Defiant Spirits

The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven

Ross King

• Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781553658078
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art moderne

Beginning in 1912, Defiant Spirits traces the artistic development of Tom Thomson and the future members of the Group of Seven, Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, Franz Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Frederick Varley, over a dozen years in Canadian history. Working in an eclectic and sometimes controversial blend of modernist styles, they produced what an English critic celebrated in the 1920s as the "most vital group of paintings” of the 20th century. Inspired by Cézanne, Van Gogh and other modernist artists, they tried to interpret the Ontario landscape in light of the strategies of the international avant-garde. Based after 1914 in the purpose-built Studio Building for Canadian Art, the young artists embarked on what Lawren Harris called "an all-engrossing adventure” travelling north into the anadian Shield and forging a style of painting appropriate to what they regarded as the unique features of Canada’s northern landscape.Rigorously researched and drawn from archival documents and letters, Defiant Spirits constitutes a "group biography, ” reconstructing the men’s aspirations, frustrations and achievements. It details not only the lives of Tom Thomson and the members of the Group of Seven but also the political and social history of Canada

1 A WILD DESERTED SPOT

IN MAY 1912 two men from Toronto arrived in Algonquin Provincial Park, armed with fishing rods and a letter of introduction to the superintendent. The park, an eight-thousand-square-kilometre fish and game preserve in Northern Ontario, was inaccessible by road, so the men made the 220-kilometre journey north from Toronto on the Grand Trunk Railway. They would have changed trains at Scotia Junction, north of Huntsville, before arriving via a single-track railway line at Canoe Lake.

For the past few years, the Grand Trunk Railway (whose president, Charles Melville Hays, perished on RMS Titanic less than a month earlier) had been transporting affluent tourists and overworked city dwellers into the Ontario hinterlands for what a 1910 issue of Rod and Gun in Canada called “a rest cure in a canoe.” 1 Canoes and fishing rods were widely publicized antidotes for modern ills and anxieties at a time when the urban population of Ontario for the first time outnumbered the rural. 2 Promoting itself as the “Highway to Health and Happiness,” the Grand Trunk advertised Algonquin Provincial Park in full-page spreads as one of “the beauty spots of the Dominion” that appealed to sportsmen, nature lovers and artists alike. “This country is increasing in popularity every year,” declared one advertisement, “and has become a favourite tourist resort of Britons and Americans who are flocking to this country for their vacation in increasing numbers.” 3 The company already operated two lakefront hotels: the thirty-five-room Hotel Algonquin at Joe Lake Station and the seventy-five-room Highland Inn on Cache Lake. In 1912 there were plans for two more.

The two visitors who presented their letter of introduction to the park superintendent were typical of those who descended by the trainload on Algonquin Park. Tom Thomson and Harry B. Jackson were city dwellers lured north on a two-week fishing holiday by promises of lakes abundant with black bass and speckled trout. Both were graphic designers who worked at Grip Limited, a commercial art firm in downtown Toronto. Their modest salaries of $30 per week meant they declined the luxuries of the Highland Inn, which boasted hot and cold running water, indoor washrooms, private baths and an elegant dining room. On the advice of one of the rangers, who assured them of “good meals and excellent beds,” 4 they availed themselves instead of the more rustic conveniences of Camp Mowat.

A former barracks for the mill workers of the bankrupt Gilmour
Lumber Company, Camp Mowat was on the northwest shore of Canoe Lake, in the semi-derelict village of Mowat. Its air of decrepitude meant that even the Grand Trunk’s most enthusiastic copywriter would have struggled for words. According to one visitor, it was “a wild deserted spot.” 5 The village’s population had shrunk from a high of five hundred at the turn of the century to a little more than one hundred. Camp Mowat itself was a bleak-looking warehouse of a building whose rows of windows faced what the daughter of a park ranger later described as “a treeless, desolate area of thirty acres or more covered with pine slabs and sawdust.” 6

The area immediately beyond Mowat was barely more inspiring. One Torontonian who owned a cottage on Canoe Lake described the park as “a paradise of virgin wilderness,” 7 but in fact much of the area around Mowat was neither paradisal nor virgin. Hundreds of acres of the surrounding forest were either clear-cut, flooded by dams or swept by fire. With the vast logging operation defunct, Mowat was left with an abandoned mill surrounded by decaying tree stumps and dunes of sawdust. There was also a deserted hospital and a cemetery with two inhabitants.

It was in these unpromising environs that Thomson and Jackson unpacked not only their brand-new fishing gear but also—since they had come to Canoe Lake for something more than black bass—a Kodak camera and their paintbrushes. They were not the first landscapists to paint in the park. A decade earlier three members of the Toronto Art Students’ League had come north, clambered into canoes and, with the help of a guide, paddled the waterways in search of picturesque landscapes. More recently the park was visited by Tom McLean, a friend of Thomson and a fellow employee of Grip Limited. A specialist in scenes of canoes and voyageurs (those staples of Canadian landscape painting), the thirty-one-year-old McLean was a true man of the woods. He had worked in Northern Ontario as a prospector, fire ranger and surveyor, and he was present in 1904 when his friend Neil McKechnie, another Toronto painter with a love of the outdoors, drowned while shooting the rapids on the Mattagami River.

Thomson and Jackson produced a number of oil sketches during their stay. Jackson commemorated their visit with a small portrait of Thomson smoking his pipe and wearing a hat festooned with trout flies, and Thomson painted several landscapes. One of them, Old Lumber Dam, Algonquin Park, showed, in an eerie adumbration of his none-too-distant fate, an overturned canoe. But these were fairly amateur efforts, because in 1912 Thomson was a painter of limited skill and no repute. Two months shy of his thirty-fifth birthday, he was more experienced in angling than in landscape painting, a technique in which he had little formal training. As Jackson later recalled, Thomson “used to chuckle over the idea” that his work would ever be taken seriously. 8

thomas john thomson was a striking man: slim, six feet tall, with black hair—“as black as midnight,” according to a friend 9—and fine, almost delicate features. According to one of his brothers, he was “always neatly attired in the best of clothes.” 10 Portraits taken in his younger days showed him in waistcoats, bow ties and celluloid collars. In one photograph a plug hat is tipped back from his brow; in another, looking like a raffish undergraduate, he poses with a cigarette between his lips and sports a dapper moustache. One family photograph reveals him with his hair parted in the middle—a style that in Victorian Ontario, an age of close-cropping and side-parting, lay one open (as a newspaper reported) to charges of “dandyism” and “dudism.” 11

Sartorial flair belied Thomson’s shy, self-effacing personality. “There was no atom of pretence about Tommy Thomson,” a friend later recalled, “not the slightest swank or swagger.” 12 According to another, he possessed “a quiet reserve, a reticence almost approaching bashfulness.” 13 One of his closest friends noted how he was “a man of few words,” 14 and a woman with whom he would share studio space found him “shy and unassuming.” 15 This self-effacing personality masked a darker side. His mood swings could be alarming. He was by turns “jovial and jolly ready for a frolic of any kind” and then “quite melancholy and defeated in manner”; when one of these melancholy moods came upon him, he could turn “almost angry in appearance and action.” 16 According to yet another acquaintance, he was subject to fits of depression, a condition he was suspected of self-dramatizing and sometimes intensifying with an excess of drink. 17

The sixth of ten children, Thomson was raised on a hundred-acre farm at Leith, Ontario, ten kilometres northeast of Owen Sound, on the southern shore of Georgian Bay. His father was the son of a Scottish immigrant and his mother (in what gave him an unimpeachable Canadian pedigree) a distant relative of Sir John A. Macdonald. 18 The Thomsons were a talented and artistic family. Their brick farmhouse, Rose Hill, was filled with books and music. Tom had sung in the choir of the local Presbyterian church and learned to play the trombone, the mandolin and the violin. In the evenings, according to a sister, “Tom usually was busy with a book.” 19 He was a sickly child, suffering various ailments. An “inflammation of the lungs” kept him out of school for an entire year. 20 He nonetheless took to outdoor pursuits. In his youth he led what a friend later called (probably with some rose-tinted amplification) the “squirrel-hunting, apple-eating, cow-chasing, chore-drudging life of the farm boy.” 21 An older sister would remember how he roamed the woods near Leith armed with a shotgun and wearing an old felt hat decorated with wildflowers and squirrel tails. 22 He often went fly-fishing with his father, John, an absent-minded and slightly delinquent farmer who escaped the drudgery of his turnip patch by loafing on a riverbank with a fishing rod.

Another inspiration for Thomson’s love of the outdoors was his great-uncle, Dr. William Brodie, a former mentor of Ernest Thompson Seton, the wildlife painter and later founder of the Boy Scouts of America and the Woodcraft League. A self-taught naturalist who originally trained as a dentist, Dr. Brodie took the adolescent Thomson on expeditions along the Scarborough Bluffs, outside Toronto, to collect plant and insect specimens. Twenty new species of insect resulted from these forays, as well as a collection of nearly 100,000 biological specimens (many of which entered the Smithsonian). In 1903 Dr. Brodie was made director of the Biological Department of what would become the Royal Ontario Museum. His only son, a promising naturalist, drowned while crossing the Assiniboine River, and Dr. Brodie appears to have regarded Thomson (his sister’s grandson) as a kind of surrogate. He passed on to Thomson his love of the Ontario landscape, which he praised for its “deep ravines” and “abrupt wooded hills . . . with the projected tops of stately pines.” 23

Thomson did not, as might have been expected of a literate young man with artistic talent, study at either university or an art school. Lack of funds was not the problem. In 1898, at the age of twenty-one, he inherited $2,000 from his grandfather’s estate. Two thousand dollars was a large sum, far beyond the annual wage of the average Canadian. In 1898 it would have been enough to either build a house in Toronto or purchase a 150-acre farm in most parts of the country. 24 What became of this sudden largesse is a complete mystery: it seems to have been either squandered outright or slowly but determinedly depleted over the course of many years. In either case, it had little bearing on his career. He began a humble apprenticeship at William Kennedy & Sons, a steel foundry in Owen Sound that produced waterwheels, propellers, mill gearings and other equipment for ships and sawmills. This career ended when, in an episode he later called the “most regrettable” in his life, he quarrelled with the foreman and left after only eight months. 25

A stint at a business college in Chatham followed. Thomson studied ornamental penmanship and, perhaps subsidized by his legacy, developed a reputation for dancing and socializing. He tried to enlist for service in the Boer War (more than seven thousand other Canadians fought) but was rejected because of fallen arches and the condition of the big toe on his right foot, broken years earlier during a football match. 26 There followed a period of what a friend from the steel foundry, Alan Ross, called “drifting.” 27 One night, during a drinking session, he unburdened himself to Ross, “lamenting his lack of success in life in terms that rather astonished me. I began to think then that he realized his powers and that he also had secret ambitions.” 28

In 1901 Thomson began pursuing these ambitions by following his older brother George across the continent to Seattle. At the time Seattle was still the transport and supply centre for prospectors heading north to the Yukon. Even the mayor of Seattle had resigned his post in 1897 and joined the gold rush. But Thomson had less intrepid plans, working as an elevator boy in the Diller Hotel on First Avenue and then studying decorative design at the Acme Business College. Owned by the enterprising George and his distant cousin F.R. McLaren, the college offered training in bookkeeping and shorthand. Diploma in hand, Thomson began working as a graphic designer—the trade he would practise for the rest of his life—in a Seattle firm of photoengravers. Once again his independent spirit and flashes of temperament caused friction with his superiors. 29

Thomson’s time in the United States ended abruptly in 1904, not owing to a quarrel with his manager but, more mysteriously, because of a love affair gone wrong. He left Seattle after an eighteen-year-old named Alice Lambert, the daughter of a former president of Willamette University in Oregon, spurned his marriage proposal. 30 Thirty years later, this interlude would be fictionalized by Lambert herself, who cast Thomson as the romantic lead in one of her novels—a “darkly morose” commercial artist with “thin, nervous hands and flashing eyes.” This young artist (imaginatively named Tom) romanced the heroine with streetcar rides through Seattle and winter afternoons in the “musty dimness of the Public Library where he would pore over prints and reproductions of the Masters.” The affair ended when Tom returned east, “determined to succeed” as a painter. 31

Success did not appear imminent...