Defiant Spirits (15 page)

However enthusiastic he might have been, the critic for
The Studio
was cautious about their chances for commercial success: “Whether this style of painting will become popular,” he concluded, “it is impossible to say: anyhow, as a feeling after forcible expression it is worthy of attention.”
36

IF HE WAS the beneficiary of A.Y. Jackson's tutelage, Tom Thomson returned the favour by firing his studiomate's enthusiasm for the Ontario northlands.

Early in February Jackson left Toronto to paint and snowshoe in Algonquin Provincial Park. He would later describe the park as “hacked up many years ago by a lumber company that went broke. It is fire-swept, dammed by both man and beaver, and overrun with wolves.”
37
But, like Thomson, he was exhilarated by these surroundings and the possibilities for painting them. The woods, he wrote to MacDonald, were “full of ‘decoratif motifs.'”
38
He remained there for several months, enduring deep snow and frigid temperatures. In the middle of February he wrote to MacDonald from Canoe Lake Station, where temperatures plunging to –45 degrees Fahrenheit meant “all you notice is your breath dropping down and splintering on the scintillating ground.”
39
The population of Canoe Lake, he reported, was “eight, including me
. . .
Our only means of locomotion are snow shoes. There is only one road, to the station a mile away, and it stops there. However, the snowshoeing is good—there are lots of lakes and all frozen, so you can walk for miles on the level. As soon as you get off the lakes you are in the bush, which is very rough, a very tangle of birch and spruce.”
40

For Jackson these stimulating hibernal adversities were all part of what it meant to be a Canadian. “The Canadian who does not love keen bracing air,” he wrote to another friend at this time, “sunlight making shadows that vie with the sky, the wooden hills and frozen lakes. Well, he must be a poor patriot.”
41
Patriotic love for bracing air and frozen lakes was an essential requirement for a Canadian artist, since the task of Canadian painters was, he now believed, to capture on canvas these wintry effects in remote areas of wilderness. In a letter to Dr. MacCallum from Algonquin Park, he wrote, only half-jokingly, of how the tenants of the Studio Building could forge a new Canadian art simply by taking themselves off to the country's most inhospitable and far-flung regions: “Heming up in the Barren Lands. Thomson West of Ungava. MacDonald Georgian Bay Rocky Island. Beatty Rocky Mountains. Harris those Godforsaken Laurentian Hills. I'll look after the Labrador Coast
. . .
Then we would have a Canadian School for sure.”
42

A “Canadian School,” for Jackson, was linked to explorations of these geographically remote areas of the Dominion. Artists were to be latter-day versions of Champlain and David Thompson, armed with canvases and brushes in place of maps and compasses, the value of their art measured in degrees of latitude and Fahrenheit. He was apparently unaware that all these isolated domains and many more besides had already been painted with no sign of a Canadian School developing. The Labrador coast for which he jocularly volunteered himself had been painted fifty years earlier by William Bradford and more recently by Curtis Williamson—but their sealskin-and-
snowshoe expeditions had not produced anything approaching a distinctly Canadian school of painting (and anyway the Labrador coast was not even part of Canada: it belonged to the self-governing Dominion of Newfoundland).

Jackson's belief that reaching and then painting these far-off regions could create a national school is all the stranger considering how these lands were hardly
terrae incognitae
to most Canadians. They had already been interpreted countless times, not only in pigment but also in literature (not least by Arthur Heming) and more recently through the new medium of moving pictures. Over the previous decade virtually every region of Canada had been captured on celluloid and then flickeringly played back in nickelodeons (of which Canada already had more than a thousand). It must have been difficult to venture far into the Canadian wilderness without bumping into filmmakers wielding hand-cranked cameras in front of waterfalls or beside frozen lakes. The country's entire geography was mapped in the silent-picturegoer's imagination—everything from the Canadian Bioscope Company's rendering of Nova Scotia in 1913's
Evangeline
and the Vancouver Island of Edward S. Curtis's 1914 six-reeler
In the Land of the War Canoes,
to the barren lands in the Edison Company's 1911
Eskimos in Labrador.

Merely dogsledding or snowshoeing into the wild, then hunkering down to paint ice floes or pine trees, would not be enough. A new vision, a new technique, was required. The most promising prospects for the development of a Canadian School were, as the critic for
The Studio
had noted, the techniques of the Continental avant-garde that Jackson had used to such striking effect in
Terre sauvage
—a work that owed as much to the galleries and ateliers of France as it did to the bracing air of the Canadian barrens.

AS JACKSON POINTED out, Algonquin Park, with its beaver swamps and swaths of clear-cut timber, was by no means conventionally beautiful or even, in many parts, particularly majestic. But such was Tom Thomson's enthusiasm that in 1914 the park became the rural centre of operations for the new Canadian School, the “men with good red blood in their veins” based in the Studio Building.

If the studios were intended for distinctly Canadian work, then the “Canada” most of the artists had in mind was Ontario's Shield country. Its granite outcrops and krummholz-formation pine trees were easy to see as the markers of a uniquely northern landscape different from the lusher and gentler countrysides of France, England or even southern Ontario. Rupert Brooke had found southern Ontario—“rolling country, thickets of trees, little hills green and grey in the distance, decorous small fields”—almost indistinguishable from rural England.
43
But clearly something more singular met the eye as one ventured into the spruce-and-moose hinterland of the boreal forest.

A journey north on the Grand Trunk Railway therefore became a rite of
paysage
for Canadian artists. In March Jackson was joined in Algonquin Park by J.E.H. MacDonald and Bill Beatty. The Toronto press soon began making reference to an “Algonquin Park School.”
44

Late in April 1914, with snow still on the ground, Thomson returned to Canoe Lake. He took up residence, as in the previous two years, at Camp Mowat, the former boarding house of the Gilmour Lumber Company that had recently been expanded and rechristened “Mowat Lodge.” As soon as the snow melted, Thomson moved out of the lodge and into his tent. He camped in a grove of birch trees next to a pile of lumber nearby the disused mill, a red-brick structure with a galvanized iron roof. Here, equipped with Hudson's Bay Company blankets, cooking pots and a sack of flour, he lived in a tent with his painting equipment and his sixteen-foot Chestnut canoe at the ready. A visitor to Canoe Lake in 1914 recalled how he looked like a woodsman in his mackinaw trousers.
45
There was, however, a touch of flamboyance and profligacy amid this scene of rusticity. He painted his canoe a distinctive blue-grey, achieved by mixing into the standard grey canoe paint a brilliant cobalt blue—an expensive pigment costing $2 per tube.
46

Thomson had become a well-known figure to the sparse inhabitants at Canoe Lake. “It appears that Tom Thomson is some fisherman, quite noted round here,” Jackson wrote to MacDonald in February.
47
Well acquainted with several of the park rangers, Thomson had also become friends with Shannon Fraser, the freckled, red-haired proprietor of Mowat Lodge who also served as Canoe Lake's postmaster. Thomson was often drafted into service to patch the roof of the boarding house, plant vegetables or even dry the dishes for Fraser's wife, Annie. He further made himself useful by performing services for other guests at Mowat Lodge, such as carving oars for them and catching the fish that Annie Fraser then cooked for dinner.
48

Besides his angling, Thomson also developed a reputation for eccentricity. Passing railwaymen were puzzled by the sight of him dabbing paint on bits of board (“What kind of thing is that?” asked an incredulous section foreman when informed that Thomson was an artist). Other visitors to the area sometimes saw him sitting above a rapids near Joe Creek, staring dreamily at the sky and occasionally tossing a rock into the rushing water. Once a young woman staying at the Algonquin Hotel expressed an interest in what she called the “strange-looking chap” who haunted the area. Despite the fact that the guest was, according to the ranger Mark Robinson, “rather an attractive looking lady
. . .
bright, intelligent in every way,” she failed to make a conquest. “I've spoken to him two or three times,” she explained in exasperation to Robinson, “and he won't as much as look my way or answer.” Robinson himself sometimes encountered Thomson staring so intently at a pine stump that he “never looked sideways at me or anything” when the ranger greeted him.
49

Robinson's wife found such behaviour “slightly demented,” but at other times, Robinson stressed, Thomson could be “all smiles” and “as nice
. . .
as you could wish him to be, in every way.” One of his most characteristic traits was generosity with money. A fellow Grip employee, Stanley Kemp, once claimed Thomson “would share his last dollar with a friend in need.”
50
One beneficiary of this kind-
heartedness was a boy in Kearney, a small logging town north of Huntsville. Before returning to Toronto in the late autumn of 1913, Thomson had gone into Kearney for a haircut when he noticed a boy with holes in his rubber boots. According to Robinson, he proceeded to buy the boy not only a new pair of boots but also stockings, mittens, a knitted toque, underwear and, for good measure, a whole new suit of clothes. “Go home and tell your Dad you met Tom Thomson,” he instructed the newly outfitted child.
51
The reference to himself in the third person suggests something of his secret ambitions.

THOMSON HAD BEEN at Mowat Lodge for several weeks in the spring of 1914 when Arthur Lismer arrived from Toronto for a canoe and sketching excursion. Although Lismer was not a tenant of the Studio Building, his passion for the “happy isles” and his friendship with Thomson were enough to have him counted among the red-blooded men among whom there was, according to Bill Beatty, a “bond of sympathy.”
52

The Englishman was met by Thomson at the train station. If he was collected by the macabre form of transport with which Fraser usually greeted visitors—a black carriage, purchased from a local undertaker and known as “The Hearse”—he failed to mention it.
53
The pair spent the night at Mowat Lodge before setting out the next afternoon in Thomson's canoe, laden with supplies: a pup tent, blankets, food for several weeks, a reflector oven, plates and utensils, an axe, fishing tackle and, not least, as Lismer wrote, “sketching impedimenta, this last consisting (for me) of two dozen
12
½ ×
9
½
three-ply veneer boards.”
54
When fully laden, the canoe's gunwale cleared the waterline by a dangerously scant three inches.

The two men camped on Molly's Island on Smoke Lake before making excursions through the maze of pine- and boulder-fringed waterways, passing through Ragged, Crown and Wolf lakes; altogether they spent some three weeks under canvas.

Thomson's other companions in the bush, Harry Jackson and Will Broadhead, seem not to have held his bushcraft in any regard. Lismer, though, was hugely impressed—in retrospect, at least—by Thomson's abilities. He was later moved to describe his friend's skills in the most hyperbolic terms: “He saw a thousand things—animals and birds, and signs along the trail that others missed. He knew where to find
subjects—a stretch of muskeg, a fine stand of pine with possibilities for the kind of thing he wanted to paint. He could drop a line in places, and catch a fish where other experienced fishermen failed. He identified a bird song, and noted changes in the weather. He could find his way over open water to a portage of a camp on a night as black as ink.” These astute powers of observation—his “sense of awareness and significance of simple sights”—served Thomson well when he sat down at his easel, because his “uncanny sensitivity carried over into his paintings and sketching.”
55

Lismer was exaggerating Thomson's affinity with nature in the interests of myth. Even so, the acute observation of the natural world required by a good woodsman or fisherman no doubt paid dividends when Thomson put down his fishing rod and took up his paintbrush. Many of his landscapes were sketched on the banks of lakes or rivers, in spots where he might have fished as easily as he painted. But he was at least as well served in his art by his astute observations of Jackson's Hot Mush technique and Lismer's own accomplished
plein-air
style. Following the example of Beatty and Jackson, he fashioned himself a variant of the kind of field easel used by French painters, notably the Impressionists, for carrying art supplies on their outdoor sketching trips. Like theirs, Thomson's box-easel served as a palette, a small easel and a place in which to separate and store his finished sketches. Working on small canvases as well as boards, he began using freer brushstrokes than a year earlier, applying his paint thickly and unevenly, sometimes allowing the weave of the canvas to show through his brusque strokes.

Thomson also extended the range of his palette at this time. In one of his sketches,
Larry Dickson's Shack,
a painting of one of the rangers' cabins, swabs of cerulean appear in the sky, with sapphire and pale-blue shadows stretching across the snow. His approach to the wilderness likewise altered. Lismer taught him to turn his panel
90 degrees and paint the scene before him—as he himself was doing in sketches such as
Tom Thomson's Camp
—in a portrait rather than a landscape format. Thomson abandoned his earlier distant and murky panoramas in favour of close-ups of enclosed spaces, as though he was becoming ever more intimate with the landscape, observing it more minutely and painting it in more forceful detail.