Defiant Spirits
Authors: Ross King
Tags: #Art / CanadianBiography & Autobiography / Artists
To my three brothers: Bryan, Randy and Stephen
Copyright © 2010 by Ross King
First U.S. edition in 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the
publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright).
For a copyright licence, visit
www.accesscopyright.ca
or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Douglas & McIntyre
An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver
BC
Canada
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5
T
4
S
7
McMichael Canadian Art Collection
10365 Islington Avenue
Kleinburg
ON
Canada
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1
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Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN
978-1-55365-362-2 (cloth)
ISBN
978-1-55365-882-5 (pbk.)
ISBN
978-1-55365-807-8 (ebook)
Editing by David Staines
Copy editing by Ruth Gaskill
Cover design by Naomi MacDougall
Front cover illustration by Tom Thomson
(Canadian, 1877â1917)
,
Twisted Maple
(detail)
,
1914, oil on plywood, 26.7
x
20.9 cm, McMichael Canadian
Art Collection, Gift of Mrs. Margaret Thomson Tweedale, 1974.9.4
Dimensions of artwork are given as height
x
width
An adaptation of “White Feathers and Tangled Gardens”
appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of
Canadian Art
.
Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the
Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia
through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Government of Canada
through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.
Now what shall be our word as we return,
What word of this curious country?
DOUGLAS LEPAN
, “Canoe-Trip”
1
Men with Good Red Blood in Their Veins
3
White Feathers and Tangled Gardens
3
Are These New Canadian Painters Crazy?
EPILOGUE
:
The End of the Trail
NEVER BEFORE IN the course of writing a book have I received or required so much help from friends and strangers alike.
My deepest thanks and greatest obligation is to Tom Smart, executive director and
ceo
of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. Tom nurtured and encouraged this project from its very beginnings (a lunch on a rainy day in Oxford in December 2006) and along the way became a close and valued friend. I'm also grateful for the support and friendship over the years of Noreen Taylor, chair of the McMichael's Board of Trustees during the time that I did the bulk of the work on the project. The third figure in this magical trinity has been Scott McIntyre, chairman,
ceo
and publisher of Douglas & McIntyre. All three have shown not only a belief in
Defiant Spirits
but also a dedication to Canadian art and Canadian publishing.
The team at the McMichael offered me a tremendous amount of wisdom and assistanceâand treated me with much patience and understanding. Thanks to their efforts I feel I am in the position of an obese and undeserving tourist who has been escorted to the top of Mount Everest by an infinitely more worthy and capable team of Sherpas. Katerina Atanassova, the chief curator, and Chris Finn, assistant curator, have given me much advice and have put in more hours of planning and detective work on my behalf than I can bear to think about. Linda Morita, the McMichael's indispensable librarian and archivist, was a constant source of help and wise counsel. She made my days in the archives pleasant and (I hope) productive, and she also located all of the archival images for the book. Janine Butler found all of the colour images andâin a task whose magnitude and frustration I cannot imagineâarranged all of the loan requests for the exhibition. Shelley Falconer and Shawna White, curators at the McMichael when I started the project, provided early encouragement, and Christine Lynett arranged my first visits to the McMichael and showed me her collection of papers from the Tweedale family, now in the McMichael's archives. I'm also obliged to Stephen Weir, the McMichael's inveterate publicist, for countless services. Among the introductions he orchestrated was a memorable one to James Mathias, for whom I am grateful for a fascinating tour of the Studio Building.
The Canadian Art Foundation gave me the chance to air earlier versions of the book, both in print (in
Canadian Art
magazine) and in lectures delivered in Toronto and Winnipeg. For these opportunities I'm grateful to Ann Webb, Melony Ward and Richard Rhodes. Another chance to think aloud in front of an audience came at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and Creativity at the University of Saskatchewan, for which I thank David J. Parkinson and Peter Stoicheff. Teresa Howe arranged for me to give a preview of
Defiant Spirits
for the Canadian Women's Club in London, England; and Judy Craig at the Arts Society King, in King Township, Ontario.
Many people responded to my requests and provided valuable information in the course of my research: Susan Mavor, head of Special Collections, University of Waterloo Library; Cyndie Campbell, head of Archives, Documentation and Visual Resources in the National Gallery of Canada's Library and Archives; Cathryn Walter and the other members of the staff at Library and Archives Canada; Scott James, librarian at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto; Nora Hague, senior cataloguer in the Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum, Montreal; Isobel MacLellan, librarian, Archives and Special Collections, Mitchell Library, Glasgow; Lisa Cole, assistant curator, Gallery Records, Tate Gallery, London; Graeme Siddall in the Sheffield Archives; Laura Lamb in the Special Collections Department of the Hamilton Public Library; the periodicals and email reference staff of the Worcester Public Library in Massachusetts; Ken Dalgarno at the Moose Jaw Public Library; Damien Rostar at the Local History Department at the Hackley Public Library in Muskegon, Michigan; and Roberta Green at the Huntsville Public Library.
Other people generously responded to my queries or supplied other assistance. Angie Littlefield provided information on Tom Thomson's early years, Ron Hepworth on Ontario's flowers and vegetation, and Dr. Ken Reynolds on the fate of the 60th Battalion. I am grateful to Barb Curry, Rick Thompson and Jayne Huntley of the Sheddon Area Historical Society and to Annie Robertson, who shared with me her memories of Coboconk. Mary Gordon told me about Christina Bertram's dealings with A.Y. Jackson and Tom Thomson. Louis Gagliardi gave me a private view of paintings by J.W. Beatty and P.C. Sheppard. Dr. Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov's tremendous support, along with that of Annie Smid, gave a great boost to the exhibition at a crucial point in its development.
I was fortunate to receive cooperation from the descendants of a number of the people mentioned in the book. William D. Addison granted permission for me to quote from Mark Robinson's diaries, now in the Trent University Archives in Peterborough; and Catharine Mastin allowed me to quote from Franklin Carmichael's letters, held in the McMichael's archives. Kim Bullock kindly gave me much information on her great-grandfather, Carl Ahrens. She also made available to me passages from Madonna Ahrens's unpublished memoirs and provided the photograph of Carl Ahrens reproduced in the book.
The formidable logistics of writing on Canadian history and Canadian art while living in England were solved thanks to help from a number of friends. Victor Shea offered me a bed in Toronto, and Tasha Shea photocopied journal articles that were unavailable to me in the U.K. I am also thankful for the generous hospitality in Toronto of John and Chris Currie, who on several occasions gave me the keys to their beautiful house.
Chris Labonté, Susan Rana and Peter Cockingâalong with other of their colleagues at Douglas & McIntyreâmade the process from manuscript to book efficient, enjoyable and remarkably painless. Ruth Gaskill expertly copyedited the manuscript.
Two people, both in Ottawa, went above and beyond the call of duty in their assistance. I was extremely fortunate in having as my wise editor Dr. David Staines of the University of Ottawa. He scrutinized the various iterations of the manuscript with a keen and rigorous eye, offering many editorial insights. I was also the happy recipient of a huge amount of help and advice from Charles Hill of the National Gallery of Canada. Despite his own busy schedule, Charlie read the manuscript in its entirety and gave me the benefit of his extraordinary knowledge of Canadian art in general and the Group of Seven in particular. He rescued me from numerous faux pas. As for any that remain, this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.
Like anyone writing about the Group of Seven, I am indebted to a number of art historians who over the years have held high the torch for Canadian art. Besides that of Charlie Hill, I wish to acknowledge the work of Dennis Reid, David Silcox, Joan Murray and the late Robert Stacey. Many other scholars are cited in my notes. One of the numerous pleasures of researching
Defiant Spirits
was discovering the tremendous breadth and depth of recent writing on Canadian art and Canadian historyâall of it testimony to the health and vigour of Canadian studies.
Two people in England were vital to the production of the book: my agent, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, and my wife, Melanie. Besides giving her love and support, Melanie patiently endured my frequent absences from home and, when I was at home, my long hours shut away in my studio with “the Canadians.”
I must also thank my family in Canada: my mother, brothers, sisters, nephews and niece. Writing and thinking about Canadian art, after a decade of work on Italian and French art and history, took me back to my Canadian roots. For that reason the dedicatees of
Defiant Spirits
are three peopleâmy brothers Bryan, Randy and Stephenâwith whom I shared a happy boyhood on the Saskatchewan prairies.
