Defiant Spirits (41 page)

Johnston seems to have worried that further association with a collective billed in some sections of the press as “ultra-radical” might dent his popularity and jeopardize his commercial prospects among Toronto's skittish picture-buying public. One of his Christian Scientist friends later explained why he left: “It was purely financial. It was because he was supporting his family, and because he felt that he would
. . .
have to do potboilers, a bit. That he would have to do that in order to support his family. And he knew that there were certain pictures of his that everybody fell for and liked
. . .
that would sell more.”
57

Whether or not he had anything to fear, much was at stake for Johnston financially by the start of 1921. The last few years had been
anni mirabiles
for him. He enjoyed the active support of Eric Brown and Sir Edmund Walker, he was paid $1,500 for his work for the Canadian War Records Office, he was represented in the National Gallery and he was elected to an associate membership in the
RCA
. Best of all, much critical praise, and even a little money, had been lavished on his work. In the spring of 1919, around the time of the Algoma exhibition, he left his job as a designer to paint full-time. “I am very glad to hear that you are starting out on your own,” wrote Brown, “and I do not think you need have any fear of the future.”
58

Buoyed by his successes, Johnston had ambitious plans for housing his family. After several years of living on Keewatin Avenue, near Yonge and Eglinton, he began designing and building a much larger home. A grand affair on St. Germain Avenue, in an upscale neighbourhood north of Yonge and Lawrence, it would feature a large studio and cathedral windows. With its $22,000 price tag making it nearly fourteen times the cost of the average Toronto house, Johnston evidently reasoned he could not risk alienating the public.
59
He decided to go it alone. The Group of Seven would become a group of six.

HANGING IN THE parlour of Geneva Jackson's Kitchener home was a painting by Cornelius Krieghoff, done about 1847. Called
The Ice Bridge at Longue-Pointe,
it was a classic Quebec scene: toque-wearing habitants in blanket coats crossing a frozen lake in horse-drawn sleighs, with a steepled church and several humble dwellings in the background.

A.Y. Jackson professed a great admiration for Krieghoff, who died in 1872. His grandfather Henry Jackson, a railway engineer who lived at Longueuil, Quebec, seems to have known the Dutch painter. Jackson eulogized him as “the leading pioneer painter of Canada
. . .
There was something wild in him, something of the coureur-du-bois and of the colonist.”
1
This description did little justice to Krieghoff, a velvet-suited, beaver-hatted, flute-playing bohemian whose Quebec scenes owed as much to the sledging and ice-skating paintings of seventeenth-century Dutch artists like Adriaen van de Velde as they did to any real-life toque-and-toboggan excursions along the snowy lanes of rural Quebec. But for Jackson, determined to make Krieghoff in his own image, the Dutchman's work marked the high-water mark in nineteenth-century Canadian art. For many years after his death, in Jackson's view, “painting in this country produced nothing of consequence.”
2

Jackson was dismissive of much Quebec painting apart from Krieghoff. Between 1913 and 1920 he made no secret of his preference for both Toronto's artistic milieu and the Ontario landscape. But by the early 1920s his interest in Quebec suddenly revived. Part of this enthusiasm could have been a simple nostalgia for the vanishing world depicted by Krieghoff in his aunt Geneva's parlour and more recently portrayed with great success in Louis Hémon's novel
Maria Chapdelaine,
published in 1916 with illustrations by Suzor-Coté (Clarence Gagnon would illustrate an even more celebrated edition in 1933). Jackson complained that in rural Quebec “beautiful old types of house architecture are giving way to bungalows and other nondescript forms.”
3
Unlike Harris, he showed no interest in Ontario's architecture, but suddenly he was seized with the desire to capture some of these beautiful old habitant dwellings on canvas before the “nondescript forms” of the modern world swept them away.

Jackson's interest in Quebec's artistic scene was further raised by the formation in Montreal of a loose coalition of young (mostly anglophone) painters called the Beaver Hall Group, after the communal studio several of them shared, in self-conscious emulation of the Studio Building, at 350 Beaver Hall Hill. Jackson met some members for the first time in Montreal in the autumn of 1920, a few months after they elected him president. Unhappy circumstances took him back to the city. His sketching holiday in Algoma was cut short when he learned via telegram that his beloved mother—the woman addressed in his letters as “little Marmoo” and “my dear darling little Mater”
4
—was gravely ill. The Beaver Hall Group was led by Jackson's friend Randolph Hewton and included a half-dozen former students of his old teacher William Brymner. Unlike the Group of Seven, this Montreal coalition included a strong contingent of women, including Nora Collyer, Emily Coonan, Prudence Heward, Mabel May, Kathleen Morris, Lilias Torrance Newton, Sarah Robertson and Anne Savage.

An exhibition, planned for early in 1921, was slated to feature the work of eleven men and eight women. Jackson eagerly began conducting interviews on their behalf. “I wish every artist would focus on painting, describing and expressing the region where he lives,” he declared in
La Presse.
“In Toronto, seven or eight of us have endeavoured to depict northern Ontario. I wish they would do the same here in Quebec.”
5

The art-wise people of Montreal must have been taken aback to learn that the landscape of Quebec was not being painted. Horatio Walker had been doing pastoral scenes of the Île d'Orléans since the late 1870s, and Cullen and Suzor-Coté both specialized in scenes of the snow-swathed Quebec countryside. By 1920 the great star of Quebec landscape painting was Gagnon, still only thirty-nine (a year older than Jackson). He had returned to Montreal in May 1919 after living for much of the previous fourteen years in Paris, though he had regularly criss-crossed the Atlantic by steamship to make his studies around his beloved Baie-Saint-Paul. The fact that he moved through Charlevoix country on skis, carrying a gun as well as a palette, should have made him an attractive and sympathetic figure for the painters in the Studio Building. But Gagnon did not meet the house style imposed by the Toronto painters. Although he had long since graduated from the turbid colours of his friend Horatio Walker to a more luminous and high-keyed palette, for Jackson his style was probably still too derivative of French Impressionism.

Jackson's hopes for the Beaver Hall Group doing in Quebec what the Group of Seven were attempting in Ontario ultimately went unfulfilled. His role as president did little to encourage the cultural nationalism or commitment to northern landscapes prevailing in the Studio Building. Heward, Coonan, Newton and Robertson, as well as one of the men, the twenty-eight-year-old Edwin Holgate, were all talented figure painters. The association nonetheless had pleasant repercussions for Jackson since he was immediately attracted to one member, twenty-four-year-old Anne Savage. A former student at the Art Association of Montreal and the Minneapolis School of Art, she had recently begun teaching art at Baron Byng High School in Montreal. It was to be the start of a long and extremely rewarding friendship that would survive, a dozen years later, Savage's rejection of Jackson's rather unconvincing proposal of marriage.

HIS INTEREST IN his home province refreshed, early in February 1921 Jackson set off on a sketching expedition in what he called “the French part of Quebec.”
6
He went to the village of Cacouna, near Rivière-du-Loup, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, two hundred kilometres northeast of Quebec City. “A nice cool spot I expect,” he wrote to Catherine Breithaupt before departing, “but if Canadians live there, Canadians can paint there.”
7

Although Cacouna was undoubtedly cold in the middle of winter, Jackson was not exactly exploring a rustic and uncharted habitant frontier. Cacouna had been a bustling tourist resort—at least in summer—since the Maison des bains opened in 1845. It was soon followed by other hotels that accommodated the hundreds of tourists who arrived each summer by train and steamboat. William Dean Howells in his 1873 novel
A Chance Acquaintance
described how Cacouna attracted “great numbers of Canadians who flee their cities during the fierce, brief fever of the northern summer.”
8
By the end of the nineteenth century, rich Montreal businessmen were building themselves palatial summer homes overlooking the St. Lawrence at Cacouna. Among them were Sir George Drummond's Gads Hill and Sir Montagu Allan's rambling neoclassical mansion, Montrose. By the 1920s, when Jackson arrived, a six-hundred-room hotel bulked over the river.

Jackson took his ease more simply in the boarding house of a couple named Plourde. By day he roamed the countryside on snowshoes, accompanied by the Plourdes' dog Bustare; evenings were spent playing cards and eating unstinting dinners of chicken, cream and maple syrup. After a few weeks he moved into a small hotel, deserted in the off-season but for its proprietor, M. Lafleur, and his extended family. Bored with their company, Jackson appealed to Albert Robinson, a friend from his days in St. Malo and Carhaix. Robinson enlivened the stilted atmosphere at the Lafleurs by dancing vigorous reels with Lafleur's sister-in-law—“who must at some time have been kicked by a horse, as she had a broken nose and impaired speech”
9
—as one of the daughters bashed the piano.

Jackson and Robinson slogged through the countryside on snowshoes, doing
plein-air
sketches of Cacouna's snow-heaped rooftops. In what seemed an occupational hazard for Canadian landscapists, even after the war, they found themselves mistaken by the locals for spies. Disabused of the notion, the Cacounois nonetheless remained bewildered that the two men should paint old houses and barns rather than Montrose, Gads Hill or the various other villas dotting the area. But Jackson was determined to capture an enchanting Krieghoff world of sleighs, old barns and steepled churches. He returned to Toronto with sketches of Cacouna's brightly painted houses seen from afar and studies of children tobogganing in the shadow of the village church. Lacking the “eerie wilderness” mood of his Ontario paintings, the works show the Quebec landscape as a place of homely comforts and charming domesticity: less a
terre sauvage
than a vision from
Maria Chapdelaine.

JACKSON'S PREDICTION THAT he and Harris would be the only significant contributors to the 1921 exhibition did not prove entirely true. MacDonald spent part of the winter working on several large Algoma paintings despite the fact that he was hired by Lismer to teach commercial design at the Ontario College of Art (Lismer later claimed he engaged his friend to “teach artistic lettering with fine artistic insight, quote Whitman, the Bible, and East philosophy”).
10
Gleams on the Hills,
an undulating landscape incandescently green, orange and crimson, he created from sketches done along the Batchawana River in 1918. In another,
Batchawana Rapid,
whitewater in close-up purls over rocks against a background of brilliant autumn colour.

His most remarkable work was
The Solemn Land.
It would be his best effort at expressing his quasi-religious experience in Algoma, the “glimpse of God himself” captured amid the infinity of waters and uprearing eminences of stone. The painting was based on several small sketches done from a vantage point (undoubtedly alongside the
ACR
tracks) high above a wide expanse of the Montreal River. In the finished work—at 1.5 metres wide by 1.2 metres high, one of his largest—the perspective plummets down a wooded hillside spiked with pinnacles of pine and along the river to a radiant sugarloaf painted by autumn foliage and a revelatory sunlight. He decided to send it to the 1921
OSA
exhibition, along with a price tag of $700. It was the most he had ever asked for one of his works.

While MacDonald was painting the paradisal majesty of Algoma, Harris busied himself with more infernal visions. In the spring of 1921 he travelled to what was for him the
terra incognita
of the Maritimes. The poet and fiction writer Charles G.D. Roberts in his 1895 guidebook
The Land of Evangeline and the Gateways Thither
described Nova Scotia as a “wonderland of artists” that offered the painter “subjects which are new both in line and colour.”
11
Jackson and Lismer had certainly enjoyed working in this wonderland, producing seascapes and harbour scenes and interesting themselves in quaint Nova Scotia fishing villages. Even the American urban realist George Luks, visiting Nova Scotia in 1919 for a spot of sketching and salmon fishing, was captivated by the coastal landscape and swiftly flowing rivers. In 1920 the Kraushaar Galleries in New York exhibited to great critical applause his series of watercolours featuring the “sparkling radiance” of the moonlight on Lake Rossignol and the rapids gushing past giant boulders at the area called the Screecher.
12
Harris, though, was drawn to other aspects of Nova Scotia. Typically, he looked for down-at-heel neighbourhoods. What he found in Halifax, in a part of the city not mentioned in Roberts's guidebook, inspired some of his most remarkable urban paintings so far.

Halifax's equivalent of the Ward or Earlscourt was Africville, a group of rundown houses and wooden tenements in the north end of the city, beside Bedford Basin and near the site of the 1917 explosion. The area was settled in the 1830s by descendents of black refugees from the War of 1812 who bought their land from white merchants, including former slave-traders. The inhabitants of the community, soon dubbed Africville, worked as fishermen, stevedores and stonemasons, but by the twentieth century this self-sufficient and hard-working neighbourhood had fallen into a shameful neglect. A railway line cut it in half, a “night soil” disposal pit was situated on its eastern perimeter, and noxious industries—a tar factory, a bone mill, two slaughterhouses—had been allowed to expand into the area. The residents were denied water and sewage, and a 1919 request for fire and police protection was turned down by the Halifax authorities. The result, by the time Harris arrived in 1921, was Canada's worst slum.
13

Whereas the other members of the Group of Seven saw as their mandate a celebration of Canada's solitary and inhospitable wilderness, only Harris was determined to show brutal and unforgiving urban environments—those corners where Canadians suffered prejudice and economic hardship. He produced two remarkable studies of Africville,
Elevator Court, Halifax
and
Black Court, Halifax.
The scenes were stark depictions of poverty and neglect. The respectable but weathered-looking clapboard houses planted in fields of mud lack the quirky charm of many of his Toronto neighbourhood scenes. Unlike the Toronto pictures, too, where the buildings are parallel to the picture plane, the Africville paintings feature a spatial recession that draws the viewer into the claustrophobic scene in the same way Skarbina did in paintings such as
The Matthiasstrasse in Hamburg.
Munch-like clouds swim through the background of
Black Court,
and a smokestack looms behind the buildings in
Elevator Court,
an intimidating monolith the omnipotence of which is underscored by the rays of the setting sun with streaks of cloud and a radiating light whose sharp orthogonals match those of the melting snowbanks and the drab, almost featureless tenements.