Defiant Spirits (18 page)

In Jackson's view, authentic landscapes required such canoe-and-sleeping-roll communions with nature. Thomson's progress as a painter, which had coincided with his progress as a canoeist and outdoorsman, seemed to confirm his opinion. Although the “excellent beds” were available in Mowat Lodge, Thomson and Jackson pointedly pitched their tent a short distance away, in the middle of a birch grove beside the old mill. The two bachelors might have felt like outsiders in any case, since both the Lismers and the Varleys had brought their children with them, and Beatrice Hagarty Robertson was newly married. With their backwoods snobbishness, Thomson and Jackson might have used their tent to retreat from the “birthday cakes and water ice” effervescence that had recently driven Thomson from Go Home Bay.

Whatever the tensions or rivalries, all concerned were awed by Algonquin in full autumn colour. Varley and Lismer, especially, were astonished by the blaze of colour. Varley, who was learning from Thomson how to paddle a canoe, wrote to Dr. MacCallum, “The Country is a revelation to me—and completely bowled me over at first.”
47
Lismer wrote of the “glorious week of colour” but admitted how he found it “far from easy to express the riot of colour and still keep the landscape in a high key
. . .
Varley and I are struggling to create something out of it all.”
48

The crimsons and yellows of the sumac and birch, in combination with the lucid atmosphere and expanses of clear water, created scenes quite different from the tonsured hedgerows and gorse-
covered fells of the moorlands outside Sheffield, or for that matter from the vaporous hues and mellow orchards and pastures of Holland or France that had served so many landscapists in the past. Jackson, Harris and MacDonald all were stressing that a different approach to the landscape—something akin to the style of the “Norwegian-French protagonists”—was required to do the Shield country justice. Jackson and Thomson, following the Post-Impressionists, and Harris and MacDonald, taking their cue from the Scandinavian painters, were abandoning the colour harmonies and cursory brushwork of Impressionism in favour of bold lines and broad planes of clashing colours. If the intensely bright sunlight of the Midi inspired the chromatic outbursts of Van Gogh, Matisse and André Derain, the palettes of the Studio Building painters took their cue from the sumacs, tamaracks and maples.

Varley wrote to his sister, “We are endeavouring to knock out of us all the preconceived ideas, emptying ourselves of everything except that nature is here in all its greatness.”
49
The desire to rid oneself of all influences and see the world anew was common among painters, especially modernists. Cézanne claimed he wanted to do paintings of the sort produced by someone who had never seen a work of art. Piet Mondrian wished to erase the history of art from his imagination, and Picasso, Vuillard and Bonnard all sought to recapture the freshness of a child's eye, untainted by other pictures.
50
Yet the painter's mind can never be wiped clean. Every artist, no matter how original, is an amalgamation of influences. Despite their fantasies of artistic tabulae rasae, Bonnard was influenced by the Impressionists and Japanese prints, Mondrian (in his early works) by the painters of the Hague School and (in his later ones) by Picasso and Braque. Picasso, the most brilliantly innovative painter of the twentieth century, assimilated such predecessors as Velázquez, El Greco, Goya and Titian.

It is hardly surprising that Varley failed to rid himself of his own preconceived ideas about what made a work of art. The product of his visit to the park was
Indian Summer,
a portrait of Maud against a background of birch trees. The bold pattern of flattened shapes shows the influence of Augustus John, one of his favourite painters, who was inspired in turn by Gauguin and Matisse.

Lismer likewise revealed the imprint of previous painters, in his case the French Impressionists. Later he would claim—in what became a mantra for these painters of the Canadian north—that Impressionism “does not transplant well to Canada. It is emotionally unstable
. . .
in our clear air and amid our solid form of land and water.”
51
But this remark does disservice to his work in Algonquin Park in 1914.
The Guide's Home, Algonquin,
however indebted to Impressionism with its dappled light, mauve shadows and stabs of colour, is a stunningly beautiful showstopper of a painting whose crystal-clear blue sky and stand of shimmering birch trees (one can almost hear the gentle applause of the leaves) suggest the Canadian autumn as vividly and powerfully as anything yet to come from the easels of his companions.

THE LISMERS AND Varleys returned to Toronto in the middle of October, followed a week later by Jackson. With the onset of war, financial prospects for the painters looked bleak. Earlier in the year, the country began experiencing an economic slowdown as more than a decade of prosperous and expanding commercial activity gave way to inactivity in the exchanges and a contraction of the money markets. Now the war threatened to make the situation even worse. “I guess there is not much commercial work to do in Toronto,” Jackson wrote to Dr. MacCallum. Orders for brochures and posters for hotels and real-estate companies evaporated, others were cancelled, and the staffs of engraving houses drastically reduced. “If the war keeps on,” Jackson glumly mused, “conditions can only get worse. The only job will be handling guns.”
52

Jackson's artist friend Randolph Hewton was already preparing to do exactly that. In 1913 Hewton had been denounced in the Montreal press as a Post-Impressionist but then defended by Harold Mortimer-Lamb as an artist of “original outlook” and “unusual promise.”
53
Now he was enlisting with the Victoria Rifles and, along with the sixty thousand other Canadians who were in uniform by the end of 1914, preparing to ship overseas with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He was anxious for Jackson, his old sketching companion at Émile-ville, to join him. “I am not in any desperate hurry,” Jackson wrote to MacCallum. “The hero's job is a pretty thankless one. There are a lot of institutions and big fat heads in this country not worth laying down one's life to preserve.”
54

Nor was Tom Thomson eager to enlist. After another month in Algonquin Park, he returned to Toronto in the middle of November. One day soon afterwards, he stood at the corner of Bloor and Yonge with Fred and Maud Varley watching as twelve thousand men marched by eight abreast. According to Varley, Thomson was “really upset” about what he took to be the dire fate of the young soldiers: “Gun fodder for a day.” He was equally pessimistic about the prospects for a swift end to the war, predicting it would last for three or four years.
55

Thomson's pessimism about the war and his disillusionment with the flag-waving crowds were shaped in part by a book he read a year or two earlier, Norman Angell's
The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage.
Angell was an Englishman who immigrated to California in 1889 at the age of seventeen. He worked at a series of frontier-style jobs—ditch digger, prospector, buckaroo—before turning to journalism. In 1903, revolted by the age's patriotism and jingoism, he published
Patriotism under Three Flags: A Plea for Rationalism in Politics.
It was followed six years later by another attack on jingoism and empire building,
Europe's Optical Illusion,
a pamphlet expanded into a book the following year and retitled
The Great Illusion.
The “great illusion,” he argued, was the belief that a nation's financial and industrial stability relied on its ability to defend itself against the aggression of other nations who would invade because they believed—in another great illusion—that they would thereby “increase their power, prosperity and well-being, at the cost of the weaker and vanquished.”
56
One economic fallacy was therefore being used to combat another, and such logical blunders were leading to a militarism that threatened the stability of the entire world.

Praised by reviewers as “one of the most profound, as well as the most acute, pleas against war and armaments that has ever appeared,”
57
The Great Illusion
ultimately sold more than 2 million copies. In about 1912, according to Stanley Kemp, it became a topic of discussion among the designers at Grip Limited. Angell's view of the contradictions and absurdities of militarists and empire builders—Jackson's “big fat heads”—won a sympathetic audience in Thomson even before the Great War. According to Kemp, Thomson “was of the opinion that war was a snare and a delusion” and that “militarism” and “preparedness” were “quite wrong.”
58

Kemp claimed Thomson was not alone in his views, but as the artist stood with Varley and his wife among the cheering crowds at the corner of Bloor and Yonge, watching the young Torontonians marching in lockstep towards their doom, he must have felt in very much of a minority. He must also have realized that his group of fellow painters, who had so recently come together and offered him such advice and support, were now threatened with dispersal or extinction as “Young Canada” was drawn into the lunatic and dangerous quarrels of the Old World.

ALTHOUGH THE WAR in Europe meant that artists such as Randolph Hewton were shipping overseas, the hostilities brought one young Canadian painter back home.

Franklin Carmichael was the red-haired son of an Orillia carriage maker. After taking art lessons in Orillia from Canon Richard W. Greene (reputedly the model for Dean Drone in Stephen Leacock's
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
),
1
he had arrived in Toronto in 1911, at the age of twenty-one, to further an artistic career limited until then to painting crests and racing stripes on the vehicles manufactured by his father. For the next two years he worked at Grip Limited as an office boy and apprentice designer while taking lessons from those stalwarts of Toronto art education, William Cruikshank and George A. Reid. He frugally put away $5 a week (his salary was $15 per week) until in the summer of 1913 he had saved enough to begin studies, on their advice, at the alma mater of Arthur Lismer and Fred Varley, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. He spent nine months in Belgium (whose neutrality wrongly suggested it would be a safe destination) before travelling to England in the summer of 1914. He was in England when Germany invaded Belgium and so returned to Toronto, to the design firm of Rous and Mann, in October. Soon afterwards he became a tenant in the Studio Building.

Carmichael's arrival in the Studio Building was a welcome one for Tom Thomson, Bill Beatty and Arthur Heming. “We really have an enjoyable time as we visit one another and gab away like so many geese,” Carmichael wrote to his girlfriend.
2
He was valued for other reasons as well. With painting commissions and the demand for graphic design in short supply, some Studio Building tenants were embarrassed for funds. To the cash-strapped artists, the state-of-the-art Rosedale studios, with their kitchens and bathrooms and enormous windows, suddenly seemed a costly and unnecessary extravagance. As early as October 1914 Jackson was hoping to have the responsibility for paying the rent taken off his hands. He was planning to return for reasons of economy to his mother's house in Montreal but feared leaving Thomson—who was “getting to the end of his tether” financially—responsible for the rent on their shared studio.
3
The arrival of Carmichael meant a replacement had been found. Before the end of the year Jackson had cleared out of the Studio Building and returned home.

Jackson did one final painting before leaving Toronto. On the first night of his stay with Thomson in Algonquin Park, the two men had camped below Tea Lake Dam, a sixty-foot-long timber construction built by the Gilmour Lumber Company to raise the water level so that logs could be driven more easily along the Oxtongue River. He might not have been in the “mood to produce” during this trip, but here, Jackson made a quick sketch of a maple sapling beside the rushing river. The scene was, as he must have realized as he returned to Toronto, quintessentially Canadian. Back in the Studio Building, he began working up his small sketch into an oil painting. On a canvas eighty-two centimetres high and a metre wide he depicted, from the low point of view of someone seated on the riverbank, rapids in the Oxtongue as seen through the delicate screen of the maple sapling. The painting showed Jackson approaching the summit of his powers and confirmed his position as the most creative and daring landscapist working in Canada. Using deep blues, ochres and, to tinge the boulders, mauve, he contrasted the stillness and fragility of the young maple with the turbulence of the churning waters beyond. Most striking of all in this, yet another of his brilliantly keyed canvases, was the flaming crimson of the maple leaves elegantly flecked across the artist's field of vision.

The Red Maple
is an astonishing image of the beauty, frailty and power of the natural world. But for Jackson, troubled by thoughts of war, the painting must have had a significance beyond his visit to Tea Lake Dam. By 1914 the maple leaf had long been a symbol of Canadian identity. In 1867 Alexander Muir wrote “The Maple Leaf Forever” (with its line “The Maple Leaf, our emblem dear”) as the Confederation song. The maple leaf was included on the flag of the governor general as well as on the coats of arms of Ontario and Quebec, and between 1876 and 1901 it appeared on all Canadian coins. Most poignantly of all, in 1914 the maple leaf was on the badge of members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, such as Jackson's friend Randolph Hewton, who were shipping overseas.

It is not difficult to see symbolic meaning in a maple sapling perched on the brink of a violent torrent. In this depiction of promise and threat, fragility and power, Jackson poetically captured the terrible predicament in which all young Canadians of his generation suddenly found themselves.

JACKSON'S MOVE TO Montreal at the end of 1914 was a great loss to Tom Thomson. Jackson, with his extensive European training and experience, had begun to foster Thomson's talent, recognizing his raw skills and helping to refine them. When for two months the previous summer Thomson was unable to paint, it was Jackson's company that unleashed his creative abilities. The two men spent only a matter of months together, but over the course of that time Thomson began developing artistic gifts the depth and power of which his earlier works had given scant hint.

Jackson did not exaggerate when he said Thomson was getting to the end of his tether financially. With his year-long patronage from
Dr. MacCallum at an end, and with discouraging prospects of earning a comfortable living through commercial design, he was forced to make economies. At the end of the year he moved out of his latest lodgings—a boarding house at Wellesley and Church—and into a tumbledown shack behind the Studio Building. Situated on sloping ground and surrounded by saplings, the shack had formerly served as the workshop of a cabinetmaker and even for a time as a henhouse. Lawren Harris and Dr. MacCallum paid $176 to have the modest structure re-roofed and insulated with beaverboard. An east window was added for light, and the shack was furnished with a bunk and a box stove. Thomson was then allowed to occupy it for the peppercorn rent of $1 per month.

Harris had an affection for this primitive kind of jerry-built,
lumber-and-tarpaper shack; many examples would later appear in his art. Although the exact origins of this particular shack are unclear, it was probably one of the many self-builds that mushroomed in Toronto over the previous decade as immigration soared and many poor British immigrants built themselves two- and three-room shacks with no plumbing or electricity. Thomson's new home was probably technically illegal as a residence, as efforts to clean up Toronto saw the city council pass Bylaw 6691 in 1913 “to regulate the installation of sanitary conveniences under the Public Health Act.”
4
He nonetheless made himself happily at home, spending his leisure moments carving axe handles and decorating the walls with paddles, lures and trolling spoons—mementos of the self-sufficient life in the bush. The shack represented an attempt to replicate, in the heart of Toronto, his primitive living conditions in Algonquin Park. Its unadorned decrepitude evoked the humble shelter-houses occupied by the park's rangers and loggers.
5

If the shack provided him with cheap living quarters, Thomson spent the winter of 1914–15 sharing workspace in the Studio Building with Frank Carmichael. Despite the age difference (Thomson was thirteen years older) the two men had much in common. Both came from Scottish Presbyterian backgrounds in rural Ontario; both were avid readers and accomplished musicians (Carmichael played the violin, cello, bassoon, piano and flute); and both were instinctive loners.
6
Carmichael's experiences studying in Europe, however abbreviated, keened all the more Thomson's appetite for modern art, already whetted by Jackson and Harris over the previous year.

Although lacking Jackson's or Harris's wide experiences, during his brief stay Carmichael probably saw the 1913 World Exhibition in Ghent, and in England he admired the work of Constable and Turner. Belgium had numerous examples of Jugendstil design (Brussels billed itself as the “capital of Art Nouveau”), and at some point Carmichael developed an appreciation of Japanese woodblock prints. He was not the first of Thomson's friends to share this enthusiasm, since Will Broadhead had been another aficionado: he had books on Japanese art shipped to him from England.
7
Japanese prints had been in vogue in Europe since at least the 1890s. Their curvilinearity and organic forms inspired both Art Nouveau (Siegfried Bing, proprietor of the Paris gallery L'Art Nouveau, spent two years in China and Japan in the 1880s) and painters such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard.

The studio shared by Thomson and Carmichael took on the carefree and disarrayed air of bachelordom. It was cluttered with easels bearing half-finished canvases, and on the floor, as Carmichael wrote to his girlfriend, Ada Went, lay “canvases and frames in great array, and not without disorder. The table too is covered with half-used tubes of paint, brushes, bottles of oil, turpentine, bottles, sketches, colour boxes with sketches standing up against the wall. Under it are colour boxes and tubes with a pile of sketches at one end, looking not unlike a bunch of shingles broken open.” Their cooking was equally chaotic, including mishaps and “queer sights
. . .
when a finger is burnt or some stuff boils over.” They often ate with Bill Beatty, who treated them to fried potatoes and oyster stew. Thomson's specialty was mulligan stew, and he also made preserves from the berries he picked in the north. He seems to have been something of an impromptu chef: MacDonald's son, Thoreau, remembered seeing him mash potatoes with an empty bottle.
8

Away from their easels, the two men played chess, often in the company of Heming. Recreations became livelier with the arrival in the building of Alex G. Cumming, the manager of Art Metropole on Temperance Street, where most of the artists bought their materials. The financial plight of the painters persuaded Harris to rent space to a non-artist. He lived to rue the arrangement, since Cumming proved a “lively and frolicsome fellow” who threw parties in his studio. Dance tunes from his gramophone blared down the corridors. Thomson may not have been troubled by the introduction of wine, women and song into the Studio Building. Cumming's wild ways, however, soon began to chafe some of the more abstemious artists, such as the fastidious Heming, who “never smoked or drank” and was “shy with women.”
9

More calm and well-behaved visitors were welcomed onto the premises, such as Dr. MacCallum, whom Carmichael called the “patron saint” of the Studio Building. According to Carmichael, the doctor “comes in, flops down on a chair, throws matches on the floor and talks in an intelligent way about our work, taking as keen an interest as one's self. His very attitude makes one feel at ease, and as though one had known him for years.”
10

Although several women were eventually to work in the Studio Building, the
Toronto Daily Star
had stressed that it was “not a place for pink teas or tango”
11
—the recreations of well-heeled Rosedale women. The emphasis on what Beatty called “men with good red blood in their veins” made it a decidedly—and even self-consciously—masculine environment. At least one tenant was aware that a nation characterized by physically demanding and exclusively masculine occupations such as mining and lumberjacking might view an artist with suspicion. “I always had the juvenile illusion,” Heming confessed in a 1912 interview, “that an artist was some long-haired effeminate freak.”
12
For many Canadians Oscar Wilde's 1895 trial forged the image of the artist as a homosexual.
13
Some Studio Building painters hoped to sever this link by having the artist bunk down—metaphorically speaking—with Canadian machos such as Mounties and river drivers. Like his near-namesake Ernest Hemingway's own hairy-chested posturings, Heming's strenuous exertions with canoes and snowshoes were in part attempts to disabuse the suspicious (most of all, perhaps, himself) of the notion that artists were what Canadians euphemistically called “Oscar Wilde types.”

The concern for manly vigour was hardly unique to Canada or Canadian artists. The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed Lord Baden-Powell trying to instill manliness in the youth of England, while the most frequent adjective on the lips of an English schoolmaster was “manly.” Not only Boy Scouts and schoolboys but artists, too, required manliness. The most famous art instructor in America, Robert Henri, told his students that the artist must be “a real man” (a category for which he qualified by dint of a boyhood among cowboys and a surname that was not French—so he insisted—but rhymed with “Buckeye”). Meanwhile, London's Slade School of Fine Art was drumming out of its students the perceived effeminacies of the 1890s Aesthetic Movement—whose cynosure was Oscar Wilde—by feeding them a diet of Friedrich Nietzsche. The Slade course could boast its successes. England's most renowned painter, Augustus John, a Slade graduate, when not painting raw and remote scenery, was bedding his models, downing pints of beer and getting into scrapes that culminated in police pursuits and county court summonses.
14

The artists of the Studio Building took their manly pleasures more innocently. Thomson, Carmichael, MacCallum and Heming often attended boxing matches. Although the sport had recently been taken to task for attracting to ringside “a great many turbulent and otherwise undesirable persons,”
15
Carmichael was anxious to assure Ada that the matches in Toronto the Good were, relatively speaking, wholesome performances. “It was of course amateur sport, and as clean as could be,” he told her after attending a series of bouts. “True, some boxers were knocked out, but that is to be expected. They were fine specimens of men physically, and I must say I have never seen such fine action. Altogether, it was an enjoyable evening, and we came home refreshed.”
16
Carmichael might have underplayed the violence, because the report of the matches in the
Toronto Daily Star
was a brutal catalogue of boxers “knocked dizzy” and dispatched “into Dreamland,” and a graphic description was offered of a “husky, gritty boy” named Martin who took a “right smash” to the head and was “dragged to the corner inert.”
17