Defiant Spirits (45 page)

Coming to power in 1921, King could not help noticing that Ahrens was still unrepresented in the national collection. According to Ahrens's second wife, Madonna, Sir Edmund Walker felt a “bitter enmity” towards the painter, vowing never to allow any of his work through the doors of the National Gallery—possibly as revenge for Ahrens's 1916 attack on MacDonald and Thomson.
17
Despairing of his prospects, Ahrens had even left Toronto a year earlier to live and work at the art colonies in Woodstock, New York, and then on the Massachusetts coast at Rockport.

King despised both Walker (“a very vain man, full of himself & what he has done”) and Brown (“a conceited ass, a bit of a fool as well”).
18
Both remained in their positions, but within a month of King's election three new trustees—Auguste Richard, Newton MacTavish and Warren Y. Soper—were appointed to the board of trustees of the National Gallery. MacTavish, the editor of
Canadian Magazine,
was a former member of the Canadian Art Club and a personal friend of King. Soper was an even closer and more long-standing friend. Founder of the Ottawa Electric Railway Company, he lived in a Rockcliffe Park mansion so grand it would in due course become the residence of the American ambassador. Among his expensive art collection were a number of paintings by Ahrens.

When, therefore, King wrote a familiar litany in his diary in October 1922—“We must follow a plan of encouraging Canadian art”—he was not referring to the “futurist impressionist stuff” produced by the Group of Seven. That same month he personally intervened to force the board of trustees to purchase an Ahrens. “If Sir Edmund Walker doesn't fall in line,” he wrote menacingly in his diary, “we will ask his resignation as chairman of the Art Advisory Committee.”
19
Walker duly fell in line, and a few weeks later the Gallery took shipment of a woodland scene called
The Road.
The painting cost $2,500, more than double the price ever paid for work by a member of the Group of Seven. Sensing opportunity, Ahrens promptly upped stakes in Rockport and moved back to Toronto.

To King's political muscle was added Charlesworth's continued attacks in
Saturday Night.
In December 1922, eight months after his first swipe, Charlesworth again launched himself at the National Gallery. He reproached Brown for neglecting many “worthy” artists in favour of the “experimental” Group of Seven, producers of “depressing and disappointing” works of art. A few weeks later he accused the gallery's “apparent obsession in favour of one school of Canadian painting” of “destroying the individuality of young artists.”
21

Neither criticism was entirely just (Brown's task of assembling a representative national collection was surely an invidious one). Certainly the Gallery was heavily promoting the Group of Seven across the country and abroad as well as purchasing examples of their work, but it was not, despite its limited budget, neglecting other artists. Soon after reopening it staged an exhibition of the work of the Ottawa-based teacher and painter Peleg Franklin Brownell, and in 1922 works were purchased from established artists such as Suzor-Coté and Ernest Fosbery as well as the timid and reclusive Beaver Hall painter Emily Coonan, recipient of the first National Gallery Travel Grant. It bought the Confederation-era watercolours
Chaudière Falls, Lake Champlain
and
Mouth of the Kaministiquia
by Sir Daniel Wilson, the first president of the University of Toronto. Other landscapes were acquired from painters—Frederick S. Coburn, John Y. Johnstone—who worked in more traditional Tonalist styles that could not have alarmed even Mackenzie King.

Debate did not take a rational turn as the rebarbative Jackson entered the fray. Ignoring the physical travails and cross-country expeditions of his many predecessors, he justified the group's canvases on the basis, as usual, of the pioneer-style get-up-and-go that had supposedly gone into their production. “We have spent weeks in the bush, camping till the snow drove us out; lived in tents and shacks and trailed all over the north country to find out how to interpret our own country in terms of art.”
22
Charlesworth reasonably replied, “To hold that artists like the Homer Watson of his prime, Carl Ahrens, Archibald Browne and Suzor-Coté, who interpret with poetic truths the moods of the older and more pastoral sections of Canada, are less worthy and less national in spirit because they do not camp out in the late autumn and paint the wilds in a harsh, strident mood is to talk nonsense and very misleading nonsense at that.”
23

But for Jackson, as ever, latitude and Fahrenheit were the measures of quality and integrity in Canadian painting. And, as ever, his argument was a specious one. Sir Daniel Wilson's luminous water-colours might have looked anodyne fifty years after composition, but they were the products of long canoe trips through territories as yet unopened by the
CPR
or the
ACR
: well-appointed cabooses were not transport options when Wilson painted them in the 1860s.

THE STAKES IN this debate between the Group of Seven and their detractors were raised after plans were announced for a 1924 British Empire Exhibition in London. According to its promoters, the exhibition was intended to open new markets, foster trade and make “the different races of the British Empire better known to each other.”
24
A 216-acre site was purchased in the North London suburb of Wembley, and work began on palaces of engineering and industry. There was also to be a “Palace of Arts” where the participating dominions and dependencies would display their finest artistic wares. Canada would be allowed to show a total of three hundred paintings, pieces of sculpture and other artifacts.

The task of selecting Canadian works for foreign exhibition was usually, though not always, assumed by the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Founded in 1880 at the behest of the Marquess of Lorne, the
RCA
was meant to be the custodian of the fledgling nation's visual heritage. It held juried exhibitions and drawing classes, it offered prizes, and each newly elected academician was obliged to deposit a diploma work in the National Gallery. Although one president protested that “it is no part of my duties,” the
RCA
usually presided over the selection of works to represent Canada abroad.
25
It took charge of Canada's artistic offerings at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901 and at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. The Canadian government, however, appointed committees to oversee the Canadian representations at a number of other foreign exhibitions.

In 1923 Eric Brown seized the initiative on behalf of the National Gallery. He contacted the British authorities and asked for the gallery to be given responsibility for Canada's display at Wembley. The British and Canadian governments agreed, funds were set aside for the task, and Brown and his trustees set to work assembling a jury. Realizing they had been outmanoeuvred, the
RCA
fought back under its new president, the Montreal-based portrait painter George Horne Russell. It passed a motion claiming—not entirely truthfully—that for the previous forty years it alone had exercised the function of choosing paintings, while Horne Russell protested that “laymen” rather than professional artists were arrogating the
RCA
's powers and privileges.

Charlesworth predictably was aghast at these developments. He published an article in
Saturday Night
fretting that the National Gallery would make predominant “the younger and more freakish schools of landscape.” The walls of the Canadian display would be covered, he feared, with “crude cartoons of the Canadian wilds.”
26
One of his main objections to the Group of Seven was that they ignored the lyrical subjects traditionally favoured by Canadian landscapists: the misty cascades, the knotty oaks, the sentimental evocations of a vanished or vanishing rural world. Instead they chose to depict, in a hard-edged style, an uncongenial topography of beaver swamps, fire-ravaged hillsides, and icy lakes. Bell-Smith and O'Brien had painted the Rockies to promote them as a tourist destination, but the works of the Group of Seven would have, Charlesworth believed, quite a different effect. He complained that the freakish landscapes would be a “bad advertisement for this country” and that the Department of Immigration and Colonization should “intervene to prevent such a catastrophe.”

Charlesworth was deadly serious. Canada traditionally used world's fairs and other international expositions to lure immigrants into the country.
27
As John Sylvester MacKinnon, director of the Canadian Industrial Exhibits for the Wembley exhibition, declared, “We want to show the people of the world that Canada is a good place in which to live.”
28
Mackenzie King expressed hopes in the British press that Canada's display at Wembley would make clear to the world “something of the capacity of Canada, not only to furnish new avenues for profitable trade and investment, but also to provide homes for countless numbers from the Old World.”
29
(Jackson once joked that prospective settlers should be “confronted with a Group of Seven show as a means of weeding out the weaklings.”)
30

Brown and Walker were unrepentant. They hoped to stage a display that, liked or loathed by the British (and by potential immigrants), would at least reveal that Canadian art was—as they believed the Group of Seven's paintings to be—distinct from that of other lands. As Walker wrote in his diary, “I feel sure that whether our modernists are liked or not, the existence of a form of plastic art which is distinctly Canadian must be admitted.”
31

The composition of the jury should have reassured Charlesworth and Horne Russell. A number of younger artists were included: Lismer, Randolph Hewton and the American-born sculptor Florence Wyle. But the others, all five of them members of the
rca
, were drawn from among the most eminent figures in Canadian art. There was Horatio Walker (winner of numerous international medals), Clarence Gagnon, Franklin Brownell, Frederick Sproston Challener (credited in 1913 with having “perhaps the keenest sense of light and brilliancy of colour of any of the Canadian painters”),
32
and the portrait painter
E. Wyly Grier, president of the
osa
between 1908 and 1913. Although he painted in a conservative style, Grier was a friend of Brown, a fellow Christian Scientist who once called him the “wise head of the tribe.”
33
Horne Russell himself sulkily refused the offer of a seat on the jury.

As the jury set to work choosing the selection of paintings for Wembley, the members of the Group of Seven must have been apprehensive. They would be prominently featured in the display: there could be no doubt of that. But success at Wembley would be vital for the group. With no new group exhibitions planned for Toronto in either 1923 or 1924, the British Empire Exhibition offered one of the few stages—and a major one at that—on which they might prove themselves.

IN THE MIDST of these debates, the painter who already made his mark in London, however ephemerally, was suffering his habitual difficulties. Augustus Bridle wrote in his review of the 1922 Group of Seven that Varley seemed uninterested in most of the things seen in the north. But one year later, in the summer of 1923, Varley was forced into a sudden and intimate acquaintance with Shield country. Evicted from their Toronto house for missing mortgage payments, he and his family took refuge in a tent in the Kawartha Lakes. Their rescuer—the man who offered the tent—was E.J. Pratt, the endpapers for whose collection of poetry,
Newfoundland Verse,
Varley had illustrated several months earlier.

Varley's financial problems stemmed, according to Sir Edmund Walker, from the fact that he worked “fitfully instead of industriously.”
34
But Varley had been more industrious than fitful in 1922 and 1923. With portrait commissions few and far between, he had taught summer school for the
oca
and accepted numerous commercial commissions. He also turned his hand to book illustration for The Ryerson Press.

Varley's design work for The Ryerson Press brought him into contact with the kind of cultural nationalism prevailing in the Studio Building. Lorne Pierce, Ryerson's chief editor since 1920, was hoping to do in the realm of literature what the Group of Seven was attempting in the visual arts. An ordained Methodist minister from Ontario, he had taught summer school in Saskatchewan in 1909 and 1910. His experiences on the immigrant mosaic of the Prairies—so different, with its Mennonites, Doukhobors and black farm labourers, from the Anglo-Saxon Ontario of his youth—convinced him of the need for a distinctive Canadian literature to shape a national identity that might encompass and indoctrinate these hundreds of thousands of newcomers. A national literature could further serve, he believed, to heal the rift between English and French Canada. The introduction to his 1922 anthology
Our Canadian Literature
asserted (with sublime optimism) that English and French Canadians “speak two languages, yet we have but one passionate loyalty—Canada!”
35
Inspired by the nationalism of the Group of Seven, he turned, naturally enough, to the painters themselves to design and illustrate his books. With MacDonald busy working on McClelland & Stewart's list (Bliss Carman's
Later Poems
in 1921, Pauline Johnson's
Legends of Vancouver,
Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's
Fires of Driftwood
in 1922 and Rogers's
Stories of the Land of Evangeline
in 1923), Pierce enlisted the services of Varley.

Pratt's poetry captured what Augustus Bridle would have called the “essential virilities” of life in a vital and dangerous northern land by the sea. Like Lampman and Campbell, Pratt was haunted by the harshness and hostility of nature—the fateful animus he glimpsed in the sinking of the
Titanic
off Newfoundland in 1912 (the subject of one of his later poems) and the drowning of his friend and teacher George Blewett four months later at Go Home Bay. The first poem in
Newfoundland Verse,
“The Ice-Floes,” grimly imagined a real-life tragedy whose aftermath he witnessed in 1898, when
ss
Greenland
steamed into St. John's with its flag at half-mast, its decks stacked with the bodies of twenty-five dead seal hunters, and another twenty-three missing. His poem describes how a day of killing seals (“From the nose to the tail we ripped them, / And laid their quivering carcasses flat / On the ice; then with our knives we stripped them”) ended with a shrieking gale, gusts of snow, desperation, madness and, finally, mass death.