Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  He also fell in love in Seattle.

  It would be more unusual if he had not fallen for someone in those years in which he was passing through his mid-twenties. Brother George later claimed that Tom became smitten with a Seattle woman who never appeared quite as smitten in return, but it is unlikely that Tom would have confided much in his stern and serious older brother. All the same, according to George, a shy Tom had edged up to a marriage proposal only to have the object of his affections laugh at the suggestion, causing the young man to flee in humiliation in 1905, never to return to the West Coast.

  The facts were later fleshed out to some extent by Canadian art historian Joan Murray, who identified the woman as Alice Elinor Lambert. Murray thought that Lambert was about fifteen years old at the time and considered the relationship harmless, mere puppy love. But Lambert would have been nineteen when Tom supposedly fled Seattle, so the affair might have been much deeper than Murray has conjectured.

  Alice was seven years younger than Tom, a common enough gap in those days between a man and woman who were romantically involved. She’d been sent by her missionary parents to board with the Shaws, where Tom was already rooming. Alice went on to become a published author, and there may be much to be read into her 1934 novel, Women Are Like That. The main character is Miss Juliet Delaney, and at one point Juliet is reminded of the one true love of her life.

  “For one disturbing year,” Lambert writes of her heroine, “she had been desperately in love with a tall, dark boy named Tom, a commercial artist, who in the summer used to take her on streetcar rides to Alki Point and in the wintertime to the dusty dimness of the public library, where he would pore over prints and reproductions of the masters. When finally, darkly morose and determined to succeed, Tom had gone east, the girl, unversed as she was in the art of pursuit and capture, had let him go, powerless to hold him back … Tom had been tall and slender, with thin, nervous hands and flashing eyes. Instinctively, since his death, Juliet had avoided men of similar build and appearance.”

  If this is an accurate reflection of whatever it was that Tom and Alice had felt for each other, it contradicts the family story. This “Tom” seems driven and depressed over his art and willing to sacrifice romance for a chance to prove himself back east. Alice might also have been the first woman hurt by his reluctance to settle down, the wanderlust and fierce independence that would mark his life and might even have contributed to his death.

  Alice lived to the age of ninety-five before passing away in Marysville, Washington, in 1981. She had led a convoluted life, marrying a man with whom she had two daughters, then leaving him and moving across the country, briefly writing a newspaper advice column and reconnecting with her husband before separating again and returning to Seattle, where, so long ago, she had met the real “Tom.” In her later years, Lambert wrote to Joan Murray describing the end of the romance, from her point of view, and suggesting that perhaps Thomson considered her too young.

  “Tom packed up,” Alice wrote, “and … went east to save me. I used to long to write him, or find him, but a miserable experience prevented me—I married a man with whom I had no communication whatsoever. But I never put Tom out of my heart. We were two star-crossed young and innocent people who never should have parted.”

  In Toronto Tom took a room on Elm Street and threw himself into what he then thought would be his life career: commercial art. In June he joined Legg Brothers Photoengraving Company as a senior artist and engraver at the satisfactory salary of eleven dollars per week. He signed up for night classes at the School of Art and Design, where he studied drawing, and also took free lessons from William Cruikshank, an old-style artist who served as mentor to several young painters in the city. It was during this time that Thomson painted Team of Horses, but the less said of it the better.

  By 1908 Thomson was working at Grip Ltd., the Toronto commercial art firm that would become the artistic percolator for Thomson and, in later years, the Group of Seven, who, curiously, eventually numbered ten. Original members J.E.H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley, Franz (“Frank”) Johnston and Franklin Carmichael all worked with Thomson at Grip. It was a time of great growth and vitality in Toronto, with much construction in the downtown core and the young city spreading quickly thanks to easy transportation provided by its streetcar lines. The young artists felt they were part of something new and important, socializing together at clubs and taverns and often spending weekends together painting in the nearby countryside. They fed off one another, encouraged one another and quietly competed with one another. In 1920, three years after Thomson’s death, MacDonald, Lismer, Varley and Carmichael were still linked artistically and socially and formed their legendary art group by adding Franz Johnston, Lawren Harris and A.Y. Jackson. When Johnston later resigned, A.J. Casson was added, and later, the group became more national when Montreal’s Edwin Holgate and Winnipeg’s L.L. Fitzgerald joined, not long before the group disbanded in 1933.

  The most influential force at Grip never did become a member of the Group of Seven. The director of the engraving division, Albert Henry Robson, called his department a “university” for graphic arts. He created such an atmosphere of creativity that when he moved on to another firm, Rous and Mann Ltd., in the fall of 1912, several Grip employees, including Thomson, soon followed. Robson hired creative men and gave them structure—formal dress, be at your desk for the full workday—but also allowed them to have fun and encouraged them to be competitive in their work and painting.

  Thomson was well liked by his colleagues but exhibited the contradictory personality traits that seem to have marked his entire life: considered shy and quiet but also one to play practical jokes on his friends from time to time—and a wit who entertained his fellow workers by mimicking managers and customers and whipping off comic caricatures in an instant.

  The young artist also had a life beyond the workplace. During this time he became fast friends with John McRuer, who was then studying medicine at the University of Toronto. McRuer eventually moved north to take up private practice in Huntsville, but in early 1909, when McRuer married Edythe Bullock, the Huntsville Forester reported that the “groom was assisted by Mr. Tom Thomson of Toronto.…”

  Tom was also a good friend of the McCarnen sisters, Elizabeth and Margaret. They had made their way to the city from the village of Phelpston, also near Georgian Bay, though closer to Collingwood than Owen Sound, and they at first kept house for a John Long, who lived on Jarvis Street. “Maggie” was ten years older than Tom and “Lizzie” six, and it seems Tom was somewhat infatuated with the younger sister. Maggie moved on to make a living as a seamstress (among other things, she made uniforms for the nurses at the nearby Wellesley Hospital), while Lizzie continued to find work as a domestic.

  The attraction may have been as much about Tom’s homesickness for his big family and the Georgian Bay area as about Lizzie’s personal charms. A hint of this is found in a letter his younger sister, Margaret, wrote after his death: “I often think now that he was many times lonely when all by himself and none of us did anything when he was away to cheer him up … His life meant so much to us here at home. He was alone and no one else was taking his affections and he always enjoyed his visits so much.”

  Tom obviously liked Lizzie well enough to give her a sketch; tellingly, it was of the countryside both had left for the city. Called Scene near Owen Sound, it hangs today in the Tom Thomson Memorial Gallery in Owen Sound. Lizzie’s heirs say that the relationship was platonic, which is the way Lizzie would have wanted it, and that she found him rather “unkempt,” though she clearly cared for the young artist. While Maggie later married John King, Lizzie never did marry. She and Tom lost touch sometime after 1907, when she returned to Phelpston to raise her two nieces, May and Rita McCarnen, following the death of her brother Bernard. According to family, she hung Tom’s sketch over the beds of the two girls she raised, and Tom continued to send postcards he’d drawn. Lizzie kept those cards with all her let
ters in a purple satin bag that was locked in a cupboard—but, unfortunately, no one knows what became of them following her death in 1957 at eighty-six.

  One Grip employee, S.H.F. Kemp, later recalled that Tom liked to paint all right but made “no noise” about his work: “He attached no particular value to it.” MacDonald, the senior designer, and the British-trained Lismer, Varley and Carmichael were all much more serious about landscape painting, but they were not particularly adventurous in their search for subject matter. They stuck to the valleys of the Don and Humber rivers that book-ended the growing city of Toronto and sometimes ventured out toward Lake Scugog to the northeast. There they found landscapes of soft English beauty—bucolic and pastoral—nothing like the brilliant fall colours, granite outcroppings and tangled bush where Thomson would find his calling.

  Thomson’s great discovery of “The North Country”—perceived as such by Torontonians of the time, as it was reachable only by settlement road, lake steamer and, in some instances, rail—began in May 1912. More of the area was actually in central Ontario than northern Ontario, covering Muskoka, Parry Sound, Georgian Bay, Algonquin Park and, to a lesser degree, the North Bay–Temagami area, known today as the “Near North.” The find occurred somewhat by happenstance: Tom and another Grip employee, Ben Jackson, wanted to go farther afield than the Lake Scugog area and chose to head for Algonquin Park, since it would fit in nicely with a visit to Tom’s doctor friend, John McRuer, and his wife, Edythe, in Huntsville.

  In May 1912 Thomson and Jackson stayed at the Dominion Hotel, down by the bridge over the Muskoka River, and did some sketching around the town. Jim McRuer, John’s younger brother, who would go on to serve as Ontario’s chief justice, was articling with a local lawyer at the time, and he visited Thomson at the hotel. He was shown the paintings and told to “Pick any two you like,” which the young law graduate did. (Many years later, those sketches would be donated to the McMichael gallery in Kleinburg, Ontario.)

  It wasn’t until the late 1960s that some undeveloped film from this trip was discovered by the Thomson family in Owen Sound. The film eventually made its way to the National Gallery in Ottawa, which developed the ancient negatives and declared the subjects “unidentified individuals.” But when Chief Justice James McRuer saw the photos in 1970, he recognized his late brother, who had died of tuberculosis a few months after Tom, in the fall of 1917. He said the photos had been taken during a day trip that spring of 1912. They’d gone by train to Scotia Junction, twenty-five kilometres north of Huntsville, where they’d picnicked and then wandered about the tiny village and surrounding countryside while Tom took photographs.

  The parties split at Scotia Junction, the McRuers taking the train back to Huntsville, while Thomson and Jackson transferred to the line heading east into Algonquin Park. They would have stopped for water at the Brule depot, where my grandparents were then living, and disembarked at the Canoe Lake station. Ranger Mark Robinson, who met most trains at Canoe Lake, wrote in his daily journal for May 18, 1912, “Met MacLaren Party and T. Thompson Party at evening train.” Thomson and Jackson camped and paddled about the various lakes—Canoe, Tea, Smoke, Ragged—and explored the Oxtongue River east from Tea Lake.

  Tom carried new paints and brushes on the excursion but did more fishing than sketching. Ben Jackson’s most vivid memories of the trip were Tom’s ability to cook over an open fire and how he made fresh biscuits to go with their feeds of trout. When it rained, Jackson said, Tom was content to stay in camp, smoke his pipe and read Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler.

  “Tom,” Jackson wrote in a 1930s letter, “was never understood by lots of people, was very quiet, modest & a friend of mine spoke of him as a gentle soul.” In Jackson’s opinion, Tom “cared nothing for social life”—again the contradictory readings of Tom’s complex personality—and was happiest with his pipe, his fishing pole or his sketching. “If a party or the boys got a little loud or rough,” Jackson added, “Tom would get his sketching kit & wander off alone, at times he liked to be that way, wanted to be by himself [and] commune with nature.”

  Later that same year, Thomson arranged for a second break from work and headed off with another Grip employee, William Broadhead, for the North Country beyond Algonquin. For all of August and much of September 1912, they travelled by canoe, beginning at Biscotasing, near Sudbury, then paddling up the Spanish River and working their way through a series of lakes and portages. They eventually reached the Mississagi Forest Reserve and the Aubinadong River. If Jackson found Thomson quiet, a bit of a loner and with no liking for the social life, Broadhead seems to have found him gregarious and open. They are said to have met a summer fire ranger named Archie Belaney on the way, never for a moment imagining that the tall man with the British accent would one day transform himself into Grey Owl, the most famous “Indian” Europe would ever know. They amused themselves with stories of other camping parties they encountered—particularly a group of Brits who were headed into the wilds with vast supplies that included carpet slippers and table napkins—and began to think of themselves as accomplished outdoorsmen.

  But they were still novice canoeists. They dumped their cedar-strip canoe on Green Lake, blaming a sudden squall that caught them off guard and swamped them, and dumped it again trying to shoot some small rapids on the Aubinadong. Thomson was despondent because most of the photos he’d taken during his two trips north went overboard and were lost in the waters.

  The two men started back for Toronto on the steamer Midland, which they caught at Bruce Mines, and disembarked at Owen Sound to visit Thomson’s family. In a later reminiscence, Thomson’s sister Louise Henry said that the two young men seemed quite full of themselves after their trip. “My husband asked Tom if he was not afraid to be so much alone in the woods with so many wild animals roaming about,” Louise wrote in a letter dated March 11, 1931. “ ‘Why,’ he said ‘the animals are our friends. I’ve picked raspberries on one side of a log, while a big black bear picked berries on the other side.’ He also told him of one time he was tramping through the woods when he heard some animal coming towards him through the undergrowth and to his surprise it was a large timber wolf, one of the largest he had ever seen, its head, neck and breast were jet black and the body the usual grey color. He said it was the most beautiful animal he had ever seen. The wolf came so close to him he could almost have touched him with his hand.…”

  “Local Man’s Experiences in Northern Wilds,” a long feature that appeared on the second page of the Owen Sound Sun on September 27th, described Thomson and Broadhead as “bronzed and weather beaten from exposure …” and reported, “The young artists think it is a grand country, and are only waiting until next year when the call of the wild will take them back.…”

  Once he and Broadhead returned to Toronto, Thomson wrote his friend John McRuer, apologizing for not calling in at Huntsville as planned on their way back to Toronto. His spirits were high, and he spoke, in the language of the day, of having had “a peach of a time.”

  Thomson had caught the bug of the North. He soon showed up at work carrying a new paddle, which he immediately tested out by filling one of the photoengraver tanks with water, then placing the tank beside his chair so he could sit down and practise paddling.

  “At each stroke he gave a real canoeman’s twist,” recalled J.E.H. MacDonald, “and his eye had a quiet gleam, as if he saw the hills and shores of Canoe Lake.”

  TWO WINNIE

  The two rolls of film rescued from the dumping on the Aubinadong River in 1912 were ignored for fifty-five years. The negatives were kept by the Thomson family as part of a general collection of Tom’s belongings until 1967, when Jessie Fisk, the painter’s niece, came across the negatives and donated them to the National Gallery in Ottawa. In 1970 the gallery put the developed photographs on display and reproduced them in a slim pamphlet with text written by the well-known Canadian art historian Dennis Reid.

  The black-and-white photographs were hardly art in themselve
s, but they did show what Jackson and Thomson had seen during their spring visit to Huntsville, Scotia Junction and Canoe Lake. In addition to some canoe shots, there were photographs of a red squirrel, brook trout and lake trout, smallmouth bass, a beaver pond and lodge, a ruffed grouse, a loon egg, a mill yard, a camp, several people (some of whom are tagged “An unidentified man”) and the Canoe Lake cemetery, where, five years on, Thomson himself would end up being buried.

  Thomson was obviously taken, as all who visit the little graveyard are to this day, by the two lonely markers. One is over the remains of an eight-year-old boy who died of diphtheria in 1915 and whose family was refused permission to transport the body from the park for fear of spreading the disease. Thomson took a photo of the simple headstone, which reads:

  ALEXANDER HAYHURST

  1907–1915

  OUR FATHER WHICH

  ART IN HEAVEN

  He also photographed the other marker, which stood over the grave of an employee of the Gilmour Lumber Company, which had operated, and ultimately failed, on Canoe Lake toward the end of the nineteenth century. Ja’s Watson died, perhaps as a result of a mill accident, at age twenty-one on May 25, 1897. Thomson’s photo is clear enough that most of the poem chiselled onto Watson’s rock can be read:

  Remember Comrades (when passing by)

  As you are now so once was I

  As I am now so you shall be

  Prepare thyself to follow me.

  There were also the photos taken during the trek to Scotia Junction with the McRuers. The village is identifiable, as is John McRuer. And there are two photos of a tall, dark, attractive woman in a white dress that shows off her slim waist and firm, squared shoulders. Her dark hair is swept back in a slightly boyish, carefree way. She’s holding a catch of smallmouth bass in her right hand, a fishing pole in her left. Based on information from Jessie Fisk, the numbered photos were labelled as “38. Miss Winnifred Trainor, I” and “39. Miss Winnifred Trainer, II.”