Defiant Spirits (46 page)

Newfoundland Verse
appeared to great critical acclaim in the spring of 1923. Calling it a welcome change from the “usual fifth-rate, airy, fairy stuff” that passed for poetry in Canada (presumably, the lyric poetry of Bliss Carman and others), one critic hailed it as “vigorous, red-blooded verse.”
36
With one poetic bound, forty-one-year-old Ned Pratt, a lecturer in English with anemia, a heart murmur and a doctoral dissertation on Pauline eschatology, landed four-square among the virile makers of Canadian culture. Like them, he was helped along in his efforts to describe what he called a land “not charactered
. . .
by History's pen” by an acquaintance with an international avant-garde, in his case the free verse and Imagist poetry of Ezra Pound and T.E. Hulme.
37

Pratt and Varley already knew each other from the Arts and Letters Club. Varley's ongoing behaviour—his drinking, his temper, his libertinism—“caused a certain amount of estrangement” (according to Mills) from other members of the Group of Seven.
38
He appears to have found in the Newfoundland-born Pratt a more reliable and congenial friend than he had in the group. Pratt came to the rescue, at any rate, when the bailiffs appeared at the door of the Varley home on Colin Avenue. A year earlier, Pratt and his wife had purchased a cottage in Bobcaygeon, 170 kilometres northeast of Toronto in the Kawartha Lakes, where Pratt enjoyed shooting ducks and playing golf. On one side of his property was his friend, the poet Arthur Phelps, author of
A Bobcaygeon Chapbook
and the man who first introduced him to free verse and Imagism; on the other was a vacant lot in which Varley and his family—consisting now of four children between the ages of two and thirteen—were invited to pitch a tent.

Just as MacDonald, a devotee of Henry David Thoreau, once ended up immersed in a Walden-like world of enforced privation and self-sufficiency, Varley, who idealized gypsies like his hero Augustus John, suddenly found himself leading the impecunious and nomadic life of a Romany. He had been fascinated by gypsies, those romantic symbols of individual freedom and vagabond living, ever since he saw their caravans as a boy in the Peak District outside Sheffield.
39
It is not difficult to see what he identified with in these outcasts who lived hand-to-mouth existences on the margins of society with their broods of children and their proverbial love of music and, when in funds, drink.

Several years after dressing a woman named Goldthorpe in gypsy costume for the expressive portraits
Gypsy Blood
and
Gypsy Head,
Varley painted a scene in Bobcaygeon casting members of his own family as campfire castaways.
Evening in Camp
shows Maud by a campfire with thirteen-year-old Dorothy and the infant Peter, their tent behind them against a twilit sky. The trio is bathed in ruddy firelight, with Maud staring sadly into the fire and swaddling two-year-old Peter on her lap. The scene is almost religious, a
modern-dress
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
with Maud cast as a bob-haired Madonna. Most of all, it is a tender family portrait in which Dorothy's awkward pose and Maud's sad meditation sum up the uncertainty faced by the Varleys in the summer of 1923.

VARYLEY'S CAMPFIRE IDYLL in the Kawarthas was soon interrupted. Before the summer was out, he was hurrying back to Toronto for an unusual assignment. An Anglican minister, the Reverend Lawrence Skey, had given MacDonald an intriguing commission: the decoration of St. Anne's Anglican Church in the Parkdale district of Toronto.

Unlike several other members of the Group of Seven, MacDonald was not particularly religious (he once claimed that his religion was the Arts and Letters Club).
40
But he took to this task with gusto. He began his designs—twenty-one scenes for the pendentives and apse—and put together a team of painters that included his twenty-two-year-old son, Thoreau, and his students from the
oca
(one a promising artist named Carl Schaefer). When the students departed for their summer holidays, Varley and Carmichael were conscripted into service.

A major decorative program in a Protestant church in Canada was an unusual commission. In the 1870s and 1880s the Italian-born Luigi Capello painted murals in many Catholic churches in Quebec; one of his students, Ozias Leduc, went on to decorate thirty others over the course of a long career. But Protestant churches in English Canada generally made do with humbler decorations. MacDonald noted that the working-class Orangemen in the pews of St. Anne's possessed “a restricted idea of colour of display.”
41
But he and Reverend Skey envisioned something eye-catching. MacDonald wanted his cycle of paintings to provide “religious vitality”
42
—to inject into the getting-and-spending world of twentieth-century Toronto a much-needed dose of spirituality. What the Orangemen would make of the work of the painter of
The Tangled Garden
remained to be seen, but Skey claimed to be confident that MacDonald would “produce a colour scheme, which would be reverent, harmonious and in keeping with the traditions of the architecture of the church.”
43

Painting the panels took MacDonald and his team through the late summer and autumn of 1923. He and Thoreau worked in the Studio Building, using palettes of crimson, Venetian red, yellow ochre and ultramarine blue. MacDonald took three scenes for himself:
Stopping the Tempest, The Transfiguration,
and
The Crucifixion.
Thoreau tackled
The Raising of Lazarus,
his choice of pigments, because he was colour-blind, no doubt closely supervised by his father. Down the corridor in the Studio Building, Carmichael worked on
The Adoration of the Magi
and
The Entry into Jerusalem.
Some of the panels were almost five metres high, and since Eden Smith had not designed the building to accommodate such enormous paintings, getting them through the door and along the narrow corridor to the exit must have been something of a struggle.

Varley's mural was
The Nativity.
Varley the libertine painting an image of the Holy Family was, in many respects, ironic. MacDonald's design called for Mary to be dressed in ultramarine blue with the Christ Child in her lap, two angels flanking her, a lamb at her feet, and two worshippers—one of them presumably Joseph—gazing in adoration. Varley faithfully (and beautifully) executed the design. But he added a small touch of his own: the worshipper on the left is, in the finest Renaissance tradition, a self-portrait of the artist.

PREPARATIONS FOR THE exhibition of Canadian art at Wem-
bley were interrupted by the death of Sir Edmund Walker from pneumonia on March 27, 1924. “A giant oak has fallen and all Canada mourns the loss of a great native son,” reported the
Toronto Globe.
His sudden passing robbed the Group of Seven of one of their most powerful supporters. Lawren Harris, writing in
Canadian Bookman,
praised him as someone “of almost incalculable value. He was the first and only man of position to detect that in the modern movement in Canadian art the country had found the beginnings of a distinctive, significant, and bold expression.”
1

A few weeks after Walker's funeral, on April 23, St. George's Day, the British Empire Exhibition opened at Wembley. First proposed in 1913 but delayed more than a decade because of the Great War, the British Empire Exhibition was intended as both an indication of Britain's imperial achievement and a sign of national renewal after the war. Never before had the pink spaces on the world map come together for such a vast display. The official guidebook boasted that the grounds at Wembley would “reproduce in miniature the entire resources of the British Empire. There the visitor will be able to inspect the empire from end to end.”
2

The exhibition presented an eclectic array of attractions against which the paintings in the Palace of Arts—a modest building tucked away in a corner of the 216-acre site and dwarfed by the gigantic ferro-concrete hangars making up the Palace of Industry and Palace of Engineering—would struggle to compete. Besides the national pavilions, there was an amusement park featuring a waterslide, a mile-long scenic railway, a giant aquarium, and a ninety-foot-high Ferris wheel. Also on display was the “Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen,” a burial chamber filled with wood and plaster replicas of the boy-pharaoh's throne, chariot and sarcophagus. Despite the mockery of literati such as Virginia Woolf and P.G. Wodehouse, and the efforts of the “Won't Go to Wembley Society,” 100,000 people a day passed through the turnstiles. Some 17 million people would visit the exhibition during its seven-month run.

Originally the brainchild of a Canadian, Lord Strathcona, the former president of the
cpr
, the British Empire Exhibition offered Canada yet another opportunity to assert itself on the world stage. Yet Canada's participation in the exhibition had been a matter of some doubt. The nationalism stirred by Canada's successes in the Great War and its quest for diplomatic and political independence were attenuating some of the links—both political and sentimental—with the Mother Country.

The fact that Canada took seriously its new role as an autonomous nation with (as Resolution
ix
had put it) “an adequate voice in foreign policy” was brought home to the British in September 1922. When Lloyd George called on the dominions for military help against the Turkish nationalists threatening the British garrison on the Dardanelles, Canadians declined to fall smartly into step as they had in 1914. Instead, Mackenzie King insisted that the Canadian Parliament, not the British prime minister, should decide “whether or not we should participate in wars in different parts of the world.”
3
This independent stance was affirmed six months later when the Canadian minister of marine and fisheries, Ernest Lapointe, signed an agreement with the United States on the conservation of halibut stocks—the first treaty negotiated by Canada not bearing the signature of the British ambassador.

This emergent nationalism, coupled with the high costs of mounting a display, meant some Canadian politicians and businessmen responded to the idea of Wembley with a notable lack of enthusiasm. Even so, when the curtain finally rose on Wembley, Canada made its presence emphatically known in a 120,000-square-foot pavilion beside the new sports stadium. Although still sheathed in scaffolding and dust wraps on opening day, the pavilion did not fail to impress the first visitors, guarded as it was by what one newspaper hailed as “Canada's finest exhibit”: a detachment of Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
4
These six-footers patrolling their turf in black breeches and red serge offered a compelling image of Canadian masculinity. “Six feet of stirring romance,” swooned one correspondent.
5

Inside, the pavilion offered attractions such as a 4,400-pound lump of silver from a mine near Cobalt. The country's vast and varied landscape, with all its beauty and riches, was the keynote. The main corridor was lined with bas-relief panoramas of cornfields, prairies, forests and mountains, all done in kernels of wheat. Travel films of Canadian scenery played alongside a mock-up of Niagara Falls. In what was reputedly among the most popular of all Wembley's attractions, the pavilion featured in a refrigerated glass display case a statue of the Prince of Wales carved from Canadian butter. The sight of so much butter (3,000 pounds were used to depict the life-sized prince standing with a horse before his ranch house in Pekisko) did little to harm Canada's image as a land of plenty. One visiting Londoner told a reporter that one of the prince's ears would “keep us a week.”
6

Lord Burnham, owner of the
Daily Telegraph,
called the Canadian Pavilion “the best piece of national advertising that has ever been attempted.”
7
This celebration of butter, wheat and mountains omitted, however, references to certain Canadians, most conspicuously First Nations people. Hitherto “Red Indians” (as the British knew them) were mainstays of both Canadian exhibitions abroad and, in the guise of spectacles such as members of the Stoney Reserve performing ritual dances at strategic points along the
CPR
line through the Rockies, the Canadian tourist trail.
8
Some sections of the Canadian press, anxious that no one should come away from Wembley with the “false impression that our country is still largely peopled by savages,” did not mourn their absence. As a journalist in the
Montreal Herald
put it, Canada should no longer be advertised “by representations of Indians in war paint.”
9
Québécois observers were distressed, though, by the scanty representation of Quebec and the complete lack of French in the pavilion's signage. Some British visitors, meanwhile, were puzzled by the absence of winter scenes.
10
More than a quarter century after Kipling's “Our Lady of the Snows,” showing a Canadian landscape under snow was still seen as tactless and unwise.

CANADA'S ADVERTISEMENTS for itself as a beautiful and thoroughly modern nation were continued a few hundred yards away from the Canadian Pavilion, in the Palace of Arts. This building (soundproofed against the hoopla of the crowds beyond its walls) displayed the art of Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India and Burma. According to the man in charge of the British exhibits, the architect Sir Lawrence Weaver, this panoply was intended to showcase not artistic individuality but rather “how the Daughter Nations have developed their art from the English School.”
11
The English School was amply represented by six rooms of Hogarth, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Constable, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites; works by contemporary painters—Paul Nash, Roger Fry, Edward
Wadsworth, Augustus John—hung in a separate room.

If some Canadian businessmen were reluctant to expose their wares at Wembley, not so Canadian painters. The Canadian section of the fine arts display, hung by Eric Brown, was made up of 267 pieces of art, including 215 paintings. The exhibition was billed by Brown as “the most important exhibition of Canadian art ever held outside the Dominion.”
12
The fact that Canada was the only dominion to issue a catalogue for its fine arts exhibition indicated how seriously Brown took his task. There was even a supplement to the catalogue,
A Portfolio of Pictures from the Canadian Section of Fine Arts,
whose cover (like that of the catalogue) was designed by J.E.H. MacDonald. Unsurprisingly, the distinctiveness of Canadian art was repeatedly stressed, the supplement confidently declaring that “a vigorous and national school of painting” was “springing up” in Canada.
13

Despite Charlesworth's fears, the Group of Seven's offering of thirty-four paintings made up less than a fifth of the display, to which were added seven paintings by Tom Thomson. The exhibition was widely representative of recent Canadian art. Established international artists such as Cullen, Gagnon, Morrice (who died in Tunisia three months earlier), Watson, Walker and Milne were on show. So too were the Beaver Hall painters Sarah Robertson, Kathleen Moir Morris and Henrietta Mabel May, together with more than two dozen other female artists. The woman whose work Thomson so admired, Florence McGillivray, was represented by
Labrador Fishing Stage.
RCA
stalwarts included Horne Russell and Wyly Grier. Suzor-Coté and Ozias Leduc were among the strong Quebec contingent, and from the West came the Saskatchewan painters James Henderson (with First Nations portraits) and the former Prairie homesteader and Slade School alumnus Inglis Sheldon-Williams.

The contributions from the Group of Seven included paintings shown at their 1920 exhibition: Carmichael's
Spring
and
Autumn Hillside,
Harris's
Shacks,
Jackson's
Terre sauvage,
Varley's
Vincent Massey.
The Northern Ontario vignette of a pine tree on a windy lakeshore was a recurring motif, reinforced by Lismer's
A September Gale, Georgian Bay
(shown at the 1921 Group of Seven exhibition), Varley's
Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay
and Thomson's
The West Wind
and
The Jack Pine.
The latter two paintings flanked Thomson's
Northern River,
making up a remarkable triptych.

Although the exhibition did not include critical
casus belli
such as MacDonald's
The Tangled Garden
or Jackson's
Assisi from the Plain,
members of the group could have been forgiven a few trepidations about their reception by British critics. Since 1923 an exhibition of their work, “Modern Canadian Painters,” had been doing the rounds of American museums. In contrast to their first American tour, the reviews this time were modest, mixed and, in general, unenthusiastic. At Wembley, though, the painters fared much better: so well, in fact, that the exhibition would eventually be celebrated, in
Saturday Night
of all places, as a “red-letter day in the history of Canada's status among the nations of the world.”
14

This remark was extravagant wishful thinking. But there was no doubt that many British critics sincerely regarded Canadian painting in general, and the landscapes of the Group of Seven in particular, as among the most vital and exhilarating forces in modern art. A number of British critics praised exactly the qualities in the paintings—the bold simplifications and flamboyant colours—detested by Charlesworth and Ahrens. “Canada, above all other countries,” announced the May issue of
The Field,
“has reason to be proud of her contribution, uniting as she does a pronounced love of nature coupled with a vigorous and a definite technique.” The critic for the
Morning Post,
a London daily, was equally enthusiastic. He suggested that whereas painters from Australia and New Zealand were content to “follow the ideas and methods of the Mother Country artists,” Canadian landscapists (he singled out Gagnon and Morrice as well as Thomson, Jackson, MacDonald and “Alfred” Lismer) were striking out on their own to create “the foundation of what may become one of the greatest schools of landscape painting. In their pictures are signs of new vision and feeling for the physical and spiritual significance of nature in both its static and dynamic moods.”
15

This combination of a passion for nature and a sense of the landscape's moods and spiritual significance led the reviewer for
The Times
to compare the younger Canadians to the visionary Russian painter Nicholas Roerich, then at the zenith of his popularity following a hugely successful American tour that witnessed his celebration as the “Walt Whitman of painting.”
16
The
Times
reviewer was impressed by MacDonald's
The Beaver Dam
and—most of all—by Thomson's
The Jack Pine.
He regarded Thomson's elegiac painting as not only the best work in the Canadian section but also the finest painting in the entire Palace of Arts. It was, he wrote, the “most striking work at Wembley.”
17

The best review of all came from C. Lewis Hind in the
Daily Chronicle,
a paper whose sales exceeded those of
The Times
and the
Daily Telegraph
put together. The sixty-two-year-old Hind was one of England's most knowledgeable writers on modern art (he claimed to be the only man in London able to discuss Matisse without losing his temper). In 1911 he published
The Post-Impressionists,
an attempt to explain Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh to the British public. “Expression, not beauty, is the aim of art,” he told them in his reasonable and measured tones. Echoing Roger Fry, he went on to describe how art is “always decorative and emotional,” and how “rhythm and emotional expression are nearer to the heart of things than representation and photographic realism.”
18

This view of art as decorative and emotional favourably disposed Hind towards the work of the Canadian landscapists. He had nothing but praise for their “bold, decorative landscapes” that emphasized “colour, line, and pattern” in a way that reminded him of work created by “the younger artists of France.” But the Canadians were surpassing even the French, producing “the most vital group of paintings produced since the war—indeed, this century.”
19
Higher or more gratifying praise would be difficult to imagine.