Defiant Spirits (7 page)

A more reliable patron for artists exhibiting at the
osa
was the Government of Ontario. It purchased works (generally to decorate government offices) after taking advice from the Toronto Guild of Civic Art, a committee of artists and laymen. Despite a limited budget, the National Gallery too bought paintings for the collection in Ottawa. Almost as important as the sales were the reviews. Most of Toronto's six newspapers, as well as magazines such as
Saturday Night
and
Canadian Courier,
gave the exhibition a write-up. However modest, it was therefore the city's most prestigious venue for painters and sculptors to make their names.

Just as advertisements for Eaton's repeatedly drew attention to the stock of “beautiful bits of landscape” and “delightful spots in the woods,” most paintings in
osa
exhibitions were landscapes. In 1911 some 120 of the 200 paintings were landscapes or European street scenes. Interiors, still lifes, genre paintings and portraits were in a distinct minority, done for the most part, though not exclusively, by the thirty women who showed work in 1911.
18
The landscapes at the
osa
always included a number of European subjects—the Normandy and Cornish coasts, views of St. Paul's, the Pont-Neuf—but mostly they were Canadian scenes because foreign landscapes required the expense of a ticket on a transatlantic liner. The 1910 exhibition had included pictures of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, the Rockies and rural Ontario. One year later visitors could see paintings with titles such as
Northern Ontario Homestead, April in Manitoba, Magnetawan, In the Pine Woods
and
In the University Parks, Toronto.
Toronto's most distinguished landscapist, C.W. Jefferys, offered
The Plains of Saskatchewan, Virgin Prairie
and
The Qu'Appelle Valley.

As their titles suggest, many of these landscapes represented Canada in a state of pastoral bliss.
osa
exhibitions abounded with images of snake fences and picturesque barns. It had long been axiomatic that Canadian landscapes should be agricultural scenes. “Canada is essentially an agricultural country,” proclaimed a writer in the
Canadian Magazine
in 1904, “and any picture distinctively Canadian in subject must include the painting of animals.” Another writer in the same magazine agreed that Canada's artistic destiny lay with scenes of beef-on-the-hoof, though he was willing to entertain another subject too, since Canada was notable for “handsome women” as well as cows.
19

There was another reason for these serial pictures of cows and barns. In Canada as elsewhere, pictures destined for the domestic interior were meant to provide notes of calm and order—to give the occupant respite from the chaotic world outside. Doctors of the day, following the “new psychology,” claimed pictures could be an emotional emollient, the next best thing to a rest cure in a canoe. Contemplation of landscape paintings, preferably ones with distant views and sombre tones, provided relief to the overworked and overstimulated. “Lines and hues,” according to one French critic, “exert as considerable an influence as that of pure air, spectacles of nature and flowers.” He no doubt voiced the aspiration of many a middle-class Canadian picture-buyer when he wrote, “Oh, to forget the ugliness of the street when we stand before an idealized landscape.”
20

Augustus Bridle believed that at the 1912
osa
exhibition the country was not only better represented than ever before but also represented in a way that put less stress on this kind of idealized pastoral landscape. “There is an exhilaration, almost an abandon,” he wrote, “that convinces any average beholder of the vitality of Canadian art.” He claimed the painters were not only depicting “farm landscapes and pastorals and smug interiors, and pretty women”—the sort of work to be found, in other words, in the department stores. They were also capturing “Canada of the east and west, north and south, of railways and traffic, and city streets; of types of people
. . .
and phases of development.” He claimed that “to a Canadian, scenes in this country are of vastly more interest than all the fishing smacks and brass kettles and seaweed sonatas of north Europe.”
21

Bridle was overstating his claims about the “first satisfying depicture” of Canada, since in 1912 Canada was no better or more abundantly served by artists than in most previous years, and there were still “farm landscapes” aplenty. But the partnership of Harris and MacDonald, with their stabs at urban realism, produced impressive results. They were the most prolific artists at the exhibition. Each showed six paintings, and Harris included a number of pencil sketches of Toronto's neighbourhoods. He did not exhibit
The Gas Works
(the painting was probably not yet complete) but showed scenes of houses and buildings in downtown Toronto, a barn in the Laurentians (from his trip with Kyle several years earlier), and
The Drive.
Besides
Tracks and Traffic, Frosty Morning
(as the work was called in the catalogue), MacDonald exhibited winter scenes set mainly in the High Park area of Toronto, such as
The Sleighing Party
and
Ski-ing.

Both painters were rewarded for their efforts. The Government of Ontario purchased one of MacDonald's six canvases,
Morning Shadows,
and the National Gallery of Canada bought
The Drive
from Harris. MacDonald would get a further boost when
Tracks and Traffic
was praised in the international art journal
The Studio
as “a
tour de force
of the effects of steam and snow.” The review, written by a Canadian critic, went on to make a surprising claim: “No such scenes may be held anywhere but in Canada, where every manufacturing and transporting enterprise is hustle-bustle evermore.”
22

This strange hyperbole, along with that of Augustus Bridle, could not hide the fact that the sought-after “Canadian tang” was still not as sharp as it might have been. Harris and MacDonald were seeking what the former called “the varied moods, character and spirit of this country.”
23
But paintings such as
The Drive
or MacDonald's vignettes of suburban snow marked no great advances over the dozens of other Ontario scenes hung each March on the walls of the Public Reference Library. The two painters, MacDonald especially, were working in a technique that, with its light palette and concise brushwork, still owed much to French Impressionism. Several other painters at the
OSA
exhibition also worked in this style, including Helen McNicoll and Elizabeth McGillivray Knowles. But if Impressionism was adept at catching the transient and delicate effects of filtered sunlight or shadowed snow, it offered little in the way of strength or grandeur. Highly derivative of European models and attacked by some critics as superficial glitter, it was probably regarded by Harris and MacDonald as too effete for their ambitious plans to capture the harsh realities of the Canadian north.

Harold Mortimer-Lamb's remarks from 1908, that no one yet possessed the “power of insight” to interpret “the spirit of the great northland,” still appeared to hold dismayingly true.
24
Where, then, could this power of insight be found? The answer, oddly enough, would be in Buffalo.

IN LATE JULY 1912, two months after returning from Algonquin Park, Tom Thomson departed on another canoeing and painting expedition. This time he would spend not two weeks, but two months, in the bush. His destination was the Mississagi Forest Reserve, eight thousand square kilometres of land north of Lake Huron that had been set aside by the Ontario government in 1903.

Thomson's companion this time was a twenty-three-year-old Yorkshireman named William Smithson Broadhead. After immigrating to Canada from Sheffield almost three years earlier, Broadhead had begun working with Thomson at Grip Limited at the end of 1910. By 1911 the pair were sharing the same lodgings, a boarding house on Summerhill Avenue, on the northern fringe of Rosedale. Broadhead too was an aspiring painter, but whereas Thomson was diffident and insecure, the ambitious and self-assured young Englishman wrote letters home to Sheffield proclaiming himself “by far the best designer in Canada” and “cock of the walk” among Toronto's painters. “I could knock the spots off half the so-called big guns here,” he brashly declared.
1
His accomplishments hardly justified such self-regard. He showed several works at the 1912
OSA
exhibition, including a painting called
Boy with Goldfish
and a drawing of Lady Macbeth. These works collected no prizes or critical attention, nor were they the kind of works Augustus Bridle had praised for giving a “satisfying depicture” of Canada.

Despite his clamorous
amour-propre,
Broadhead evidently made an agreeable roommate, co-worker and travelling companion for Thomson. The two men caught the train from Toronto to Biscotasing, on the shores of Biscotasi Lake, 140 kilometres northwest of Sudbury and almost 500 kilometres from Toronto. Although on the
cpr
line, this area was more remote than Algonquin Park, with slightly fewer chances of encountering American fishermen or weekending Torontonians. The local fur-trading post, La Cloche, had shut down several decades earlier, but trappers, fur traders and canoe brigades still worked the area around Bisco (as the town was known) and along the Spanish River, and each spring the Spanish River Lumber Company drove sawlog timber downriver. These men who took to the lakes and rivers were no recreational canoeists in search of a rest cure. One of the rangers working in the Mississagi Forest Reserve in 1912 later described these rivermen as “hard-bitten bush-wackers, nurtured in hardship,” with “barbed, gritty humour” and an “unparalleled skill in profanity.”
2

This particular ranger was a hard-drinking Englishman, born the same year as Broadhead, named Archie Belaney, later to become famous as Grey Owl. He would soon be run out of Bisco for demonstrating his marksmanship on the bell of the local church while a Sunday service was in progress. In the summer of 1912, however, he was working for the Ontario Department of Lands, Forests and Mines, his face burned “as black as the arse of a tea kettle” by the summer sun.
3
Legend has him meeting Thomson and Broadhead in Bisco. Thomson supposedly impressed Grey Owl with his skill in making doughnuts, though the Englishman was later distinctly ambiguous in his memories of the encounter.
4
Still, a meeting is not unlikely, given how it would have been prudent for relatively inexperienced canoeists like Thomson and Broadhead to check in with the local ranger (as Thomson had done in Algonquin Park) before paddling into the maze of woods and waterways. But what, if anything, passed between these two icons-in-the-making—besides a plate of doughnuts—has long since been lost to history.

The Treaty No. 9 commissioners (among whom were the poet Duncan Campbell Scott and the painter Edmund Morris) had noted in Biscotasing a “considerable Indian population” who “make their living by acting as guides and canoeists for sportsmen.”
5
It is unclear if Thomson and Broadhead hired an official guide: once again, a prudent recourse for a pair of relatively inexperienced canoeists, if only to keep them from getting lost in unfamiliar territory. But Thomson might have felt his experience in Algonquin Park held him in good stead, and Broadhead was typically proud of his expertise in the bush: “I am an expert with a canoe now,” he boasted to the folks back home two years earlier, after paddling a stretch of the Humber River.
6
In any case, after provisioning themselves in Bisco, they began making their way in a Peterborough canoe west across Biscotasi Lake to Ramsey Lake and then along the Spanish River, through a great wilderness of red and white pine.

Canoeing would have been difficult, with their passage impeded throughout their journey by rapids, dams and dead logs left over from the drives. What Grey Owl's “hard-bitten bush-wackers” might have made of these two would-be painters up from Toronto, had they met on the lake, one can hardly guess. But Thomson and Broadhead were not the first landscape painters to dip their paddles in a Canadian river. In the 1840s Paul Kane had travelled with the Hudson's Bay Company canoe brigades, and in 1869 Frances Anne Hopkins voyaged along the Ottawa and Mattawa rivers and through the Great Lakes. More recently, in the summer of 1903 Tom McLean and Neil McKechnie, both described by the
Toronto Globe
as “expert boatsmen,” had paddled through the Abitibi district and then the following year, with tragic consequences, on the Mattagami.
7

Artists, along with sportsmen and tourists taking a rest cure, were only the latest in a long line of Canadians for whom the canoe had proved important. It had been used for many centuries both by the Aboriginal peoples and the European explorers, fur traders and surveyors. Canada's geography as well as its industry were shaped by its waterways and consequently by vessels such as the birchbark canoes of the Algonquin peoples and the ten-man
canots du maître
of the North West Company. By the early twentieth century the canoe had become a romantic symbol of the country that encompassed and included—as little else did—First Nations, French-Canadian and
English-Canadian cultures. Ole Evinrude built the first outboard motor in 1909, but Samuel de Champlain's wonder at the canoes of the Aboriginal peoples at Lachine in 1603 (“in the canoes of the savages one can go without restraint, and quickly, everywhere”)
8
could still be experienced by anyone, like Thomson and Broadhead, who wished to travel the more remote and inaccessible routes through the Canadian hinterlands.

Thomson and Broadhead spent their nights in makeshift campsites. Their meals were trout and smallmouth bass caught and then cooked in a reflector oven, sometimes after Thomson, like a big-game hunter, photographed them. He took great pride in his skills as a fly-fisherman, tying his own flies and casting his line in perfect figures of eight.
9
But although canoeing in these parts called for great skill, he regretted that an expert fisherman was hardly called for to extract pike from the waters in the forest reserve, since “they are so thick there is no fun in it.”
10

Thomson clearly fished for reasons beyond putting something on his dinner plate. Fishing was part of his communion with nature, an escape from civilization into what the publicity for the Grand Trunk Railway constantly emphasized was a more salubrious and elemental world. Fishing seems to have exemplified for Thomson what the novelist J. Macdonald Oxley had called “wise idleness,” which he defined as “quietly absorbing something through the eye or ear that for the time at least drowns the petty business and worries of life.”
11
It is probably revealing that Thomson took with him on fishing expeditions a copy of Izaak Walton's
The Compleat Angler,
first published in 1653. Presumably he read the book not for Walton's advice on how to keep live bait or catch trout at night, but rather for the work's poetic celebrations of the contemplative life. The book is subtitled
The Contemplative Man's Recreation,
and for Walton the “art of angling” was a “pleasant labour which you enjoy when you give rest to your mind and divest yourself of your more serious business.” For the careworn scholar of the seventeenth century, angling was “a cheerer of his spirits, a divertion of sadness, a calmer of unquiet thoughts, a moderator of passions, a procurer of contentedness.”
12

Angling was a cure-all, in other words, for what another of Thomson's favourite writers, Wilfred Campbell, called “our modern ills and problems”—the enervation caused by a life spent amid the bustle and smoke of the city. Like the lean-and-draw motion of the paddle, fly-casting into a flowing stream brought Thomson into touch with the rigours and rhythms of a more natural way of life.

FOLLOWING A BRANCH of the Mississagi River, Thomson and Broadhead eventually reached Aubrey Falls, a series of cataracts the highest of which, cascading over pinkish granite, is an imposing fifty-three metres. From Aubrey Falls they made their way south along the Mississagi to Squaw Chute, near Thessalon on the North Channel of Georgian Bay. Altogether, their journey was some 160 kilometres by canoe and portage through an area whose thunderous rapids and brooding granite hillsides Grey Owl later described so vividly in
Tales of an Empty Cabin.

Thomson boasted to a friend that the Mississagi Forest Reserve provided “the finest canoe trip in the world.”
13
Although suitably impressive, their voyage was dwarfed by those of Paul Kane and Frances Anne Hopkins. It was also less audacious than one made in 1907 by another Canadian painter, the wildlife artist Ernest Thompson Seton. He and a companion had rowed more than 3,000 kilometres through northern Canada in a thirty-foot Peterborough canoe, from the old fur-trading post at Athabaska Landing (150 kilometres north of Edmonton) to Great Slave Lake. Thomson was probably aware of Seton's feat, not merely because the painter recounted the journey in
The Arctic Prairies,
published in 1911, but because Seton's natural history mentor had been Thomson's friend, relative and own natural history mentor Dr. William Brodie. Seton was good friends with Dr. Brodie's son (Thomson's first cousin, once removed), and he was present when the young man drowned in the Assiniboine. Although based in Connecticut for the previous dozen years, he may well have met Thomson at some point, courtesy of Dr. Brodie. In any case, Seton could have provided inspiration for the younger man, since he was far and away Canada's most famous artist, naturalist and woodsman.

Near Bruce Mines, on the North Channel of Georgian Bay, Thomson and Broadhead caught a steamer that took them to Owen Sound. Reaching his family on September 23, after a journey of almost two months, Thomson wrote to a friend that he had “got back to civilization.”
14
If he had not been a skilled canoeist when he left Bisco, then two months later, as his canoe nosed into the waters of the North Channel, he and Broadhead could legitimately claim to be something more than the amateurs disparaged by Grey Owl as “kitchen-garden woodsmen.”
15

THOMSON PHOTOGRAPHED more than he painted during his voyage through the Mississagi Forest Reserve. The weather through August and into September was not conducive to
plein-air
painting. Constant rains caused the rivers to swell dangerously. Thomson wrote about his experiences to a friend in Huntsville, Dr. John McRuer, a fellow fisherman whose best man he had been in 1909: “The weather has been very rotton [
sic
] all through our trip never dry for more than 24 hours at a time and some times raining for a week steady.” He added details of a mishap recalling the accidents that claimed the lives of both Neil McKechnie and Dr. Brodie's son, as well as an upset in the Athabaska that cost Seton his journal. “We got a great many good snapshots of game—mostly moose and some sketching,” he explained, “but we had a dump in the forty mile rapids which is near the end of our trip and lost most of our stuff—we only saved 2 rolls of films out of about 14 dozen.”
16
Broadhead soon afterwards recounted details of this “narrow escape” to Thomson's brother-in-law, describing how they had been shooting rapids in a fully laden canoe when they struck a submerged rock and came close to “losing their lives.” He claimed that if Thomson had not been “such an expert canoesman, they would both have been lost.”
17

McRuer commiserated over the loss of the photographs but alluded to an earlier mishap: “You might have drowned, you devil, and that was not the first time you were dumped, eh?”
18
Thomson had been taking the photographs (a total of fourteen rolls of a dozen exposures each) as a record of his journey and perhaps to use for future paintings. With most of these lost or damaged, he asked McRuer to find the friend of a mutual acquaintance named Hicks—“a man who was through the trip last year and who had a fine lot of photos”—to ask if he might borrow them. “If Dr. Hicks can remember that man with the photos he may save a life.”

But McRuer and Hicks had fallen out (“he acted very unkind
. . .
so that we ‘bounced him,'” reported McRuer), and so it was another doctor who would come to the rescue. Besides the two rolls of film, Thomson also salvaged some of his paintings. After he showed them to his friends at Grip Limited, word reached Dr. James M. MacCallum, a friend of Lawren Harris.

Dr. MacCallum might have seemed an unlikely hero for Canadian art. The fifty-two-year-old ophthalmologist was a professor of materia medica, pharmacology and therapeutics at the University of Toronto and the author of the treatise “Recurrent Fugitive Swellings of the Eyelids.”
19
He came by his love of art through a passion for the Canadian wilderness. His father had been a Methodist minister whose parish included the east coast of Georgian Bay, an area MacCallum had come to love deeply. He had recently purchased a twenty-seven-acre island—“Island 158”—in Georgian Bay, fifty kilometres north of Penetanguishene; in 1911 he added to it an Arts and Crafts cottage designed by C.H.C. Wright, head of the University of Toronto's Department of Architecture and Drawing.