Defiant Spirits (11 page)

The work of these three young painters caught the attention of the reviewer for the
Toronto Daily Star,
Margaret L. Fairbairn, who was struck by the forcefulness of their work. A knowledgeable commentator on the arts, she wrote that the exhibition was “dominated almost entirely by the younger men, who, casting aside formulas, start out to record only what are their own individual impressions. The result is virile work, fearless brushing, strange, crude colour.”
43

This was something of an embellishment: the brushwork and “strange, crude colour” were nothing like as bold as what had been on offer at the Armory Show. The reviewer for the
Toronto Daily Mail & Empire
noted, in fact, how the “wave of artistic excitement” that swept over the United States in the previous few weeks had “scarcely touched Toronto.”
44
But Fairbairn's comments note perceptively how MacDonald and Harris, along with Jackson, were beginning to experiment with a more audacious and “virile” style of painting that would move away from the muzzy tones and gentle pastoral beauty of many Canadian landscape paintings.

BY 1913 THE new Canadian art movement in Toronto had another recruit: Tom Thomson exhibited one of his works in public for the first time. That he should have exhibited nothing before reaching his mid-thirties indicates both a lack of confidence and a desire for perfection. He had few illusions about his talent as a painter. In Seattle, any designs failing to meet with his approval he would “burn up,” according to his brother Ralph, “or smear with cigar ashes or the ends of burned matches.”
45
He took a similarly incendiary attitude towards his paintings. Harris claimed he would sometimes sit in disgust before a freshly painted picture and “flick burnt matches at it in a kind of whimsical scorn.”
46
He once made a bonfire of his paintings in Algonquin Park. The proceedings were witnessed by a twelve-year-old girl who found herself impressed by the “beautiful” effect of the burning oil paints.
47

A loner by nature, Thomson nonetheless thrived in the encouraging atmosphere of a group. MacDonald, Varley, Harris and Lismer all urged him to develop his talent, and early in 1913 he painted
A Northern Lake
for exhibition at the annual
osa
show. A restrained effort, thinly painted in murky tones, it featured a composition to which Thomson would return many times in the years to come: a foreground of boulders, a horizontal band of water in the middle ground and a shore in the distance, all framed by the rigid, vertical trunks of bare trees.

The canvas had none of the fearless brushing or crude colour Fairbairn noted in the canvases of some of the other young painters. But it suitably impressed the Government of Ontario's selection committee, which purchased it for $250. Thomson benefited from the fact that this three-man committee consisted of his old teacher William Cruikshank and—possibly even more decisive—two members of the Madawaska Club, a group of University of Toronto professors, all fishing and canoeing enthusiasts, who in 1898 purchased land and then built a clubhouse for their outdoor recreations at the mouth of Go Home River on Georgian Bay. Their leader was the physicist
W.J. Loudon, a keen outdoorsman who had followed up his
Notes on Elementary Mechanics
(1909) with
The Small-Mouthed Bass
(1910). In 1913 Dr. Loudon served on the Government of Ontario's selection committee, and he was no doubt as favourably disposed to northern scenes as the third member, Dr. John Seath, a former teacher and inspector of schools who had been Ontario's superintendent of education since 1906. Dr. Seath was a charter member of the Madawaska Club. Like Loudon, he was a friend of Dr. James MacCallum, who had purchased Island 158 because of its proximity to the club and who might have done some string pulling in order to see his young protege represented in a public collection.

Questions of influence peddling aside, to have sold his first exhibited painting to the provincial government was a tremendous boost to a painter lacking in self-assurance. In purely practical terms, the $250 Thomson earned from his painting was the equivalent of almost two months' wages. It gave him the courage, like MacDonald a year earlier, to quit full-time paid employment (he had recently been part of an exodus from Grip Limited to a rival firm, Rous and Mann). He cashed his government cheque in $1-bills and, visited later that day by Arthur Lismer at his latest boarding house, on Wellesley Street, tossed the bills into the air in an uncharacteristic fit of exuberance. Later he pinned the money to the wainscotting of his attic room so that he could see it all at once. Such behaviour was slightly odd from a man who had inherited $2,000 from his paternal grandfather, but presumably he felt that his $250, unlike the legacy, had been properly earned. It was, in any case, to mark the beginning of a new stage in his life.

ARTHUR LISMER HAD reasons of his own for celebrating: the Government of Ontario had likewise purchased one of his works from the 1913
OSA
exhibition. Featuring tree stumps and waste ground surrounded by a fringe of pine trees,
The Clearing
looked like a scene from the heavily logged areas of Northern Ontario. In fact, it was painted in the Toronto suburbs, in York Mills, on the site where ground was being cleared for a new subdivision. Although Lismer received $250 for the work, he could hardly afford Thomson's heedlessness, since he had a wife and, from the middle of May, a daughter to support. Part of his money was spent on a cot and a baby carriage.
1
To earn extra money, he took a summer job at the Ontario College of Art (as the Central Ontario School of Art and Industrial Design was rechristened in September 1912). It was the start of a teaching career at which he would excel throughout his life.

Lismer, like Varley, was hoping to paint farther afield than the Toronto suburbs. Sheffield was a dismal industrial city described by one resident as an “enduring cloud of smoke” occupied by a “pale-faced teeming population.”
2
But Toronto, for Lismer, was scarcely an improvement. Like MacDonald, he found it drab and grey. “Toronto is a good place,” he once said. “Good to get out of!”
3
So far he had painted at York Mills and on the banks of the Don River, but he was mesmerized by Thomson's accounts of Algonquin Park and the Mississagi Forest Reserve—and mystified that most Torontonians seemed uninterested in such places. “If the country's half as stirring as Tom's sketches seem to indicate,” he wrote to a friend, “in Heaven's name why are so many of Canadians always talking about their stomachs, their money, etc.?”
4
He found Torontonians obsessed with getting and spending. “They can argue and discourse for hours on the dollar and the ways and means of getting it,” he wrote, “but they can't talk on any other subject intelligently. My present opinion is that they are all ‘swank,' to put it broadly.”
5

Lismer's distaste for the mercenary acquisitiveness of Canadians was shared by others. Catharine Parr Traill's decades-old plea to Canadians—“set not your heart too much on riches!”
6
—seemed to have gone largely unheeded. Many believed the country's enormous resources and fast-growing economy meant spiritual matters were being neglected in a Klondike-style rush for wealth and possessions. A Protestant minister lamented that people immigrated to Canada not for educational advantages or religious privileges but rather “to make money—and the material side of life is uppermost in their thoughts—wheat and lands, dollars and acres, the thirst to have, the rush to get, these are the things that are absorbing the lives of men to the exclusion of other and higher things.”
7

Lismer's dismay at this materialism and his belief in “other and higher things” were shaped in a large part by his admiration for Edward Carpenter, the English mystic and social reformer whose book
The Art of Creation
accompanied him to Canada in 1911. Born in 1844, Carpenter was a Cambridge graduate, ordained Anglican priest, associate of William Morris (with whom he formed the Socialist League in 1884), and enthusiastic disciple of Walt Whitman. He had studied Eastern religions in India and Ceylon and since the early 1880s lived in the Derbyshire village of Millthorpe, ten kilometres south of Sheffield. Here he grew his own vegetables and manufactured sandals. He shocked Victorian society by living with his working-class male lover and wearing open-necked shirts.

Carpenter wrote numerous books, from works on homosexuality such as the pamphlet
Homogenic Love
and a collection of essays called
The Intermediate Sex,
to philosophical treatises steeped in Eastern mysticism. Of these latter,
The Art of Creation,
published in 1904, was typical. Carpenter married up-to-date science and psychology with what he called “the world-old wisdom of the Upanishads” to argue that the “materialistic view of the world”—the notion that the world around us is merely dead matter—was passing out of favour. For Carpenter, as for much Eastern philosophy, the physical world was instead to be understood as “the outcome and expression of the mental,” with “a vast unity underlying all.” Carpenter was influenced by Whitman's famous line from
Leaves of Grass
(another book that found its way into Lismer's luggage for his transatlantic voyage): “Objects gross and the unseen soul are one.”
8
It was the duty of the artist to explore this underlying connection between the mind of man and the “other world of the mountains and the trees and the mighty ocean and the sunset sky.”
9
He therefore advocated in one of his other books,
Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure,
a “return to nature
. . .
This is the way back to the lost Eden, or rather forward to the new Eden, of which the old was only a figure.”
10

Besides discussing these writings with other members of the Eclectics, Lismer used to attend Carpenter's lectures on Sunday mornings at a Unitarian church in Sheffield. He was suitably impressed by the man known as the “Noble Savage.” “I would listen with my mouth open,” he later claimed.
11
He may even have visited Millthorpe with his fellow Eclectics, because Carpenter kept an open house and regularly entertained visitors from far and wide. In any case, arriving in Canada and hearing Thomson describe the wonders of places such as the Mississagi Forest Reserve sparked in Lismer a desire to escape “civilization”—which Carpenter regarded as a disease through which humanity must pass—and see for himself the “other world” of nature.

THE OPPORTUNITY PRESENTED itself in September 1913, when Dr. MacCallum invited Lismer, his wife, Esther, and four-month-old daughter, Marjorie, to his cottage in Go Home Bay. Laden with sketching equipment and baby bottles, they were transported across open waters towards the island, over three kilometres from shore, in a small motor launch piloted by a “sinewy youth.”
12

The Lismers quickly experienced nature red in tooth and claw. A storm—appropriately for Lismer, a September gale—blew in across Georgian Bay, a body of water so vast that Champlain, arriving on its shores in search of the sea route to China, had called it
La Mer douce
(the Freshwater Sea). The journey became hazardous, the youth having to navigate the small craft through choppy waters past the island known as Giant's Tomb, where a Huron legend held that Ki-chi-ki-wa-na, or Rockman, lay buried. Much larger vessels had come to grief in the area. Only two years earlier, the
Thomas Cranage,
a 305-foot freighter that was once the largest ship in the American fleet, went aground on Watcher Reef, northeast of Giant's Tomb, breaking up and sinking in waters almost seventeen metres deep. Over the years, the number of wrecks, including those of the
Imperial
and the
Lottie Wolf,
helped earn Georgian Bay the nickname “Graveyard of the Great Lakes.”

Although Lismer probably knew little of these maritime disasters, as the gale mounted he might have reflected that death by water was something of an occupational hazard for a Canadian painter: less than a month earlier, Edmund Morris, one of Canada's finest landscapists and a subtle and sympathetic painter of First Nations portraits, drowned in the St. Lawrence near Quebec City at the age of forty-one. Little more than a year earlier, in August 1912, Go Home Bay was itself the scene of tragedy as one of Canada's most distinguished philosophers, thirty-eight-year-old George Blewett, Ryerson Professor of Moral Philosophy at Victoria University, drowned while swimming near Dr. MacCallum's cottage. Their deaths, like Neil McKechnie's, were poignant reminders of the dangers lurking in Canada's lakes and waterways.

The party eventually found refuge on a small island where a Yorkshireman named Billy France lived. Following some hastily improvised sleeping arrangements, they made their way safely to Dr. MacCallum's cottage on the following day. West Wind Island was in Monument Channel, northeast of Split Rock, views of which MacDonald had painted the previous summer. The house was fairly typical of the summer cottages that had been appearing on the shores of Georgian Bay islands for the previous few decades. Built on a rocky point, it was Y-shaped, with a wing of bedrooms facing the water and a high-ceilinged, wood-panelled living room with an open fire and a massive stone chimney breast; a wide veranda ran around the perimeter, and nearby a houseboat was moored in a sheltered cove.

Whereas Tom Thomson preferred a primitive sojourn in the woods that harked back to the experiences of the explorers and fur traders, Lismer's first taste of the Canadian “wilderness” was much the same as that enjoyed by the cottagers who each summer packed their croquet mallets and water wings and descended by the hundreds on Muskoka and Georgian Bay. Living in well-appointed houses with verandas, balconies and even turrets, they often enjoyed much the same standard of comfort as they did at home: one Torontonian, William Elliott, president of the Mendelssohn Choir, had built himself a beautiful Arts and Crafts cottage on Lake Joseph, to which each summer he transported a cow from his Rosedale residence. Already popular with Americans, Ontario's cottage country received international attention in the summer of 1913 owing to the presence on Lake Rosseau of a vacationing President Woodrow Wilson, elected only the previous March. The publicity surrounding his visit caused even more Americans to buy property in the area.
13

Lismer was less experienced and, understandably therefore, less adventurous than Thomson when it came to paddling a canoe. Nonetheless, each morning he would set off from Dr. MacCallum's wharf, pass the slash and sawdust heaps of the defunct lumber company town of Muskoka Mills, and enter the Musquash River, collecting milk and other supplies from a farm before paddling back to the island. The landscape through which he passed did not disappoint. The Wisconsin glacier had sculpted the area, exposing the bedrock and leaving only rocky outcrops and a thin soil in which only the hardiest vegetation could flourish. Also left behind was the archipelago known as the 30,000 Islands, a maze of inlets and islands so bewildering that even David Thompson got lost as he surveyed the area.

Lismer almost believed he had discovered the “new Eden” promised by Edward Carpenter: “Georgian Bay!” he would later write, “Thousands of islands, little and big, some of them mere rocks breaking the surface of the waters of the Bay—others great, high rocks tumbled in confused masses and crowned with leaning pines, turned away in ragged disarray from the west wind.” He called them the “happy isles, all different, but bound together in a common unity of form, colour, and design. It is a paradise for painters.”
14

Altogether Lismer spent several weeks in these “happy isles,” painting and exploring near the MacCallum cottage. Despite the fact that he had seen the controversial 1910 exhibition
Manet and the Post-Impressionists
—his interest possibly sparked by the fact that the curator Roger Fry was a protege of Edward Carpenter—his style was still fairly conventional. Regardless of how dramatic he found the scenery, he used an Impressionistic style to catch the effects of light dappled on the waters in Georgian Bay, as in a painting called
Georgian Bay.
Although beautiful and accomplished in its own way, it showed no attempt to explore the underlying connections between the mind of man and the “other world” of mountains and trees.

AT THE END of September, as Arthur Lismer and his family waited for transport to take them back to Penetanguishene, a motor launch appeared on the island's dock. Out stepped A.Y. Jackson, ready to begin his own sojourn at the cottage.

Lismer and Jackson had met briefly several months earlier, in Toronto, after Jackson used the money Lawren Harris paid for
The Edge of the Maple Wood
to fund a trip to Ontario. Harris had been away at the time on yet another sketching expedition with MacDonald: first at Mattawa, the site of an old Hudson's Bay Company trading post on the Ottawa River that closed only in 1908; and then at Témiscaming, fifty kilometres farther north on the Ottawa. Returning to Toronto and realizing he had missed Jackson, Harris sought him out in Berlin, where Jackson had gone in June to visit his two paternal aunts.

The fateful meeting between Harris and Jackson appears to have taken place at Geneva Lodge, the antique-crammed, servant-filled home of A.Y.'s aunt Geneva Jackson. She was a grand old lady whose father, Henry F.J. Jackson, of Jackson & Flowers, had constructed, in association with Sir Casimir Gzowski, the stretch of the Grand Trunk Railway between Breslau and New Hamburg.
15
On the triangle bounded by King, Water and Francis streets in Berlin, Henry Jackson had built himself a large home that he named in honour of his daughter. Here the unmarried Geneva lived in somewhat distressed gentility. She owned a Krieghoff and what she mistakenly believed to be a Caravaggio. A dabbler in oil paints, she regarded her nephew's productions as “pictures no sane person could understand.”
16

Jackson had listened to Harris's optimism about the burgeoning Canadian art movement in Toronto, and he may also have been reassured by the more sympathetic reception given his paintings at the
osa
. But in the spring of 1913 he was already making plans to try his fortune, like so many other Canadians, in New York. Before departing for the United States, he went north to Georgian Bay to spend time with some distant relations, the Breithaupts, members of a prominent Berlin family (the father had served as both mayor and
mpp
) who owned a cottage and houseboat near Penetanguishene.