Defiant Spirits (19 page)

This enthusiasm for pugilism did not translate into paintings, even though the young American artist George Bellows, himself a star athlete, had recently achieved success with action-packed fight scenes such as
Stag at Sharkey's
and
Both Members of This Club.
But if Bellows captured the brawny dynamism of the American character with his bloodstained boxers, for Thomson and his fellow painters the essence of Canada was to be found not in its people but in the landscape.

THE GREAT WAR brought another young Canadian painter back to Toronto, this time from New York. Frank Johnston was a burly twenty-seven-year-old painter and designer, the son of Irish immigrants.
*
He and Thomson had known each other since 1909, when both began working at Grip Limited. Three years later, as Thomson was discovering artistic inspiration in the Ontario backcountry, Johnston enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

The Pennsylvania Academy was one of the finest and most famous art schools in America. Five members of the most vital and original art movement in America—the group of urban realists known as The Eight—had recently been students there. Johnston studied under the American Impressionists Philip Leslie Hale and Daniel Garber and then worked briefly in New York as a graphic designer at Carlton Studios. In New York he continued his studies under Robert Henri, leader of The Eight. Although Henri was famous for encouraging his students—his “real men”—to frequent New York's bars and billiard halls in search of low-life subjects, Johnston preferred landscapes. Returning to Toronto in 1915 he began work at Rous and Mann with Frank Carmichael and Fred Varley.

Johnston took a studio above the Arts and Letters Club rather than renting space in the Studio Building. He was a frequent enough visitor to Severn Street, however, for Arthur Lismer to commemorate him in a series of cartoons called “Frank Johnston in T.T.'s Shack.” He was good friends with Heming as well as with Harris and MacDonald, and by 1915 he may well have taken over from Jackson in guiding Thomson's artistic education. He was arguably the most impressively trained of all the painters around the Studio Building. His teachers in Philadelphia were in the front rank of American artists, with Garber a leading figure among the Pennsylvania Impressionists, a group of artists acclaimed by one American critic as “our first truly national expression.”
18
A revered teacher and the most accomplished technician of the New Hope colony of painters, Garber specialized in poetic and meticulously painted scenes of the Delaware River and the tranquil countryside surrounding New Hope.

An even more intriguing teacher was Philip Leslie Hale. Born in Boston in 1865, Hale was one of the first Americans to experiment with Impressionism, working at Giverny in the late 1880s and early 1890s. He ultimately developed a style in which he adapted some of the most progressive aspects of French art of the 1890s to produce Pointillist-inspired landscapes of disintegrating forms and shimmering light. A sharp-eyed commentator on artistic trends, he was familiar to some Canadians thanks to a series of articles he wrote in the early 1890s on Symbolism and Neo-Impressionism for the
Montreal-based journal
Arcadia.
He was especially interested in the Nabis, the school of French painters such as Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis who wished their art, with its bright colours and flat patterns, to be decorative rather than descriptive. Johnston might have known one of Hale's most adventurous works, the Nabi-influenced
Landscape,
painted in the early 1890s and still in the artist's studio in 1915. The simple design of the landscape—a screen of mauve tree trunks against horizontal bands of luminous yellow ground—veered tantalizingly towards abstraction.

Johnston's years in Philadelphia and New York therefore made him
au courant
with Neo-Impressionist styles of painting such as Pointillism and their American interpreters like Hale. If Thomson found Seurat and Pointillism as appealing as Jackson claimed, he must have been intrigued by Johnston's explanations. His old friend, thanks to his studies at the Pennsylvania Academy, had at least as firm a theoretical grip on these techniques as Jackson.

AROUND THE TIME of Johnston's return to Toronto, Thomson was at work on a painting called
Northern River
. The title seems to allude to Wilfred Campbell's poem “A Northern River,” which describes the “shining music” of a river winding through the “dusk and dim” of a forest. Showing the silver arc of a river behind the bristling silhouettes of bare spruce trees, Thomson's painting featured clarified forms, flat planes of colour and an arrangement to which he would return many times in the years to come. Using the motif of an interrupted vision, he showed a screen of vertical trees parting like a veil or stage curtain to allow a revelatory glimpse of the reflective surface of a body of water and, beyond, the indistinct features of a distant shore. The impression is one not only of a communion with nature but also of a mystery on the brink of disclosure—or what Campbell's poem calls “the under-dreams that throng and bless, / The unspoken, swift imaginings.”

Northern River
was partly the product of Thomson's observation of the natural world. The inspiration was probably the Oxtongue River, the setting for Jackson's
The Red Maple.
Yet this haunting image of the Canadian northlands owed much to the sinuous lines of Art Nouveau and the reduced forms and bright colours of Post-Impressionism. It owed a debt, in particular, to a colour illustration published two years earlier in
The Studio.
This English journal, first published in 1893, appears to have been read avidly by the artists in the Studio Building, not least because of its regular mentions of their efforts. Thomson clearly regarded the journal as a source of artistic inspiration. He once adapted a Harry van der Weyden landscape reproduced in a 1904 issue, turning it into a work called
Northern Shore.
19

A 1913 article in
The Studio
entitled “Modern Tapestry-Work in Sweden” reproduced images of a number of Swedish tapestry designs, among them one by Gustaf Fjaestad, whose paintings at the Albright Art Gallery had so impressed MacDonald and Harris. Thomson seems to have been taken with a tapestry called
Woodland Scene,
designed by Henrik Krogh and reproduced by the journal in full colour.
20
Owned by the Swedish sawmill owner Hjalmar Wijk, it was a stylized representation of a spruce wood, with ruler-straight ranks of vertical trunks festooned with chartreuse and yellow foliage. Thomson transformed this decorative design of a dense northern wood into his own pattern of branches drooping in elegant tracery across an enfilade of tree trunks. The S-shaped tree leaning diagonally through the foreground—what was to become a classic Thomson motif—clearly reflects the curvilinear motifs of Art Nouveau as well as the arabesques of the Fauves.

The March 1913 issue of
The Studio
was therefore among the paddles and axe-handles in Thomson's shack. This same issue included articles on the art of the Italian landscapist Paolo Sala, the Camille Corot paintings in the recently auctioned collection of Henri Rouart, and an exhibition in Berlin devoted to the work of the Berlin Secessionist Lovis Corinth. There were also reviews and reports of various other art shows in Vienna, Budapest, London, Moscow, Munich, Copenhagen and Philadelphia.

The fact that Thomson was leafing through the pages of such a journal—and discussing topics such as Neo-Impressionism with Jackson and then Frank Johnston—should complicate his image as a “wild man” of the bush closed off from the world and ignorant of the ways of modern art. Lismer was grossly underrating him when, in the interests of turning him into the brute poet of Canadian art, he claimed that “outside of fishing and his canoe he had few other interests.”
21
The claim was patently false: Thomson certainly had interests outside of fishing and his canoe—art and music being two of them. Conversation at Grip and in the Studio Building did not focus exclusively on canoes and the north country. Will Broadhead, who collected books and considered himself “highly intellectual,” described the environment at Grip as “refined and cultured.”
22
Among this “bunch of gentlemen” (as Broadhead called them) was Stanley Kemp, the man with whom Thomson discussed
The Great Illusion.
Before starting work at Grip, Kemp had studied for the Anglican ministry at Wycliffe College and in 1908 completed an
MA
thesis at the University of Toronto entitled “The Life of Palladio and His Place in the Evolution of Architecture.” He was, among other things, the future father-in-law of Northrop Frye.
23

Thomson's discussions with Kemp indicate the wide range of his reading. Raised among shelves of books (works of literature were as basic to his mother's house “as curtains on her windows or carpet on her floors”),
24
Thomson continued to read through adulthood. Walton's
Compleat Angler
and works by Wilfred Campbell were favourites. He also kept abreast of the more progressive trends in literature. One of the authors he appears to have studied was Maurice Maeterlinck, the Symbolist dramatist and poet celebrated as the “Belgian Shakespeare.” He might have seen Roy Mitchell's direction of Maeterlinck's 1891 play
Interior
at the Arts and Letters Club in 1911, the year Maeterlinck won the Nobel Prize in Literature. By then he was already familiar with Maeterlinck. About the time he started work at Grip Limited he illustrated a line from Maeterlinck's
Wisdom and Destiny,
which had been translated into English in 1899: “It is well to have visions of a better life than that of every day, but it is the life of every day from which elements of a better life must come.”

Thomson's interest in Maeterlinck shows his awareness of wider cultural trends both in Canada and abroad. The Belgian Symbolist's mysticism was hugely influential in Canada at the turn of the twentieth century. His Canadian translator Richard Hovey, a friend and champion of the Confederation poets, believed Maeterlinck's work marked the passing of realism in favour of “esoteric meaning” and “the adumbration of greater things.” Duncan Campbell Scott shared this enthusiasm, calling Maeterlinck's work revelatory “for the mystical side of life
. . .
He is endeavouring to awaken the wonder-element in a modern way, constantly expressing the almost unknowable things which we all feel. His is the work of the modern Mystic.”
25

Maeterlinck's mysticism inspired, besides Scott, the painter Wassily Kandinsky: for the Russian he was an “artist of the soul” and “one of the first prophets” whose work heralded the end of the “nightmare of materialism” and the “soulless life of the present.”
26
One of Lismer's favourite writers, Edward Carpenter (another scourge of soulless materialism), had friends in common with Maeterlinck and would later quote his work.
27
It is not difficult to imagine Lismer and Thomson discussing mysticism and Symbolist art and poetry as they sat together in the shack. But this was not the Thomson—erudite, philosophical,
au fait
with the latest European thought—that Lismer and other members of the group wished to advertise to posterity.

THOMSON SENT
Northern River
and two Georgian Bay scenes to the 1915
osa
exhibition that opened on March 13. Despite the war, there was no shortage of works for the public to see, with 138 paintings on display in the exhibition rooms of the Public Reference Library. A notable feature of the show was the strong presence of the painters from the Studio Building. Arthur Lismer had recently begun using one of the ateliers, and so seven painters listing their address in the catalogue as the Studio Building—Beatty, Carmichael, Harris, Jackson, Lismer, MacDonald and Thomson—accounted for twenty-three paintings, or almost one in five of the works in the entire exhibition.

They also accounted for many of the highest asking prices. A striking aspect of the Studio Building contributions was their eye-popping price tags. Established artists such as F.M. Bell-Smith and C.W. Jefferys priced their major works in the exhibition at $400, while Clarence Gagnon, subject of a successful solo show in Paris in 1913, had work on offer for $250. The artists from the Studio Building demanded steeper tariffs: Beatty, Thomson and Lismer all were asking $500 for various of their works. The $600 price tag on MacDonald's
Canada's Morning
made it the second-dearest work in the exhibition; only George A. Reid, at $700 for
An Idyll,
was marked higher.
28

Prices aside, the other notable aspect of their contribution was the emphasis on winter scenes. Carmichael showed
Winter Evening,
Harris
Snow Pattern,
Jackson
Winter Afternoon
and MacDonald
Snow-Bound.
This much snow was a rarity in a Toronto art exhibition. Although Quebec painters such as Gagnon, Cullen and Suzor-Coté had tackled snow and ice before, landscapists in English Canada generally steered clear. They recognized, as one critic observed, that to paint a Canadian landscape under snow was “unpatriotic, untactful, and unwise.” Canada's cold climate and deep snow had been a sore point at least since Voltaire mocked the country as “a few acres of snow.” As Jefferys put it, “Our climate, winter especially, was regarded as a sort of family skeleton.”
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Although winter scenes left most English Canadians cold, they were enjoying a remarkable vogue elsewhere. The Studio Building painters would certainly have known of the great success enjoyed by Gagnon with his solo exhibition,
Winter Landscapes in the Laurentians,
staged at Adrien M. Reitlinger's prestigious Paris gallery at the end of 1913. A former student, like Jackson, of both Brymner and then Jean-Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian, Gagnon had displayed seventy-five paintings, the bulk of them winter scenes of the Baie-Saint-Paul region of Quebec. Unanimously glowing reviews in the French press led to an invitation to show further work at Reitlinger's 1914 exhibition
Painters of Snow
and a recognition, in France and Canada both, of his talents as a brilliant interpreter of the snowy terroir of Charlevoix country.