p. 66.
12. The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume 2: 1910–1921, ed. Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 309.
13. Quoted in Ord, The National Gallery, pp. 102–3.
14. Saturday Night, 1 April 1922.
15. Hill, The Group of Seven, p. 139.
16. “The Diaries of William Lyon Mackenzie King,” 11 January 1927, 14 April 1934,
LAC, Ottawa, available online at http://king.collectionscanada.ca/EN/default.asp.
17. Ibid., 14 May 1935.
18. Madonna Ahrens, “Carl Ahrens: His Life and Work.”
19. “The Diaries of William Lyon Mackenzie King,” 21 November 1922, and 14 April 1926.
20. Ibid., 20 October 1922.
21. Saturday Night, 9 December and 23 December 1922.
22. Quoted in McLeish, September Gale, pp. 79–80.
23. Saturday Night, 30 December 1922.
24. Quoted in Judith M. Brown and William Roger Lewis, The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 214.
25. Quoted in Davis, “The Wembley Controversy,” p. 67.
26. Saturday Night, 15 September 1923.
27. See E.A. Heaman, The Inglorious Arts of Peace: Exhibitions in Canadian Society during the Nineteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); and Stuart Murray, “Canadian Participation and National Representation at the 1851 London Great Exhibition and the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle,” Histoire sociale / Social History 32 (May 1999), pp. 1–22.
28. Quoted in Anne Clendinning, “Exhibiting a Nation: Canada at the British Empire Exhibition, 1924–1925,” Histoire sociale / Social History 39 (May 2006), p. 83
29. The Times, 23 April 1924.
30. “Two Views of Canadian Art: Addresses by Mr. Wyly Grier, RCA, OSA, and
A.Y. Jackson, RCA, OSA, before the Empire Club of Canada, Toronto, February 26, 1925,”
The Empire Club of Canada Speeches, 1925 (Toronto: Empire Club of Canada, 1926), p. 113.
31. Quoted in Davis, “A Study in Modernism,” p. 108.
32. E.F.B. Johnson, “Painting and Sculpture in Canada,” in Canada and its Provinces,
vol. 11 (Toronto: Publishers’ Association of Canada, 1913), p. 623.
33. Quoted in Ord, The National Gallery, p. 94.
34. Quoted in Tippett, Stormy Weather, p. 142.
35. Lorne Pierce and Albert Durrant Watson, eds., Our Canadian Literature: Representative Prose and Verse (Toronto: Ryerson, 1922), p. 124
.
36. Quoted in Roza, “Towards a Modern Canadian Art,” p. 62.
37. Quoted in E.J. Pratt: Selected Poems, ed. Sandra Djwa, W.J. Keith, and Zailig Pollock
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), p. xii. For the influence of Imagism on Pratt,
see ibid., pp. xii and xiii.
38. Doris Speirs, interview with Charles Hill.
39. On Varley and the gypsy tradition, see Atanassova, F.H. Varley, pp. 43–45.
40. Quoted in Duval, The Tangled Garden, p. 148.
41. Quoted in McKay, A National Soul, p. 83.
42. Quoted in ibid., p. 91.
43. Quoted in ibid., pp. 91–92.
CHAPTER 7: WEMBLEY
1. Toronto Globe, 28 March 1924; Canadian Bookman, May 1924.
2. Quoted in Robert W. Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Exhibitions
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 65. The most comprehensive study of the exhibition is found in Donald R. Knight and Alan D. Sabey, The Lion Roars at Wembley: British Empire Exhibition (London: Barnard & Westwood, 1984).
3. Quoted in R.M. Dawson, ed. The Development of Dominion Status, 1900–1936
(London: Oxford University Press, 1937), p. 239.
4. Daily Graphic, 29 March 1924.
5. Quoted in Anne Clendinning, “Exhibiting a Nation,” pp. 96–97.
6. Quoted in ibid., p. 95. For Canada’s contribution, see William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 226; Andrew Stuart Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education, 2005), p. 86; John Allwood, The Great Exhibitions (London: Studio Vista, 1977), pp. 128–29; and especially Clendinning, “Exhibiting a Nation,” pp. 79–107, to which I am indebted for information on the Canadian display. The butter sculpture was carved by George D. Kent and Beauchamp Hawkins (Illustrated London News, 24 May 1924).
7. Quoted in S.R. Parsons, “The British Empire Exhibition: A Study in Geography, Resources, and Citizenship of the British Empire,” The Empire Club of Canada Speeches, 1924
(Toronto: Empire Club of Canada, 1924), p. 293.
8. On the latter, see Pauline Wakeham, Taxidermic Signs: Reconstructing Aboriginality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), pp. 46–47.
