Defiant Spirits (12 page)

Jackson was no stranger to what, during his time in France, he nostalgically called “the good Canuck wild woods.” As a young man, especially in Paris, he had adopted the self-consciously bohemian air of the Left Bank artiste or
flâneur,
wearing a corduroy suit and celluloid collar and dosing his head with coal oil to preserve what remained of his vanishing and prematurely greying hair. But he claimed to be at home in the bush as well as on the boulevard. “I have passed so much time out in the woods by myself,” he boasted as a student, “that I can get all the company I need out of a pencil and a piece of paper.”
17

Jackson had already visited Georgian Bay three years earlier, in the summer of 1910. On that occasion he had been in the company of the three artistic Breithaupt girls—Edna, Rosa and Catherine—and another set of distant Berlin relations, the Clements. The Clement family owned a cottage on the southern tip of Portage Island, and while staying with them Jackson would take a canoe and paddle over to the Breithaupt property.
18
His short voyage might have been motivated by more than a need for fresh air or exercise on the open water, since he was apparently in love with Rosa Breithaupt, recently graduated from her art studies at the Ontario Ladies' College in Whitby.
19
In the summer of 1913 Jackson did a painting of twenty-two-year-old Rosa posing at her easel on Chippewa Island.

Like Lismer, Jackson would likewise call the 30,000 Islands of Georgian Bay the “happy isles.” In 1910 he and his cousins had enjoyed the usual cottage-country delights. They took to the water in dinghies, enjoyed marshmallow roasts and ice cream, and picnicked on Giant's Tomb.
20
Yet he did not find the area encouraging as far as painting went. Georgian Bay was no stranger to artists: that inveterate painter and traveller Lucius O'Brien had already worked there in the 1880s, creating works such as
Among the Islands of Georgian Bay.
But Jackson could see few pictorial possibilities. With his head full of European cathedrals and Dutch scenery of the sort he had just depicted on the wall of his Aunt Geneva's bedroom, he disdained the area as a place for artists. “It's a great country to have a holiday in
. . .
but it's nothing but little islands covered with scrub and pine trees, and not quite paintable
. . .
Sketching simply won't go.”
21
The Canuck wild woods of Georgian Bay did not, at least in 1910, seem worth the pencil and paper.

In the summer of 1913 Jackson was more favourably disposed to the scrubby boulder-and-water landscape. He had no doubt been influenced by the enthusiasm of the Toronto painters he met a short while earlier, as well as by some of the art he had recently seen in Europe. Georgian Bay's wind-sculpted pine trees, clear atmosphere, expanses of water and masses of Precambrian rock seemed to call for the strong outlines, broad patches of colour and dynamic forms that Van Gogh, for example, had used to capture the clear light and gesticulating cypresses in the south of France, or that had served Gauguin when he painted Brittany's weather-beaten granite churches and whitewashed cottages.

Jackson remained on the bay after his cousins returned to Berlin, occupying the Clement family's old boathouse on Portage Island and—as he was accustomed to doing from his days in Fontainebleau or on the Brittany coast—making numerous
plein-air
sketches in the woods and on the shore. Portage Island, as it happened, was only a few kilometres south of West Wind Island. Dr. MacCallum had been planning to close the cottage for the winter following Lismer's visit when he received a letter from Lawren Harris describing how a Montreal artist named Jackson was working in the area. “We want to get him to come to Toronto,” Harris wrote, “but he's hard up and talks about going to New York. If you see him, have a talk with him about it.”
22

HARRIS AND Dr. MacCallum were only too aware that, for lack of opportunity, many Canadian artists had been forced to base themselves more or less permanently abroad. Sometime after returning from the Mississagi Forest Reserve, Will Broadhead joined the exodus to seek his fortune in New York City. His initial optimism about his adopted country had rapidly faded. “I feel that I can do some real good work, if only I get the proper opportunity,” he wrote home to his parents, “and I can see that that opportunity will not come in this city.”
23
Around the same time, Tom Thomson's other canoeing companion, Harry B. Jackson, likewise left town for greener American pastures. Their attitude was summed up by A.Y. Jackson in a letter of October 1910. “As far as Canadian Art concerns me, it can go to
—
—. There never will be a school of Canadian art. The natural centre for Eastern Canadian artists will be New York, and it will be better for themselves and their art when they realize it.”
24

The climate in Canada was indeed inhospitable for an aspiring artist. The collectors were apathetic, the public oblivious and the critics benightedly conservative. Daniel Wilkie, a banker who served as honorary president of the Canadian Art Club, despaired that a Canadian artist returning to his native land after studying abroad “experienced a shock in realizing the lack of sympathy with his aims and objects, the lack of artistic facilities of every kind, the lack of intelligent critics, the lack of suitable buildings where works of art can be properly shown, and, above all, the lack of any apparent desire to see things change for the better.”
25

Even artists with international reputations, such as Maurice Cullen and J.W. Morrice, found Canadian sales difficult. The Montreal-born Morrice sold paintings to the French government and the wealthy Russian collector Ivan Morozov, but his sales in Canada (apart from a few to connoisseurs) were few and far between. In 1911 he refused to send his paintings for exhibition in Toronto: “Nothing is sold
. . .
nobody understands them.”
26
Since 1890 he had lived in Paris. Many other Canadian painters worked in London or New York. Hamilton-born William Blair Bruce, who died prematurely in Sweden in 1906, spent most of his working life in France and then on the Swedish island of Gotland. Halifax-born Ernest Lawson, founder of the Harlem River School and the inspiration for the painter Frederick Lawson in Somerset Maugham's
Of Human Bondage,
lived for so long in the United States that he took to denying his Canadian roots: he told everyone he came from San Francisco.

MacCallum and Harris were probably aware of how yet another promising artist had just been lost in this great diaspora. The painter besides Jackson condemned by the
Montreal Daily Herald
as a member of the “Infanticist School” was twenty-seven-year-old John Goodwin Lyman. Lyman left Montreal in 1907 to study in Europe: first at the Royal College of Art in London and then the Académie Julian in Paris (where he studied under Laurens one year after Jackson). Haunted by the “summary intensity” of a Matisse painting at the 1909 Salon des Indépendants, he enrolled in the Académie Matisse, which he called a “nest of heretical fledglings.”
27
Early in 1913 he returned to Canada to show work at the Art Association of Montreal. Braving the poor reviews, he staged a solo exhibition of forty-two paintings in May, with catalogue copy composed by his wife that read, “Art is not an imitation of nature
. . .
Art that has an air of the natural is a nonsense; art must be artificial.”
28
The response was even more savage. In the
Montreal Daily Star
Samuel Morgan-Powell attacked his canvases as examples of the dreaded Post-Impressionism, haughtily dismissed as “a fad, an inartistic fetish for the amusement of bad draughtsmanship, incompetent colourists, and others who find themselves unqualified to paint pictures.”
29
In the kind of intemperate language used in not even the most acrimonious political debate, he condemned Lyman's works as “travesties, abortions, sensual and hideous malformations” whose creation “would shame a school boy. His composition would disgrace an artist of the stone age.”
30
At least Lyman was in good company: Morgan-Powell had denounced Van Gogh as a “raving maniac” and Gauguin a “Post-Impressionist mountebank.”
31
But the result of this critical mauling was that Lyman immediately left Montreal in disgust: he would spend the next eighteen years in Europe.

Another painter badly shaken by the critics in 1913 MacCallum and Harris almost certainly would not have known about. In the summer of 1912, when Tom Thomson and Will Broadhead were paddling through the Mississagi Forest Reserve, another aspiring artist, Emily Carr, was travelling along the Skeena River and through the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia. Earlier that year, following her studies in France and San Francisco, she exhibited some of her Fauve-inspired French canvases—to critical alarm—in her studio at 1465 West Broadway in Vancouver. In 1913 she rented space at Drummond Hall in Vancouver to show two hundred of the works painted in northern British Columbia. Like Harris and MacDonald, she hoped to forge a new style appropriate to the Canadian landscape, in her case by combining the vibrant colours of Post-Impressionism with the designs of totem poles and ceremonial masks of the First Nations peoples. “More than ever I was convinced,” she later wrote, “that the old way of seeing was inadequate to express this big country of ours, her depth, her height, her unbounded wideness, silences too strong to be broken—nor could ten million cameras, through their mechanical boxes, ever show real Canada. It had to be sensed, passed through live minds, sensed and loved.”
32
But the lack of support for her work in Vancouver, both critical and financial, obliged her to close her studio and move back to Victoria. She would live for many years in artistic isolation and, like Lyman, no longer disturb the sensibilities of the Canadian critics.

MacCallum and Harris were determined that Jackson should not join the ongoing exodus of Canadian painters. Seeking him out on Portage Island, MacCallum found the painter gamely trying to insulate his quarters by stuffing birchbark and moss into the gaps in the walls. Inviting him to spend the winter at the cottage on Go Home Bay, he also made Jackson another even more generous offer: he would pay the painter's expenses for a year, relieving him of his need to work at anything other than painting.

JACKSON STAYED IN Dr. MacCallum's cottage for a month before returning to Toronto and accepting further hospitality from Lawren Harris, who gave him space to work in his own studio above the Bank of Commerce at Bloor and Yonge.

Harris also tried to woo Jackson by getting his work into the National Gallery. Although founded in 1882, for many years the gallery was woefully neglected by the Dominion government. Until recently its small collection (in 1913 it held some four hundred paintings) shared space in a mansard-roofed building on O'Connor Street in Ottawa with the Government Fish Hatcheries Exhibit: stuffed salmon were displayed on the ground floor, art a floor above. In 1911 the collection moved into the newly opened Victoria Memorial Museum, this time sharing accommodation with the Department of Mines and the Geological Survey. The building was to prove structurally unsound, and in 1915 the central tower would need to be removed to stabilize the shaky foundations that served as an all too apt metaphor for the state of the national collection.

Found among these mineral samples and dinosaur bones was a painting collection of what Harris derided in a letter to a newspaper as “second-rate foreign pictures.”
33
Eager to have his new friend represented in the national collection (to which
The Drive
had recently been added), he convinced nineteen Toronto artists—most of them members of the Arts and Letters Club—to invest in one of Jackson's paintings, a French landscape entitled
Autumn in Picardy.
Then, without troubling to consult either the director, Eric Brown, or the majority of his subscribers, he announced in a newspaper article that the painting was to be donated to the National Gallery. Brown was taken aback by the offer, and some subscribers felt conned. The eminent portraitist E. Wyly Grier was angered that until he read Harris's “preposterous article” he had not been informed of the “monstrous suggestion” that such a “microscopic sketch”—it was only twenty-one centimetres high by twenty-seven centimetres wide—should be sent to the National Gallery.
34
Grier was probably objecting to the style of Jackson's painting as much as he was to its minuscule size.
Autumn in Picardy
was a blur of bright colour and dissipating form, a
plein-air
sketch with dabs of pigment thickly and energetically applied with a wide brush.

Autumn in Picardy
was one of the works Jackson displayed in Toronto in December 1913, when Harris—in another effort to keep him in Canada—arranged for an exhibition of his paintings at the Arts and Letters Club. The critical waters proved little better in Toronto than in Montreal, and Jackson received a facetious rebuke in the
Toronto Daily Star
in a review entitled “The Hot Mush School.”

With more than eighty thousand readers, the
Daily Star
was Toronto's largest-circulation newspaper by some margin.
35
A few months earlier its regular art reviewer, Margaret L. Fairbairn, responded favourably to the “virile” style of the “younger men.” But it was not Fairbairn but a man named Henry Gadsby who strolled through the doors of the Arts and Letters Club to survey the paintings. Gadsby freely admitted his lack of qualifications to speak knowledgeably about art: he was a parliamentary reporter more accustomed to penning affectionately mocking portraits of politicians. His persona in the article was that of the befuddled member of the public confronted by strange and incomprehensible images. Mystified by Jackson's experimental style, with its urgent colours and liberal paint handling, he claimed the works looked as if someone had sprayed a tube of paint at the canvases. One of them he described as looking like “a plesiosaurus in a fit,” another as “Dutch head cheese having a quarrel with a chunk of French nougat.” The works, he claimed, looked more like “a gob of porridge than a work of art.” The “younger set,” he wrote, “believes in Explosions, Outbursts and Acute Congestions of Pigments.” He even suggested that many of these “Hot Mushers” were under the influence of opiates or other hallucinogens.
36