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Ties that Bind
Tom Thomson’s family set a pattern of unselfishness, and he would always be drawn to people like them. He was himself good-hearted. “Anything he had was always shared with his playmates, and if there were only two, himself and a friend, his friend always got the larger share,” wrote one childhood friend, Alan H. Ross. Thomson learned these generous ways from his mother, who was charitable to the poor and needy. It was Margaret Matheson Thomson who organized the legendary hospitality of their home. “It snowed of meat and drink in that house,” wrote Ross, echoing Chaucer. Thomson’s mother loved to read and, even with nine children, she found time to delve into archaeology, geology, astronomy, poetry, and fiction, as well as her daily Globe. She gave her son her remarkable memory, and when we see her in a photograph, we sense that it was also from her that he got his droll sense of humour: she has the same puckish expression on her face. From John Thomson, his handsome father, he got his strong features, his high principles and careful ways, his great powers of concentration (when he wanted to use them), and a fine tenor voice.
The Thomson family, c. 1898.
Front row: Margaret, John (father), Fraser, Ralph, Margaret (mother), Tom.
Back row: George (above, his photograph was inset as he was in Seattle and not present for the session), Elizabeth, Louisa, Henry, Minnie. Photograph by E. Tucker, Owen Sound, courtesy of Joan Murray Tom Thomson Papers.
Notice the way John holds an open book in his hands, with a finger marking the spot where he had stopped reading to wait for the photographer to snap the picture; he, and all the Thomson family, enjoyed reading. Of the two, Margaret had the energy. Her humorous, slightly puckish expression recalls that of Tom.
Gathering the family around them, his parents enjoyed musical evenings. The children — George, Elizabeth, Henry, Louise, Minnie, Thomas, Ralph, Margaret, and Fraser (one more child, James Brodie, had died in childhood) — were all musicians in one way or another, and all devoted to music. For his part, Tom Thomson took up the cornet, the violin, and the mandolin. They were a family with a passionate urge for creative expression; they were upwardly mobile and they were cultured. Their uncle had been good at drawing and their father sketched; as a result, almost all the family drew or painted. They also loved to study and to read good literature. John Thomson had always loved reading, and would read all night when the mood was on him. A graduate of the first-class Whitby Grammar School in Whitby Township, where he was born in 1840, he helped his children with grammar and mathematics. At night the family sat down to read aloud family favourites: the novels of Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, George Eliot, the poetry of Byron. They wove and rewove the tale of the family’s move to Canada.
The story of the family’s immigration to this country is an eventful one. It began in 1806 in St. Fergus in Aberdeenshire in northeast Scotland, where John Thomson’s father, Thomas Thomson (called “Tam”), was born, and where he met Elizabeth Brodie from nearby Peterhead. During the 1830s a wave of Scots sought their future in the farmlands and lumber yards of Canada, and especially Ontario. In 1833, Tam sailed for Canada; Betty followed in 1835, travelling with her uncle George and his family, and with a close girlfriend. Tam and Betty married in 1839, and settled first near the town of Whitby, east of Toronto, then on a farm in the Township of Pickering, near the smaller town of Claremont, where he took up fifty acres to which he added two more properties, making in total a farm of a hundred and fifty acres. Good-natured and quiet, Betty Brodie Thomson was long remembered for her precise ways, and for her splendid flower garden; Tam was known as a genial romancer and teller of yarns, and a sympathetic friend. He and the Brodie family (which had settled close by at Craigieburn Farm in Whitchurch Township north of Toronto) and especially George’s son, James — Betty’s first cousin, remained close throughout their lives. When Tam died, James was one of the executors of his will. The other was Tam’s only child, his son John.
John received his early education at the common school in Claremont, then he attended Whitby Grammar School. After graduation, he returned to his father’s farm. True to his roots, when John chose a wife he selected Margaret Matheson, who was of Scottish descent. Her family had come from the Isle of Skye to Prince Edward Island, then moved to Morriston, near Guelph, Ontario, and when her mother died her father moved to Glenarm, Ontario to be near relatives. From there, his daughter moved to Claremont, where she got a job as a servant on Tam’s farm — and met John Thomson.
Like her husband, and later her children, she had simple, natural manners. She was always hard-working. It was she, aided by a photographic memory, who had the business ability in the family. There was no pretension about her. Her son Tom had the same quality of utter simplicity. Ross, Tom’s boyhood friend, recalled that Tom “was always as plain and easy as an old shoe. There was never the slightest pretence, affectation or self-consciousness about him.” He was also unusually reserved and quiet, though not with his own folk. Within the family circle, he was a charmer: he sought to entertain others, especially Minnie, the sister closest to him in age. When he sketched ships and boisterous waves with his finger on the steam or frost covered kitchen window, she noticed. He sometimes drew caricatures of people they knew, and kept them all laughing and guessing who they were. “When he got an extra good caricature, a whimsical grin came over his face,” Minnie lovingly wrote. That was about 1905, as we know from the sketchbook that contained the drawings. In 1907, home for a visit after her marriage, she recalled him sitting in a big armchair with his sketchbook on his knee, drawing prowling and ferocious-looking tigers ready to spring from a tangle of jungle grass, while two of their sister Elizabeth’s children, thrilled and spellbound, perched on the arms of his chair, and another peered over his shoulder. The urge to amuse others was deeply engrained in his character.
Tiger Pillowcase, c. 1908?
Ink on linen, location unknown. Photograph courtesy of Joan Murray Tom Thomson Papers.
Thomson made this drawing on a pillowcase as a present for his mother.
In psychological terms, he was what is called a “pleaser,” a man who suppresses his personality to satisfy the needs of others. Some say this type of personality prefers middle-of-the-road jobs because it seeks feedback from others and a boss’s seal of approval. “When things go wrong, emotions build up inside,” writes the clinical psychologist Barbara Killinger. “Instead of verbalizing their hurt and confusion, pleasers absorb their anger and feel guilty. Since guilt is self-anger, it only adds to their distress. They become depressed, moody…. They may walk away to avoid their own anger…. Many carry grudges for long periods of time, and unresolved anger arises each time a related issue surfaces….. Like a slow volcanic eruption, passive-aggressive anger, both conscious and unconscious, bubbles away.”
Thomson was everybody’s friend. In 1914, Arthur Lismer wrote that he found Tom a splendid companion, totally capable, a sincere and able artist, unassuming. Praise from others could be listed. Franklin Carmichael and friends in the engraving trade always spoke of Tom’s good nature. “He was one of the two most generous and open hearted men, it has ever been my pleasure to know,” wrote Ross (the other such man was Tom’s brother, Ralph). A.Y. Jackson always said that Tom wanted to do all the work — he meant canoeing, carrying the pack, or cooking when they camped. Yet there was anger hidden inside, anger that could erupt. “Thomson had strange antipathies and the few people he did dislike he hated most cordially,” wrote Ross. “He was not at all diplomatic in concealing it either.” And since he was sensitive — some people, like Jackson, would even say overly so — he often got a chance to have his feelings hurt.
Other clues to his personality can be found in the accounts of his brothers or friends such as Lawren Harris. They vividly recalled Thomson’s fits of despondency. When he was discouraged, Tom would sit looking at a work of design or a painting on his easel and try to destroy it, smearing it with ash, or breaking wooden matches to throw them at the wet paint surface — a repetitive action typical of inward rage. Other signs of his repressed anger were his moods — often up or down. To get away from his own or others’ anger, he would walk away. Harris later recalled that during the winter at his shack in Toronto Thomson would exercise at night by putting on snowshoes to tramp the length of the Rosedale ravine and out into the country. We conjecture that through the passage of time, and his bodily movement, he set behind him a difficult painting. His reaction to emotional entanglement was flight. In 1904 in Seattle, where he had gone to attend business college, he fell in love, but when difficulties arose, he left town, never to speak to the young woman again.
Killinger observes that pleasers can carry grudges for long periods of time, and that unresolved anger arises each time a related issue surfaces. In the murky circumstances surrounding his death in 1917, one fact is clear: he was again coming close to marriage.
Inside himself, like any pleaser, Thomson may have felt that he was a failure. “He particularly resented anything like public ridicule,” Ross wrote. Perhaps being treated as ridiculous struck too close to his fears. “I’ll show them” was his reaction. Part of his fear of being held up to derision was grounded in a dislike of authority: while in his teens, he stood up to J.B. Fraser (1864–1916), the powerful minister of Leith Church. To this antipathy he added something more serious when he was finally accepted as an artist: fear of discovery. He felt that he was a phony and that his work would be revealed for what it was. “They call this art,” he sneered to a friend, tossing aside one of his panel paintings.
Reverend J.B. Fraser (1864–1916).
Photograph courtesy of Joan Murray Tom Thomson Papers.
Thomson’s guilt would have stemmed from several factors. Probably most important was his reaction to his uncompromising father. “With John Thomson, right was right, and wrong was wrong,” Tom’s sister Minnie wrote. John was morally rigid, and a disciplinarian. Tom was the sixth child, and a bit of a hell raiser — or at least he liked to have fun. Probably he felt an unpleasant suspicion that he had done something wrong. He may have felt regret that he hadn’t achieved what he should. Within his achievement-oriented family, he likely was criticized for not sticking to what he started. Perhaps his father said he didn’t have “grit.” In a letter to his father in the spring of 1917, the last letter he ever wrote, he said, “I’ll stick to painting as long as I can.” The words are suggestive: they sound as though the father believed his son could not stick to anything much. Thomson probably felt a discrepancy between what he was and what he would have liked to be. He would have blamed himself for his lack of success.
Minnie Thomson.
Photograph courtesy of Joan Murray Tom Thomson Papers.
All this came later, of course. Yet, even growing up in such an ambitious family, he would have harboured secret dreams. His upbringing trained him to hope to achieve. It was accepted among the family — and by friends such as Ross — that he was the one with the artistic temperament, but he was still expected to do his part, to contribute to life in Canada. His mother and father had imbued in him the values of hard work and success. For them, one aspect of success, a very Scottish one, was money.
The economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, himself a Scot, in his book on The Scotch in Canada, wrote that money for a Scot is pure love. “The Scotch wanted it for its own sake.” He continued, “Two techniques for accumulating assets have always been in some measure in competition. One is to earn money; the other is to avoid spending it,” John Thomson would always be lackadaisical about the accumulation of assets, but he would have given his full approval to the latter method. For him, as for other fathers among his acquaintances, his sons were his investments. They were to give him “his money’s worth,” he thought; so, after they attended primary school in Leith, he required them to work on the farm until they were twenty-one. His daughters and some of the younger boys, however, made it to high school, and in time, the men got business school training. Perhaps John Thomson even told his own father how he felt — that his boys owed him a living. This, and an impractical side to his nature, may have been the reason for Tam’s curious will. He left half his estate (about $20,000) to his son John, and the other $20,000 to be divided among his grandchildren, “payable to each of them on attainment of majority,” Tom Thomson had to be of age before he got his freedom, but at least, with the help of his grandparents (for the money seems to have originated with his grandmother), he got it.
On the farm, his life passed peacefully. “The Thomsons were no different from anyone else, everyone was poor,” a neighbour described the family’s life in Leith. John Thomson was not particularly hard-working. Neighbouring farmers never took his farming seriously. He sometimes would plant a field of turnips and never get around to harvesting it, recalled an acquaintance. If the weather was good, he might go fishing instead. He and his son Tom were ardent fishermen and huntsmen, and thought nothing of walking miles for a day’s sport.
He also loved his half-acre of garden, and on it lavished attention. To enrich the soil, he brought cartloads of silt from a nearby swamp; to protect it, he surrounded it with a white picket fence. Inside was a little of everything, mostly a rich selection of flowers, but also herbs, grapevines, and a few peach trees. That he loved his garden best, and did not do much work in the fields, suggests that John Thomson didn’t mind being different from the farmers around him. Clearly, he regarded his farm less as a money-making proposition than as a healthy place to raise a large family. As soon as his boys moved away he left Leith for a small farm close to Owen Sound, which he soon sold to move into town.
The flowers John planted and loved are a key to his character. “He painted a picture within that picket fence,” said an acquaintance. All his life he had been intense though absent-minded. One time, an acquaintance recalled, after the family had moved to the farm nea...
