Defiant Spirits (17 page)

There is probably a good reason why Thomson's solo voyage has become legendary. Besides placing him alongside near-mythical vagabonds of the Canadian wilderness such as voyageurs and coureurs de bois, it gives a uniquely Canadian twist to the age-old myth of the solitary quester, which has been called “the single most pervasive literary plot in western literature.”
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In this myth, the hero, in a time of need, goes forth from his homeland and into an underworld of dangerous wonders. Here he contends against mighty forces and undergoes a series of trials before returning home, armed with special powers that give vitality to his community. Anthropologists and literary historians find this motif everywhere, from Homer and the Bible, to Grail legends and the Native American
hanblecheya,
or vision quest. The myth was particularly cherished during the Age of Discovery.
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As such, it bore a special relevance to Canada, with its history of European seamen-adventurers such as Champlain or Martin Frobisher navigating into an underworld of treacherous northern straits in hopes of returning home laden with fabulous riches.

In the tale of Tom Thomson as the epic quest–hero, the setting (the Shield country) and means of transport (the canoe) set him alongside these other heroes of the Canadian national epic. His victory in the green deeps of the wilderness over what Grey Owl called the “brooding relentless evil spirit of the Northland” grants him insights into this harsh geography, as well as special artistic powers with which to interpret it for his countrymen.
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A.Y. JACKSON WAS undertaking adventures of his own at this time, as he spent the summer of 1914 with Bill Beatty in the Rocky Mountains. The pair had received a commission to accompany work crews of the Canadian Northern Railway as they laid steel through the Yellowhead Pass. They therefore became the latest in a long line of landscapists, beginning with John A. Fraser, F.M. Bell-Smith and Lucius O'Brien a quarter century earlier, who journeyed west on passes issued by railway companies anxious to promote the Rockies as a tourist destination.

More accustomed to the beaches of Picardy than the Canadian wilderness, Jackson enjoyed the rigours of his mountain adventure. He described in a letter to Dr. MacCallum the hazards and exertions of painting in the Rockies: “We took too many chances, sliding down snow slopes with only a stick for a brake, climbing over glaciers without ropes, crossing rivers too swift to wade by felling trees across them.”
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This rough-and-ready approach to the task of landscape painting anticipated a friend's comment, made years later, that Jackson's painting expeditions were forays into a world of “nature-as-enemy as known to the explorer
. . .
an affair of Jackson-against-nature and vice-versa.”
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Even so, Jackson was hardly an explorer of the calibre of some of his fellow painters. His frolics in the
cnr
camps in the Rockies pale beside the feats of an American contemporary, the painter Belmore Browne, another product of the Académie Julian. Between 1906 and 1912, Browne made three attempts on the summit of Mount McKinley in Alaska, established the altitude record for North America and made the first ascent of Mount Olympus.

Whereas Browne's adventures led to finely observed paintings of wildlife and glacial peaks, Jackson proved unable to translate his enthusiasm for the Rockies into successful canvases. The brief to create beautiful works that might attract tourists and immigrants to the Rockies was not one for which the painter of
Terre sauvage
was ideally suited. He came to the conclusion that “mountains were not in my line” and consigned most of his sketches to the flames.
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Making matters worse, he did not find Beatty a stimulating companion. “He can look after the business end of a trip and is a good man to travel with in that respect,” he confided to MacDonald, “but he isn't an artistic inspiration. I don't know what he thinks of me, and care less.”
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Beatty's admiration for William-Adolphe Bouguereau—the French academic painter of glossily erotic nymphs and shepherdesses—disgusted Jackson.
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Nor could Beatty keep up with Jackson, who was thirteen years younger. The man whose feats once astonished colleagues at the Lombard Street Firehall was now forty-five and not the physical specimen he used to be. “We'd start to climb a mountain, but about halfway up Old Bill would have to lie down panting, so I'd go on alone.”
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It was to Algonquin Park and Tom Thomson that Jackson now looked for inspiration and companionship. As soon as he returned to Ontario he made his way to Canoe Lake.

THOMSON HAD ULTIMATELY reached Lake Nipissing after his solo voyage and, after navigating its southern shore, turned into the South River and paddled another eighty kilometres south, reaching Canoe Lake in the middle of September. He and Jackson immersed themselves in the grim beauty of the Algonquin wilderness. Taking along their sketching equipment, they canoed and camped at Smoke Lake and then on its southern neighbour, Ragged Lake.

The experiences of paddling a canoe and sleeping in a tent were as novel for Jackson as for Lismer on these same waters four months earlier, and he took to it with a similar delight. Like Lismer, he was impressed by Thomson's abilities in the canoe. A friend at Grip Limited described Thomson as “tall and big and strong,”
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and Jackson was struck by the physical strength that allowed him to row for an entire day without fatigue while Jackson—a bantamweight a full six inches shorter—idled in the bow and kept a lookout for likely subjects. Besides berries and fish, Thomson was fuelled by a carbohydrate-rich diet of bannock, flapjacks and doughnuts.
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Jackson was equally impressed by his fellow traveller's paintings. Not having seen the sketches Thomson produced in Algonquin Park and Georgian Bay, he was struck by the vibrancy of his friend's new style. If Thomson had suffered an artistic block in Georgian Bay, his creative energies were released in Jackson's company in Algonquin Park. His bold new style was achieved in part by creating furrows and other textures on his panels by dragging a dry brush or even the point of the wooden handle through his paint to produce works that were, Jackson informed Dr. MacCallum in a letter, “very different from last year's stuff.”
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To MacDonald he reported, “Tom is doing some exciting stuff. He keeps one up to time. Very often I have to figure out if I am leading or following. He plasters on the paint and gets fine quality.”
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He even joked to Dr. MacCallum that Thomson was developing “decided cubistical tendencies and I may have to use a restraining influence on him.”
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This was to lay it on rather thick, but in Thomson's latest sketches, such as the gloriously ablaze
Twisted Maple
and
Soft Maple in Autumn,
the forms in the Algonquin landscape dissipated into bright colours—deep reds, primrose yellows, burnt oranges—that were a far cry from his low-keyed works from the autumn of 1912. He was also, as Jackson noted, adding his pigment in a lavish impasto whose texture revealed the deftly confident sweep of his brush.

These works showed Thomson's enthusiasm for capturing raw visual effects with a startlingly sensuous technique—the kind of “fearless brushing” and “crude colour” Margaret Fairbairn had already noted in the works of painters of “Young Canada” such as Harris and MacDonald. Even so, sketching did not always go well. Thomson still became frustrated and discouraged, and on one occasion, enraged at a poor day's work, he hurled his box-easel into the bushes and vowed never to paint again. The next morning, following a change of heart, he and Jackson crawled through the brush in search of it. Once found, the box needed to be taken to one of the rangers for repair.
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Despite Thomson's example and the rude beauty of the surroundings, Jackson still found himself unable to paint anything worthwhile. “I am not in the mood to produce at all,” he wrote to J.E.H. MacDonald. The problem was partly that the failure of his Rocky Mountain paintings prevented him from working spontaneously. His problems were also related to the grim shadow that had fallen across Europe in the summer of 1914. He had learned of the outbreak of war while in the Rockies and since then had painted little of worth. “I think if the Germans got a good walloping I might brace up,” he told MacDonald.
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THAT THE WAR in Europe should have been on Jackson's mind was hardly surprising. For the previous few weeks the Toronto newspapers were emblazoned with headlines about the “Battle of Belgium.” It was clear that Canada, unable because of her constitutional position either to declare war or to conclude peace, would not escape the conflict. Three days before Britain declared war on Germany, the Duke of Connaught, the governor general, cabled the British secretary of state for the colonies to affirm that “the Canadian people will be united in a common resolve to put forth every effort and to make every sacrifice necessary to ensure the integrity and maintain the honour of the Empire.”
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Torontonians eagerly affirmed the statement, with news of Britain's declaration of war against Germany greeted by crowds pouring into the streets to sing “Rule Britannia.”

By the end of August, optimism that the war would be over by Christmas—as so many statesmen initially predicted—was fading rapidly. The
Toronto Daily Star
began printing long lists of British casualties (1,600 died at the Battle of Mons on August 22) as well as hair-raising tales of German atrocities in Belgium. On August 25 one of its reports quoted Lord Kitchener's ominous forecast that the “disastrous war” might well endure for as long as three years.
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In Ottawa, two orders-in-council were made to raise a Canadian fighting force for service overseas. No shortage of volunteers came forward. In Toronto, crowds besieged the city's armouries, including many ex-servicemen hoping to rejoin their old regiments.
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By the beginning of September, two Toronto regiments alone, the 48th Highlanders and the Queen's Own Rifles, had shipped more than 2,000 men east to the training camp at Valcartier near Quebec City. In the first week of October, 33,000 Canadian troops—many of them raw recruits with only the most basic training—departed for Europe.

There was as yet no special urgency among the recruiters. So numerous were the volunteers that married men were turned away, along with those who (as the
Toronto Daily Star
reported) had “a foot not properly arched.”
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For this reason, it was not unusual that in the first week of October two married men with jobs and children, Arthur Lismer and Fred Varley, joined Jackson and Thomson in Algonquin Park. They brought with them their wives and another Toronto painter, Beatrice Hagarty Robertson, a former studiomate of MacDonald and Bill Beatty who had exhibited flower paintings at the
OSA
. Jackson, a veteran of the prolific art colony at Étaples, was impressed by their industry. “Art is raging round here now,” he wrote to MacDonald. “No less than five
OSA
exhibitors on the job.”
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Mowat Lodge quickly became an impromptu exhibition gallery in October 1914.
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The painters propped their works against the wall for appraisal, turning the premises into a Canadian version of the Buvette de la plage, the boarding house in Le Pouldu decorated by Gauguin and Paul Sérusier in 1899, or the Hôtel Baudy in Giverny, where the dining room was filled with paintings by the resident Impressionists. Mowat Lodge did not, however, turn into a mutual admiration society. Bill Beatty had boasted to a journalist of a “bond of sympathy” between the artists, making them “encourage one another” in their efforts.
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But with so many red-blooded men jockeying for position, rivalries and differences were bound to show (as Beatty himself had discovered with Jackson).

In Algonquin Park, it was Varley who frustrated the obstreperous Jackson. Varley had taken readily to life in Canada, and within days of arriving he wrote back to his wife: “I am already a Canadian.” He also wrote to his sister in England about how there was “a small party of us here, the young school, just 5 or 6 of us, and we are working to one big end.”
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But despite his friendship with Thomson and his passion for “this outdoor country,” he was not as convincing as some of the other artists in his commitment to what Harris called “distinctly Canadian work.” Working full-time as a designer at Rous and Mann, and with a wife and two young children to support, he had little time for the lengthy canoe expeditions undertaken by Thomson or the railway journeys of Jackson and Beatty. Nor had he, like the others in the “young school,” journeyed into the Ontario backcountry. Before his trip to Canoe Lake, his experience of rural Canada barely extended beyond the Toronto Islands. His real preference was for figure paintings and portraits rather than landscapes. His most ambitious work to date—painted in Sheffield early in 1912—had been a dramatic female nude entitled
Eden.

For Jackson, who wished painters of the “Canadian School” to prospect the farthest-flung regions of the Dominion, Varley's metropolitanism and his interest in the human figure were hindrances. The two men had little in common beyond their friendship with Thomson, and Jackson was contemptuous of Varley's lack of experience in the bush. “Varley is most excited over the sketches which are the least suggestive of the north country, and as for my stuff,” he pouted to MacDonald, “he doesn't like it at all.”
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Jackson even sniffed at Varley's decision to spend his nights with Maud in the comfort of Mowat Lodge rather than under the stars. “Varley would be a hot musher in a few weeks,” he complained to Dr. MacCallum, “if he would live outside.”
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