Defiant Spirits (16 page)

One of Thomson's sketches, done before Lismer's visit, showed a continuing interest in panoramas as well as his “uncanny sensitivity” to the landscape. At some point in the early spring he had travelled to the Petawawa River, in the northeastern corner of the park. Here, standing on the bank beside a rapids, the river swollen and broad before him, he painted the spring breakup and, in the distance, the monumental forms of the Petawawa gorges. With its stratifications of water, land and sky, the composition was not much different from the work he did two years earlier on the Mississagi River—but the assertive brushwork and innovative use of colour showed exactly how far he had come. Called
Petawawa Gorges,
the sketch was signed in the mauve-coloured paint he had used in the shadows of the gorge. Thomson himself was beginning to come out of the shadows, ready to take his place at the forefront of Canadian art.

IN THE SUMMER of 1914 the Studio Building for Canadian Art entertained a distinguished visitor. Sir Edmund Walker was, in the words one admirer, “a tall majestic figure, alert and radiant, with far-seeing kindly blue eyes, ample grey beard, and well-cut clothes.”
1
The sixty-five-year-old Sir Edmund was president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce and one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the country.

Sir Edmund was also a man of culture and learning. He lectured on Italian art at the University of Toronto, on whose board of governors he presided as chairman. His influence and patronage were decisive in the founding of the Mendelssohn Choir, the Royal Ontario Museum and the Art Museum of Toronto. He was a collector of discerning if predictable tastes. His skills as a connoisseur were honed, according to legend, in his first job: spotting counterfeit bills at his uncle's bureau de change in Hamilton. Long Garth, his elegant residence on St. George Street, had fine collections of etchings, bronzes, ivories and more than a thousand Japanese woodblock prints. It featured murals by the Canadian artists Gustav Hahn and George A. Reid, along with several hundred European paintings. The collection included works by Dürer and Rembrandt.

Sir Edmund visited the Studio Building in his capacity as chairman of the board of trustees of the National Gallery. A short while earlier Lawren Harris had published an angry letter in the
Toronto Globe
decrying the National Gallery's supposed practice of filling its rooms with what he called second-rate European pictures. This policy was detrimental to Canadian painters, he claimed, because it endorsed the “snobbishness” of collectors (he might have had Sir Edmund in mind) who bought only “foreign work.” He ended with an angry blast: “Out of touch, with no sympathy or enthusiasm or any belief in the future of Canadian art save that it ape the past and severely copy European standards, it with its stupid policy is merely helping the dealer to blind the people whom the Canadian artists must depend on for a living.”
2

Harris's letter was overstated and in many respects unjustified. Although Canadian collectors steered clear of Canadian paintings, the same could not be said of the National Gallery. Its director, Eric Brown, had recently written about how Canada had “a strong and forceful art which only needs to be fostered and encouraged in order to become a great factor in her development as a nation.”
3
He was making it his business to make certain the National Gallery fostered Canadian art, with particular attention to what he called “the younger men.” One of Harris's own works,
The Drive,
had been added to the collection in 1912, and Tom Thomson's
Moonlight
was purchased only weeks earlier. The gallery included works by most Canadian artists of any repute whatsoever, many of them Canadian-themed landscapes. Its confined quarters could boast (to name only a few) Maurice Cullen's winter landscapes
First Snow
and
The Ice Harvest,
Fred Brigden Jr.'s
A Muskoka Highway,
C.W. Jefferys's Prairie landscape
Western Sunlight, Last Mountain Lake,
Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté's
Autumn Landscape, Evening,
Edmund Morris's coastal view
Cap Tourmente,
Horatio Walker's moody rural scene
Oxen Drinking
and Homer Watson's pastoral
A Hillside Gorge.

Some of these painters might well have been guilty of trying to “ape the past” and imitate European standards. But the accusation that the National Gallery was neglecting homegrown art in favour of European paintings was such a gross exaggeration that one suspects Harris either had not set foot in the Victoria Memorial Museum or else (more likely) he was being deliberately and provocatively disingenuous in the interests of further promoting himself and his friends.

Harris's strident letter produced the effect of luring Sir Edmund Walker—“a strong man with a liking for his own way of doing things”
4
—into the Studio Building. The times must certainly have seemed auspicious for Harris and his fellow “rising men.” During the 1911 election campaign, Sir Edmund, as leader of the Toronto Eighteen, had been one of the most powerful and effective opponents of reciprocity. Harris and his friends were protectionists in the art world: they hoped, as the
Toronto Daily Star
reported, to “counteract the effect of the importation of European pictures.”
5
Would Sir Edmund now defend and support Canadian painters as he had Canadian businessmen?

The meeting passed cordially and peacefully. Walker proved sympathetic to Harris's arguments. Despite his personal taste for Japanese prints and Old Masters, Walker recognized that the National Gallery needed to collect representative samples of Canadian art. As early as 1909 he had instructed his fellow trustees that they must consider purchasing for the collection works of art “which may not be attractive to us as individuals, but would be fair expositions of the condition of art in Canada.”
6
According to A.Y. Jackson, he asked Harris “what all the fuss was about. Harris told him of our intention to paint our own country and to put life into Canadian art. Sir Edmund said that was just what the National Gallery wanted to see happen; if it did, the Gallery would back us up.”
7

Walker must have been by taken aback by the fervency with which the painters expressed a desire to paint their own country, since Canadian landscapes were hardly in any short supply. But he must have been shown some of the paintings that Harris and his friends had recently finished or were executing at the time—works that, like
Terre sauvage
or
Laurentian Landscape,
did indeed show that the tenants of the Studio Building were attempting to “put life into Canadian art” by expressing themselves in a style different from earlier generations of landscapists such as Homer Watson. Although Walker might have little wished to see such works on the walls of Long Garth, he could appreciate the need to put them in the National Gallery.

FOLLOWING HIS CANOE expedition in Algonquin Park, Arthur Lismer returned to Toronto, to his job and his domestic obligations, in the third week of May. Tom Thomson, with neither work nor a wife to detain him, remained in Northern Ontario for the rest of the summer. After Lismer's departure he travelled west by train from Algonquin Park to Parry Sound, at the mouth of the Seguin River. Here, on the eastern edge of Georgian Bay, he continued to pursue the leisure that Dr. James MacCallum's patronage offered him.

Some 240 kilometres north of Toronto, Parry Sound was a bustling port, logging town and railway terminus. It had several sawmills, a shingle mill and two grain elevators built by J.R. Booth. There was also a deep, well-protected harbour for steamships, many owned by the endlessly enterprising Booth. Yet when he sat down with his box-easel on the last day of May, Thomson chose not to record any of this industry and activity. Instead he produced a remarkable sketch,
Parry Sound Harbour,
which showed the more elemental forces of wind and wave. As Thomson knew, Georgian Bay was renowned for its wrathful storms. Wilfred Campbell had written in his guidebook of the “iron surfs” and the “maddened fear” of the waves on this “inhospitable coast.”
8
Thomson no doubt knew how tempests in this area had claimed steamers such as the
Waubuno
and the
Asia,
the latter, in 1882, at the cost of more than a hundred lives. The
Asia,
which had set off from Thomson's hometown of Owen Sound, even became the subject of the popular ballad “The Wreck of the
Asia.
”

It was this destructive power that Thomson hoped to capture. The composition of his sketch—horizontal bands of lake and sky in panorama—he had done many times already, but
Parry Sound Harbour
showed evidence of rapid progress as he deployed his new-found skills, texturing his paint to give turbulence and menace to the white-capped water and wind-blown sky. In the bottom right-hand corner, in blood-red pigment, he confidently inscribed his name.

A few days later, after travelling north along Georgian Bay, probably by steamship, Thomson camped with Dr. MacCallum near the delta of the French River. Here the doctor was able to see the latest fruits of Thomson's industry. Unlike Sir Edmund Walker, Dr. MacCallum was hardly a knowledgeable connoisseur. Jackson claimed the ophthalmologist knew astonishingly little about art. His virtue, to Jackson, was that he had a great passion for the Ontario northlands and “looked for the feel of it in pictures.”
9
Yet Dr. MacCallum, to his credit, had more advanced tastes than many other collectors, and Thomson's latest paintings, with their gestural brushwork and exuberant colours, seem to have left him reassured about his decision to fund the artist. He acquired (either then or later) Algonquin sketches such as
Larry Dickson's Shack
as well as both
Parry Sound Harbour
and a sketch Thomson made a short distance from their campsite,
Spring, French River.
Executed on plywood with the same robust brushwork, this latter painting showed a stand of trees, including a twisted jack pine, huddled on an outcrop of rock.

In the past few years, Jackson, Harris, MacDonald and Lismer had all visited Dr. MacCallum's cottage on West Wind Island. In the summer of 1914 it was Thomson's turn to enjoy the doctor's hospitality. He spent much of June and all July at the cottage, canoeing among the islands and making numerous sketches. He gave painting lessons to Dr. MacCallum's ten-year-old daughter, Helen, and presented her with a painting called
Boathouse, Go Home Bay,
one of several sketches he did of the area's numerous summer cottages. She inscribed on the back, “Given to me by Tom Thomson the summer he taught me to paint.”
10

Although the landscape of the “happy isles” appealed to Thomson no less than to Jackson and Lismer, he was less than impressed with his fellow visitors to Go Home Bay. Jackson later wrote that on Georgian Bay everything was still “pretty much as it had been when Champlain passed through its thousands of rock islands three hundred years before.”
11
But this was to turn a blind eye to the effects of industry and, especially, tourism. Thomson wrote to Fred Varley in July that the area was “too much like North Rosedale
. . .
all birthday cakes and water ice.”
12
This disdain was evidently for people like Jackson's friends the Clements—affluent urbanites who each summer descended on the “wilderness” for a few weeks of marshmallow roasting and dinghy rowing.

Deprived of the guidance of Jackson, Harris and Lismer, Thomson found himself unable to paint.
13
Soon he began yearning for the relative isolation of Algonquin Park, whose deeper reaches were as yet untrammelled by the same kind of tourism and whose landscape offered so much inspiration a few months earlier. At the beginning of July he wrote a letter trying to persuade Varley and his wife, Maud (who had arrived in Canada the previous summer), to join him for a canoeing and camping excursion. He hoped to be back in Algonquin Park “about a week from today.”
14
However, it was not until the beginning of August 1914—when the lamps were going out all over Europe—that he finally set off by himself for Algonquin Park.

THE PRECISE DETAILS of Thomson's remarkable solo voyage—one that has entered the realms of Canadian myth—are vague. He probably took a steamer the hundred kilometres north from Go Home Bay to the French River, from which point he began canoeing and portaging northeast to Lake Nipissing.
15

This was a daring voyage through mythic waters. Exactly a year earlier Rupert Brooke, struck by the apparent lack of history or habitation as he travelled through this area, wrote that the pools of water and cliffs of rock were “dumbly awaiting their Wordsworth or their Acropolis
. . .
The air is unbreathed, the earth untrodden.”
16
But Brooke was almost as ignorant of Canada as his graceless New York friends. This was by no means a pathless and anonymous wilderness, because these waterways, as Wilfred Campbell had noted, were replete “with history and legend.”
17
Thomson undoubtedly knew the histories and legends, not only from reading Campbell but also through discussions with
Dr. MacCallum. It was no accident the two men met to camp along the French River, at the spot where Champlain, in search of the sea route to China, had arrived on Georgian Bay. The Madawaska Club was planning celebrations for the three hundredth anniversary of Champlain's voyage, and MacCallum was probably scouting locations for the proposed pageant. Festivities were to include actors rowing a canoe ashore and playing the parts of Champlain, the Hurons and Father Le Caron.
18

In traversing the 110 kilometres along the French River between Georgian Bay and Lake Nipissing, Thomson was tracing earlier voyages by both the Algonquin peoples and the explorers, fur traders and Récollet friars who followed them. For many years the French River had been part of the main fur-trade route to the Great Lakes, and by the end of the nineteenth century, as lumber replaced fur as a staple, tens of millions of board feet of timber were driven down the river each year to the sawmills on Georgian Bay. More recently, fishermen had come to the river in search of smallmouth bass and northern pike.

However commercialized, the French River was still undeniably treacherous, especially for a lone canoeist. Passing through the undulating, glaciated granite of the Canadian Shield, it offered stretches of whitewater and sheer cliff. Alexander Henry, navigating the river in the summer of 1761, described “many rapids, full of danger to the canoes and the men.”
19
Jennet Roy's
The History of Canada,
published in 1850, reported that beside a single set of its rapids thirteen wooden crosses had been erected “to commemorate an equal number of fatal accidents.”
20
It was almost as if in undertaking this foolhardily perilous voyage Thomson was measuring his abilities against all those who had come before him—including Neil McKechnie, the “expert canoeist” and “real Canadian” who had captured the country's savage beauty in paint.