Defiant Spirits (8 page)

MacCallum's Toronto residence was on Warren Road, only a block or two from where Harris lived, but it seems to have been West Wind Island (as Island 158 would more romantically be christened) where MacCallum and Harris met. Harris had spent the summer of 1911 in a nearby cottage owned by Dr. David Gibb Wishart, a professor of otolaryngology at the University of Toronto. Dr. Gibb Wishart may even have introduced the two men: and so it was that an ophthalmologist and an otolaryngologist (a specialist on the diseases of the ear, nose and throat) came to play vital roles in Canadian art.

Dr. MacCallum, a bald man with a waxed moustache, was already friends with an artist, Curtis Williamson. A Brampton-born painter who had lived in Barbizon, France, in the early 1890s and spent time in the Netherlands, Williamson was known for gloomily atmospheric paintings that earned him the nickname the “Canadian Rembrandt.” MacCallum had also met J.E.H. MacDonald. After seeing MacDonald's 1911 exhibition at the Arts and Letters Club, he not only purchased several of his works but also invited him to paint on West Wind Island. The works produced there, including
View from Split Rock, Sunlit Water,
and
Clouds and Rock, Split Rock,
he either purchased or else received as recompense for hosting the artist. It was to be the start of a faithful and generous patronage.

Since leaving Grip Limited, MacDonald had been sharing a studio on Adelaide Street East with Bill Beatty, and it was here, one day in the autumn of 1912, soon after returning from the Mississagi Forest Reserve, that Thomson met Dr. MacCallum. MacCallum was shown some of the works that had been, as he put it, “fished up from the foot of the rapids.”
20
Thomson's paintings at this point were considerably less sophisticated than MacDonald's: it would have been fair to say that Thomson was, capsize notwithstanding, a better outdoorsman than a painter. His works were sombre in colour and barely a cut above the average Sunday-afternoon dauber in oils. They were characterized by distant views, low horizons, largely unbroken bands of muted colour and a general absence of detail. Still, Mac-
Callum believed they had a feeling “for the grim, fascinating northland. Dark they were, muddy in colour, tight, and not wanting in technical defects; but they made me feel that the north had gripped Thomson as it had gripped me when, as a boy of eleven, I first sailed and paddled through its silent places.”
21

A short time later, interested in adding a few Thomsons to his collection, MacCallum looked up the painter at home. Not having the exact address—Thomson was still leading a peripatetic existence—he was forced to ring every doorbell on Summerhill Avenue until he found the boarding house. Although Thomson was out, the proprietor admitted MacCallum to his room in the attic, where he studied the Mississagi sketches as he waited. When he returned at last, Thomson told the doctor, in his usual self-deprecating way, “Take them home with you. They're no good.”
22

WILL BROADHEAD'S FIRST few years in Canada were marked by a heedless optimism of the sort that infected so many Canadians. His letters home to his family in Sheffield described the boundless possibilities of his newly adopted country. “I see nothing but sunshine and prosperity,” he wrote in one letter. “Everything in Canada seems to be booming,” he declared in another. He assured his friends and family that he was “doing wonders,” that Canada was “a great place,” and that his bosses “think I am a rapid worker, but as a matter of fact I just take it easy & try to do good work, there is absolutely no hustling here.”

Word of this promised land for designers soon reached the ears of Arthur Lismer, a friend from their days together at the Sheffield School of Art. Lismer wrote to Broadhead that he was “sick of Sheffield” and wanted a change. Broadhead was enthusiastic, because he regarded Lismer, then twenty-five, as “a real fine fellow, just the fellow for a companion.” He tried to ease Lismer's path to Canada, late in 1910, by taking samples of his design work to Grip Limited (Lismer was self-employed in Sheffield as a photoengraver and “specialist in pictorial publicity”). Alas, as Broadhead wrote confidentially to his father, “The truth is—his work is not good enough.” But it was too late: in January 1911 Lismer boarded
ss
Corsican
in Liverpool.
23

The extroverted and ambitious Lismer (a friend would later describe him as “an ardent spirit suffering no restraint”)
24
was a spare six-footer with red hair and piercing green eyes. The son of a Sheffield draper, he had begun studies at the Sheffield School of Art at the age of thirteen; two years later, while still a student, he went to work as an illustrator for the
Sheffield Independent,
doing sketches of what he later called “the spot where the body was found,”
25
as well as portraits of visiting luminaries such as George Bernard Shaw and a fledgling
MP
and former war correspondent named Winston Churchill. He joined the Heeley Art Club, a working-men's sketch club not unlike the Toronto Art Students' League; its members went on sketching excursions on the moors outside Sheffield before retiring to the local hostelries for refreshment. Some of them, Lismer included, were members of a group called the Eclectics who gathered to discuss theosophy as well as writers such as Edward Carpenter, the sandal-wearing apostle of “cosmic consciousness.”

In 1906, at the age of twenty-one, Lismer enrolled in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Founded in 1664, the Royal Academy was one of the finest teaching institutions in Europe, in a city that was once the artistic centre of the continent. Discipline was rigorous. A journal of the day reported how the students toiled for seven days a week. Smoking was forbidden, and breaches of the regulations resulted in “compulsory holidays for two or three days or sometimes weeks” (one of the more illustrious but troublesome pupils, Vincent Van Gogh, had been expelled some twenty years earlier). The products of this regime were young artists of “breadth and manliness” whose “technique and feeling” could, in the opinion of the journal's critic, “cope with any on the continent.”
26

Besides formal instruction at the school, there were museums and galleries in Antwerp for the students to visit, in particular the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten. This royal museum held fine examples of Netherlandish landscapes that included several works by Joachim Patinir, the “father of landscape painting” who had specialized in panoramic views of rugged coastal terrain. Lismer also made side trips to see the galleries in Paris and into the French countryside to study the landscape where Camille Corot and Charles-François Daubigny had painted.
27

Lismer survived under his stringent Antwerp tutelage for eighteen months. Back in Sheffield, he found himself unable to earn a decent living or offer prospects to his fiancée, Esther Mawson. “It was a cold world for artists in those days in northern England,” he later wrote.
28
He therefore set sail for Canada with $5 in his pocket and his few worldly possessions (which included a parting gift from his fellow Eclectics, a copy of Carpenter's
The Art of Creation
) crammed inside a travelling trunk made from his chopped-up writing desk. Weeks later, after a winter transatlantic crossing that finished with
ss
Corsican
encased in ice, the effusive Yorkshireman was working at Grip (Broadhead's appraisal had clearly been too pessimistic) and rooming on Summerhill Avenue with the reticent and self-effacing Thomson.

TORONTO PROVED AS lucrative and welcoming to Lismer as it had to Broadhead. Within a year of his arrival, he had enough money in his bank account to return to Sheffield to marry Esther and then to bring her to Canada and install the pair of them in a small house near Christie Pits. The streets of Toronto, he jubilantly informed a Sheffield acquaintance in a letter, “were practically paved with gold.”
29

That acquaintance was Frederick Horsman Varley, the next son of Sheffield to immigrate to Toronto. Varley was a thirty-year-old commercial artist and Lismer's fellow graduate of both the Sheffield School of Art and Antwerp's Royal Academy. Varley too had been struggling to earn a living in Sheffield, a city he would later dismiss as “a back alley for art.”
30
For much of the previous decade he had led a hand-to-mouth existence in both Sheffield and London as a newspaper illustrator, but by 1908 his bleak prospects had forced him to take work as a stevedore on the docks of the North Sea port of Hull and then as a clerk in a railway office in Doncaster. In the summer of 1912, with a wife and young daughter to support, he was prepared to listen to his old friend's tales of Canada as a land of artistic opportunity. That summer, leaving behind his family and borrowing money from Lismer's brother-in-law, he sailed from Liverpool aboard
SS
Corsican.
Arriving first in Montreal, he tossed a dime into the air: heads meant New York, tails Toronto. Although the coin came up heads, he went to Toronto, no doubt owing to the presence of Lismer. Within days he, too, had landed on his feet, finding work at Grip and a bed on Summerhill Avenue.

Thomson and Varley immediately became friends. The red-haired, craggy-featured Varley was a loner with a mercurial temperament and—almost unheard of even among artists in Toronto the Good—bohemian appetites. He had spent several years in London, by his own account, “drifting in the underworld.”
31
He drank copiously and chain-smoked cigarettes, and beneath his corduroy trousers (the choice of Parisian aesthetes and bohemians from Théophile Gautier to Leo Stein) he wore silk underwear. Thomson too liked to drink and, when not in the bush, could be something of a dandy. He was a “connoisseur of good tobacco,” according to one Grip colleague, and he wore what Lismer called “silk shirts of a fairly loud pattern.”
32
When in funds, he dined at the fashionable McConkey's Restaurant on King Street West, an elegant establishment whose Palm Room was the home of Toronto's beau monde. His mackinaw-clad forays into the bush notwithstanding, Thomson had, according to one of his sisters, a “hunger for the refinements and niceties of life.”
33

Thomson and Varley got along so well that soon Varley began acting as a matchmaker, trying to engineer a relationship between Thomson and his sister-in-law Dora, the half-sister of his wife, Maud: the two Englishwomen were expected to arrive in Canada by spring. Thomson declined the offer. He “wasn't fit for a girl,” he told Varley, because he was “a wild man.”
34

Painting was the two men's greatest passion. Weekends found them sketching in the outskirts of Toronto and on Centre Island, in Toronto Harbour. Thomson evidently regaled his new friend with tales of life on the Mississagi, because before long Varley was writing to his sister in England that he was “aching” to express the landscape of what he called “this
. . .
outdoor country.”
35

IN JANUARY 1913 Lawren Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald caught a train from Union Station in Toronto. On this occasion they were going not north but south, 150 kilometres around Lake Ontario to Buffalo, New York.

Buffalo was a far more impressive city than Toronto. The eighth-largest city in the United States, it had a population of more than 420,000. Buffalonians could boast spacious boulevards built on a radial plan, houses by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the United States' largest office block, the Ellicott Square Building. They also enjoyed more than a thousand acres of beautiful parkland designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, America's greatest landscape architect; one of the parks, Delaware Park, had been the site of the Pan-American Exposition, which in 1901 attracted nearly 8 million people to the city. Whereas Toronto still had no permanent public art collection, Buffalo could take pride in the neoclassical Albright Art Gallery. The gallery was begun in 1900 and completed five years later. Its 5,000 tons of marble, 102 Ionic columns and eight-foot-high caryatids all announced Buffalo's triumphant commitment to the arts.

The Albright had already mounted several major exhibitions. Recent shows were devoted to modernist artists such as the Russian Prince Paolo Troubetzkoy, the Spanish Post-Impressionist Ignacio Zuloaga, the Art Nouveau designer Aubrey Beardsley and the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Two separate exhibitions had been dedicated to James McNeill Whistler. In 1911 the Albright had hosted yet another important exhibition, the first showing outside Paris of the Société des peintres et sculpteurs (formerly the Société nouvelle). According to a
New York Times
review, this exhibition revealed the “intelligent zest” of the “new forms of expression” in France.
1
It included bronzes by Auguste Rodin and paintings by the expatriate Canadian
J.W. Morrice, a Montreal native who had lived for many years in Paris. Members of the Arts and Letters Club, Harris and MacDonald among them, chartered a
cpr
carriage to transport them to the exhibition. A friend later said that Harris “deplored our neglect of the artist in Canada,”
2
and so it must have been chastening for him to realize that, in order to see works of such quality and variety, one needed to catch the train to Buffalo.

The exhibition that opened on January 4, 1913, entitled
Contemporary Scandinavian Art,
was yet another impressive international show. Harris and MacDonald would already have known Scandinavian art by reputation because Canadian artists had long taken an interest in Nordic painting. Twenty years earlier, in 1893, paintings from Norway, Sweden and Denmark struck a resonant chord with several young Canadian artists at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. C.W. Jefferys, twenty-four years old at the time, noted that “their painters were grappling with a landscape and climate similar to our own.” He felt “a natural affinity to them, rather than to the London, Paris, Munich and Dusseldorf Schools. We became northern-minded.”
3

In 1913 there was still much in Scandinavian art to make impressionable young Canadian painters turn northern-minded. “You will see here,” the Swedish-American curator Christian Brinton announced on opening night, “the fantastic forms which the snow assumes, the freshness of the fields in springtime, the flow of water, and the contour of the clouds mirrored in the shining face of the sea.”
4
The forty-two-year-old Brinton, author of
Modern Artists,
was a tireless promoter in America of contemporary European painting. For the Albright he had assembled a collection of 165 works by some of Scandinavia's most prominent modern painters. Although no contributions came from the Swedish avant-garde collective De Åtta (The Eight), Brinton did pay tribute in the exhibition catalogue to what he called these “earnest disciples of progress”—students of Henri Matisse led by Isaac Grünewald.
5

The Eight were Scandinavia's only most recent disciples of progress. For the previous thirty years Scandinavian art had been enjoying a golden period. Young Swedish, Danish and Norwegian painters, trained in Italy, France and Germany, had returned to their countries to interpret their northern landscapes in adventurous new styles that made them among the most celebrated painters in Europe. “After us, the Scandinavians,” the French painter Ernest Meissonier had predicted shortly before his death in 1891.
6
Optimism about the power of Scandinavian art was related to a widespread conviction that the civilization of Western Europe—urban, industrialized, rootless—was entering a decline. For an apostle of progress such as Brinton, Scandinavia's virtue was “its remoteness, its scenic picturesqueness, and the comparative lateness with which its inhabitants entered the concert of so-called European civilization.”
7
The decadent and enfeebled culture of Europe could be invigorated (so proponents of Northern European art believed) by a half-civilized race of poets and artists from Europe's rugged northern latitudes—what one critic celebrated as the “wild men of the North.”
8

This philosophy, as well as Brinton's poeticizing about Scandinavia's “perpetual snow” and “grandiose and eccentric meteorological phenomena,” had obvious parallels to the American and, even more especially, the Canadian situation. For was not Canada, too, a remote northern land of perpetual snow and spectacular scenery, with a vigorous stock of people not yet domesticated by the bonds of culture? Since Confederation, many Canadians had been identifying themselves—in sharp distinction to the races and nations of supposedly softer and lazier latitudes—as a hardy northern race. They were, in the words of Robert Grant Haliburton, the “Northmen of the New World.”
9
If the northern wilderness was to preserve and progress culture through its health and vigour, where could it be found in greater abundance than in Canada?

Canada had intriguing parallels with Norway in particular, a country that, as Brinton observed, was emerging from the “early, formative years of her artistic development.”
10
Both nations had until recently been ruled by others. Norway was a province of Denmark for more than four centuries until, in 1814, it achieved partial independence thanks to a political union with the Kingdom of Sweden; parliamentary rule was achieved in 1884 and independence from Sweden only in 1905. Such prolonged political subservience naturally led Norwegian artists to explore national identity—and this identity was constructed around their northern landscape. A movement known as “National Romanticism” developed in the 1840s, followed forty years later by the “New Romanticism” of nationalist-minded painters, led by Gerhard Munthe, based at a farm named Fleskum in Bærum, near Oslo. Founding the Lysakerkretsen (Lysaker Society) to promote Norwegian nationalist values, Munthe had even launched the idea of a special Norwegian palette of colours—blue-green, bright reds, deep violets, indigo, bold yellows—that he believed reflected the unique Norwegian landscape.
11
Although none of Munthe's works was on show in Buffalo, nationalism was one of the keynotes of the Albright exhibition, with Brinton evaluating the paintings through the lens of the perceived national characteristics of the different Scandinavian countries.

Harris would later call his trip to the Albright with MacDonald “one of the most rewarding and exciting experiences either of us had.”
12
Accustomed to misty paintings of French riversides and Dutch coasts, the two men were enthralled by the vivid images of the boreal forest, the vast biome that encircles the top of the globe like a coniferous crown, encompassing Canada as well as Scandinavia. They were particularly struck by the work of landscapists such as the Symbolist painter Harald Sohlberg, a Norwegian, and the Swede Gustaf Fjaestad (a former speed skater who in 1891 set the world record for the English mile). Snow was unexpectedly rare in Scandinavian paintings prior to the 1890s, but Sohlberg and Fjaestad had turned to wintry images to convey specific national characters and a distinctive Nordic symbolism.
13
These razor-sharp images of hoarfrost, pristine snow and bristling pines against steel-blue skies struck the Canadians as fresh and new after the mellow, beeswaxed glow so prominent in Toronto exhibitions.

Harris and MacDonald began to envision the possibilities of an art that would emphasize what Harris later called “the power and clarity and rugged elemental beauty of our own land.”
14
Or as MacDonald prolixly enthused, the “feelings of height and breadth and depth and colour and sunshine and solemnity” raised by these paintings of “the soil and woods and waters and rocks” meant both artists became determined to do much the same thing with the Canadian landscape.
15

THERE WAS MORE in the Albright exhibition to intrigue Harris and MacDonald than depictions of forests, mountains and snow. After all, for the better part of a century Canadian painters in great profusion had been depicting forests, mountains and (less frequently) snow: the walls of the
osa
exhibitions had been thronged with images of Muskoka and the Rockies. It was, rather, the particular
style
of some of the Scandinavian painters that excited the two Canadian artists. The clear light, jagged peaks and pinnacled pines of the northern latitudes evidently called for a style different from the misty riverbanks and cultivated fields of Europe's more southerly regions. A number of the Scandinavians used strong colours and expressive, rhythmic forms taken from 1890s artistic movements such as Synthetism, Symbolism and Art Nouveau. The Danish painter J.F. Willumsen had been a friend and disciple of Paul Gauguin, and many of his canvases (eight were at the Albright) showed the influence of Gauguin's saturated colours and distorted perspectives.

The purpose of these startling compositions and bright, seemingly arbitrary colours was an emotional effect. European art movements of the previous decades had emphasized the importance of the painter's emotional and psychological responses. Van Gogh stressed that he painted what he felt rather than what he saw, writing to his brother Theo that “instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make more arbitrary use of colour to express myself more forcefully.”
16

A number of the Scandinavian painters at the Albright likewise wished to capture and express emotional states in their landscapes. Their motto was expressed by the Swedish painter and critic Richard Bergh: “Every landscape is a state of mind.”
17
Sohlberg, a Symbolist, hoped to create, in the words of an American reviewer, “nothing less than a new form
. . .
that shall express with greater intensity the new feelings and emotions aroused in man by all the objects of the natural world.”
18
He was not interested in offering photographic images of the Norwegian countryside: he specialized in what Brinton called “emotionally intense landscapes.”
19
He experimented with glazing techniques in order to create heightened colours and intense feelings.

Another Norwegian Symbolist, Edvard Munch, offered even more emphatic emotions and visions. He too believed a physical landscape produced a set of feelings that he then attempted to capture in pigment: “It is these feelings which are crucial,” he once wrote, “nature is merely the means of conveying them.”
20
Harris must have taken a special interest in Munch's six paintings, since he was the man for whom Franz Skarbina had resigned his post and then founded the Group of Eleven. In 1913 Munch claimed he was “quite faded and classic,” no longer among “the wildest things of Europe.”
21
He was living in Norway with his beloved fox terrier, Mr. Phipps, and enjoying excursions through the fjords on his motorboat. An outcast no more, he was a Knight of the Royal Order of Saint Olav and by far the most renowned and financially successful of the Scandinavian painters on display at the Albright. He was in fact, as Brinton acknowledged, one of the most famous artists in the world, his reputation “second to that of no living contemporary.”
22
Although scarcely appreciated by everyone (his name “still rankles in the memory of many an outraged patron of art,” noted one reviewer),
23
he was a salutary example of how controversy and notoriety could coalesce, in the short space of a decade or two, into acceptance and fame.

Something more than Munch's celebrity must have drawn Harris and MacDonald to his works. There was in much Scandinavian art, and in Northern European art in general, an attitude towards nature quite different from, say, the French art of the previous fifty or sixty years. By the nineteenth century, natural scientists had unwoven the rainbow (as John Keats lamented). Following in their wake, Realist and Impressionist painters such as Gustave Courbet or Claude Monet drained the natural world of any transcendent dimension. Many French painters in the second half of the nineteenth century regarded the landscape as a setting for social recreations such as picnics and promenades, or as a site on which to examine—like a scientist on a field trip—atmospheric or meteorological effects in the changing seasons and at various times throughout the day.

Courbet and Monet both painted seascapes at Étretat on the Normandy coast, but their pictures of remarkable geological formations such as Needle Rock—as in Courbet's
Cliff at Étretat after the Storm
or Monet's
Étretat, Gate of Aval: Fishing Boats Leaving the Harbour
—were descriptive images of sunlight, water, reflections and human activities such as fishing or sailing. No attempt was made, despite the appearance of the looming rocks or the fact that Monet often worked in gales of wind and rain, to convey a sense of the awesome majesty of nature. Interest was in the specific and the momentary. “For me,” Monet once claimed, “a landscape does not exist in its own right, because its appearance changes at every moment; but it is brought to life through the air and the light, which continually vary.”
24
The English painter and critic Roger Fry wittily paraphrased this kind of statement when he characterized the Impressionist as someone who believed he could not paint the same river twice.
25