Defiant Spirits (13 page)

Gadsby's comments were a harmless pastiche of the outraged moral panic that had greeted the Post-Impressionist works at the Grafton Galleries and the Armory Show. But Jackson's new Toronto friends were not prepared to let these insults go unpunished. MacDonald leapt swiftly to his defence with his own article in the
Toronto Daily Star,
published a week later.

MacDonald took an interesting tack to defend Jackson. Various clear explanations and robust defences of this kind of paint slinging had recently been offered in both Britain and America. Such was the topicality of Post-Impressionism following the scandal of the Armory Show that in November 1913 even
Popular Science
published an article explaining the optical theories that underpinned it. Many other statements of purpose could have helped unscramble Gadsby's confused thoughts. In an essay published in 1909, Roger Fry had argued that “likeness to Nature” was no longer important to the modern artist: what counted were the “emotional elements” of a painting.
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Or as the catalogue for his 1910 exhibition
Manet and the Post-
Impressionists
stated, “There comes a point when the accumulations of an increasing skill in mere representation begin to destroy the expressiveness of the design.”
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MacDonald could easily have defended Jackson along these lines. But aligning Jackson with a coterie of dreaded Post-Impressionists would have done the painter few critical favours in Canada, and so his support for Jackson was based not on the integrity of his experimental modern style so much as on the nationality—the “Canadianness”—of his paintings. He urged Gadsby and his fellow critics to respond to such works “with an open eye and perhaps a little receptivity of mind,” and to “support our distinctly Native art.”
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In what would become a familiar refrain, he appealed to the patriotism of the critics and the public, arguing that a new Canadian style could not emerge so long as the country's young painters were forced to maintain the shopworn conventions of the past.

MacDonald therefore swaddled their art in the flag of the Dominion. He was sincere in his desire to forge a new Canadian style, but his manoeuvre was disingenuous: patriotism was used as a stalking horse for an international style of art that, as reactions at both the Armory Show and the Art Association of Montreal revealed, the North American public was not prepared to accept. Anything that might be disparaged as a French fancy needed to be garbed in mackinaw.

This kind of artistic flag hoisting was not regarded by everyone as the highest ideal for art. The best painting was supposed to aspire to timelessness and universality, not nationalist concerns. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called for a distinctively American art, admitted that the “highest charm” of masterpieces was “the universal language they speak.”
40
Good art was meant to cut across national boundaries. When that most deracinated painter, James McNeill Whistler, founded the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers in 1898, he disparaged the idea of “nationality in Art.” He wished to occupy instead what he called the “cosmopolitan ground of International Art.”
41

Yet not everyone wished to join Whistler on his cosmopolitan terrain. Modernist art is often seen—thanks to Whistler and others—as loftily international, at odds with narrowly regional or nationalist concerns. But MacDonald and his friends were far from alone in their desire to forge an indigenous culture based on the land. Many European modernists openly appealed to nationalist sentiments or were inspired by their love for a homeland.
42
Modernism's three greatest innovators, Cézanne, Gauguin and Picasso, were deeply rooted in either their provincial homelands or (in the case of Gauguin's South Sea paintings) the particular features of a specific locale, rural and remote. Many of their paintings, however formally adventurous, can be seen as “ethno-scapes”—celebrations of geographical patrimonies.
43

Cézanne, for example, was thoroughly imbued with the terroir of Provence. After his permanent return to Aix-en-Provence in 1886 he described his passionate attachment to “our native soil, so vibrant, so harsh and so reverberant with light.”
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Picasso's landscapes from the area around Horta de Ebro, painted in 1909 and declared by Gertrude Stein to be the first examples of Cubism, were inspired by both Cézanne's example and his own Catalan nationalism.
45
For Picasso's friend, Guillaume Apollinaire, all art was inescapably national. This influential apostle of modernism believed art always expressed “a milieu, a nation,” and that artists were inevitably the products of their environments. “Art will only cease being national,” he wrote, “the day that the whole universe, living in the same climate, in houses built in the same style, speaks the same language with the same accent—that is to say, never.”
46

MacDonald and his friends wished to produce a “distinctly Native art” that could do for Canada what Cézanne's self-conscious
provençalisme
did for his homeland, or Picasso's paintings for the hilly Catalan landscape. They hoped to produce works that would be both artistically audacious and (in the old phrase beloved of cultural nationalists everywhere) “racy of the soil.”
47

Whether the public and the critics would show any “receptivity” and support for these painters was still an open question. But Jackson at least paid heed to the injunctions of MacDonald and the blandishments of Harris and MacCallum: by the end of the year he had decided to remain in Toronto rather than follow the path of so many other artists south to New York.

LAWREN HARRIS AND Dr. MacCallum had another idea, besides their sponsorship of A.Y. Jackson, about how to kindle the “sacred fires” of Canadian art. In the autumn of 1913, construction began on a three-storey brick and concrete building on Severn Street, a few hundred metres east of Yonge and Bloor, on the southwestern-most fringe of Rosedale, one of Toronto's most affluent neighbourhoods. “The Studio Building for Canadian Art,” as it was known, would offer workspace, and even some limited living quarters, for at least six artists. Harris paid more than three-quarters of the building costs, with MacCallum contributing the rest. The total layout, including the land, was $60,000. It was an enormous sum considering that the average assessed value of a house in Toronto at the time was $1,600.
1

With fourteen-foot-high ceilings and six north-facing windows, the Studio Building was intended as a Toronto version of the hospitable and inspiring MacCallum cottage on West Wind Island. It was designed by Eden Smith, the architect of Harris's new home on Clarendon Avenue. Smith was a co-founder in 1903 of the Arts and Crafts Society of Canada and, since his arrival in Toronto from England in the 1880s, one of the country's leading architects. Dozens of his stylish Arts and Crafts houses, occupied by barristers, businessmen and university professors, adorned the city's boskier neighbourhoods, such as Wychwood Park, the artistic community where he had built his own home.
2

The hallmarks of Smith's usual William Morris–inspired style—dormers, hipped roofs, multi-paned sash windows—were largely absent from the more utilitarian Studio Building. A visiting journalist described it as a “factory-looking building.”
3
The premises nonetheless showed the pervading influence of the Arts and Crafts ideal of a cooperative community.
4
Its name and purpose furthermore revealed familiarity with the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York, a three-storey structure opened in 1858 and still offering studio space to artists in 1914. New York's Studio Building had housed prominent American painters such as Winslow Homer and William Merritt Chase, as well as Canadians like Horatio Walker. It had provided winter quarters for many landscapists, from the Hudson River School to American Impressionists, who in the summer flocked to the Catskills or the Connecticut coast in an attempt to create a distinctively American idiom.

The Studio Building's Toronto counterpart (whose originators scrupulously avoided all reference to their model in New York) was aimed at creating a uniquely Canadian style of art, or what Harris was later to call “a modern conception which suited this country.”
5
The Studio Building, Canadian-style, would therefore become (as Jackson wrote) “a lively centre for new ideas, experiments, discussions, plans for the future and visions of an art inspired by the Canadian countryside.”
6
Visions of art inspired by the Canadian landscape were an important criterion for anyone hoping to claim one of the six studios, since Harris specifically reserved space “for artists doing distinctly Canadian work.”
7

THE STUDIO BUILDING filled with tenants as soon as it opened in January 1914. Jackson and Tom Thomson began sharing an atelier on the ground floor, splitting the monthly rent of $22. Two more studios were occupied by MacDonald and Harris himself.

Some of the other occupants likewise had an interest in northern landscapes. One of them, forty-four-year-old Bill Beatty, was a friend of both Harris and MacDonald. Although he, like Jackson, had spent much time studying and painting in Europe, he was a brawny outdoorsman heralded as the first to “attempt to paint into this northern wilderness the quality of its trackless immensity.”
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An adolescent during the 1885 Riel Rebellion, Beatty went west to Batoche as a bugler in the 10th Royal Grenadiers. Afterwards he worked as a house painter and firefighter, astounding co-workers at the Hook and Ladder Company of the Lombard Street Firehall with feats such as sliding headfirst down the brass pole or with a man clinging to his back. Following his return from his studies in Europe in 1909, he painted with Harris in the Haliburton Highlands and a year later travelled with Tom McLean to Fort Mattagami on the Abitibi River. Since 1912 he had been teaching, like Arthur Lismer, at the Ontario College of Art.

Another occupant of the Studio Building, forty-three-year-old Arthur Heming, known as “the chronicler of the north,” also seemed to fit the bill as a combination of artist and outdoorsman. As a youth in Hamilton he was a prodigy at lacrosse, football, rowing and wrestling. His first trip into the Canadian wilderness, at the age of sixteen, was followed over the next two decades by more than a dozen treks through the northlands. He even crossed the Rockies with a Royal Northwest Mounted Police pack train. According to his own meticulous accounting, he had chalked up 550 miles by raft, 1,100 miles by dog sled, 1,700 miles on snowshoes and 3,300 by canoe. Legend had him pitching teepees, knocking together rafts and toboggans, even harpooning whales. Augustus Bridle viewed him with exhilarated reverence. He celebrated him in a 1912
Toronto Globe
article: Heming had “seen more,” boasted Bridle, “and found out more about the wild life and the outpost edges of the Canadian north than any other artist or writer alive.”
9
The article was illustrated with a photograph of Heming striding through the snow, a slit-eyed lynx cap on his head and a rifle in the crook of his arm. Those who met this husky-
mushing, pemmican-munching paragon of northern get-up-and-go were invariably surprised to find him extremely “citified” and “curiously over-refined”—for Heming was fastidious to the point of prissiness and (according to one observer) a “popinjay.”
10

Although he “disdained social life” and “arty circles,” Heming was a member of the Arts and Letters Club.
11
It was probably there that he came to know Harris, who in 1911 praised his paintings for the “masterly way” they captured the “mystery and bigness” of the North and the “cold crispness” of its snow.
12
This was to err on the side of generosity. The (literally) colour-blind Heming's outdoor scenes of Canadiana were traditional in execution and similar in subject matter to the northern adventure stories of Robert M. Ballantyne or J. Macdonald Oxley: square-jawed Mounties collaring renegades, fur-hatted hunters taking beads on their quarries.

Heming first made his reputation with illustrations for James Williams Tyrrell's 1897 classic of northern travel literature,
Across the Sub-Arctics of Canada: A Journey of 3,200 Miles by Canoe and Snowshoe through the Barren Lands.
He was also a writer and in 1907 illustrated his own novel,
Spirit Lake,
based on his travels near Hudson Bay. “It was generally believed that Heming knew more about the north country than anyone else in Canada,” Jackson later wrote, “and Harris hoped he would inspire a northern movement.” He added, “I do not remember that he ever mentioned the north country or expressed a desire to go there.”
13
Some of Heming's hardbitten northern exploits undoubtedly erred on the side of myth, but Jackson's observation showed his wish to claim for himself and his friends the role of pioneers of the Canadian north. There is no doubt that, however dandified his appearance, Heming saw vast tracts of northerly Canadian latitudes long before Jackson.

The final atelier was taken by someone with, at first blush, slightly less impressive credentials for doing “distinctly Canadian work.” Curtis Williamson, born in the year of Confederation, was the portrait painter known as the “Canadian Rembrandt” for a dark and moody tonal style he had developed in Holland. In this sense he made a strange studiomate for Jackson and Harris, considering their antipathy towards the Hague School. But Williamson had travelled and painted the coast of Labrador, returning with works that, according to one writer, “struck the Scandinavian note.”
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His place in the Studio Building may also have been assured thanks to his close friendship with Dr. MacCallum, who had fast become one of the driving forces in Canadian art.

That the Studio Building was meant to give Canadian painters a place in which to depict their country—and to gain what Harold Mortimer-Lamb had called the “power of insight” demanded by the Canadian landscape—was affirmed in an article printed in the
Toronto Daily Star
several weeks after the building opened. According to the writer, in a piece called “Where Artists Work by Northern Lights,” it was a venue for painters to produce “pictures which partake of the larger, bigger feeling which abounds in Canada—conveying to the minds of people something broader, grander, more noble, even, of the aspects of life which come to artists who are permeated with the virility and enthusiasm of the freer atmosphere of a new country—freed from the conservatism and staid ways of older countries of Europe.”
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Within these walls, the band of painters—what Beatty called “men with good red blood in their veins”—would flex their artistic muscles and begin to create their “virile” interpretations of the Canadian landscape. They would make, as Beatty confidently predicted, “the future of Canadian art.”
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IF A MUTUAL shortage of funds originally prompted them to share a ground-floor atelier in the Studio Building, A.Y. Jackson and Tom Thomson soon discovered they had much else in common.

The two men first met in the late autumn of 1913, after Thomson returned from his latest expedition into the bush. He had spent the summer canoeing through Algonquin Provincial Park and then working as a fire ranger north of Biscotasing on the Mattagami Reserve, the area through which Neil McKechnie and Tom McLean canoed in the summer of 1904 when they too worked as fire rangers.

Thomson was probably drawn to this particular area of Ontario in part because one of his sisters lived in Timmins and also because Lawren Harris and Bill Beatty went there in 1910. But he almost seemed to be following the trail of the doomed McKechnie, born in the same year, 1877, and celebrated as a “real Canadian” who captured the “granite-ribbed” wilderness and the “mystery of the North.”
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Thomson probably never met McKechnie, but his memory was kept alive in Toronto almost a decade after his death. He lay buried near Gogama, southwest of Mattagami Lake, beneath a wooden cross designed by friends who included J.E.H. MacDonald. His remote and primitive burial (a newspaper reporting his death described the impossibility of finding “even a plain deal coffin within 200 miles of the scene of the disaster”)
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probably inspired Duncan Campbell Scott to compose “Night Burial in the Forest.” Scott, who travelled to Mattagami Lake the year after McKechnie's death, described the inhumation of a young man “in his secret ferny tomb” in the middle of a mossy forest.

Thomson evidently decided that his artistic destiny, like McKechnie's, lay along these same lakes and rivers. But although he had found a subject in Ontario's forested regions, he still needed a personal style—what Harris called a “modern conception”—with which to capture the wild vitality of the Ontario northlands. Help was fortuitously at hand.

Like Jackson, Thomson became a beneficiary of Dr. MacCallum's patronage. The ophthalmologist made Thomson the same offer: he would underwrite his expenses for a year as he concentrated on his work. But if MacCallum was impressed with Thomson's skills, Jackson was not. He found his paintings, he later claimed, sombre and colourless. Thomson's hesitancy and lack of chromatic panache were hardly surprising. He was the least experienced and most untutored of the painters in the “northern movement” being fostered by Dr. MacCallum and Lawren Harris. Apart from his classes from William Cruikshank, he had not studied in a recognized school or academy, nor had he visited Europe or had the opportunity to see, except in reproduction, works of art by modern masters such as Cézanne, Gauguin or Matisse.

The only place Thomson might possibly have been exposed to international artistic trends was in Connecticut. The art colony based at Florence Griswold's boarding house in Old Lyme, on the Connecticut coast, was the most famous in America. The first art colony in the United States to experiment with Impressionism, it was founded in 1899 by Henry Ward Ranger, who worked in muted tones and hoped to create an “American Barbizon.” The colony, however, soon came to be dominated (after his arrival in 1903) by Childe Hassam. Painting in bright colours and occupying a shack-like studio christened “Bonero Terrace,” Hassam turned Old Lyme into an “American Giverny.” Arthur Heming had been a member of the “School of Lyme” for much of the previous decade, spending each summer there between 1902 and 1910. By about 1907 another member of Old Lyme's art colony was Tom Thomson's older brother George, who had sold his share in the Acme Business College and moved from Seattle to New York to study under Frank Vincent DuMond at the Art Students' League. Each summer, DuMond taught outdoor painting classes in Old Lyme, and in 1907 George's
Lyme Pastures
was accepted at the National Academy of Design's annual exhibition in New York. Since 1908 he had been living in New Haven, fifty kilometres west of Old Lyme.

If Tom Thomson visited his brother in New York or Old Lyme, he left no trace: Heming mentions neither George nor Tom in his memoir of Old Lyme. Still, it almost seems inconceivable that Thomson should have followed his brother across the continent to Seattle but not made the much shorter journey to Connecticut. If he did visit the art colony, the impact on his painting was limited. By 1913 his landscapes revealed none of the splashy colour or animated brushwork of Old Lyme's resident American Impressionists—but nor, for that matter, did the work of either Heming or George Thomson.
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