by Ross King
Lismer’s distaste for the mercenary acquisitiveness of Canadians was shared by others. Catharine Parr Traill’s decades-old plea to Canadians—“set not your heart too much on riches!” 6—seemed to have gone largely unheeded. Many believed the country’s enormous resources and fast-growing economy meant spiritual matters were being neglected in a Klondike-style rush for wealth and possessions. A Protestant minister lamented that people immigrated to Canada not for educational advantages or religious privileges but rather “to make money—and the material side of life is uppermost in their thoughts—wheat and lands, dollars and acres, the thirst to have, the rush to get, these are the things that are absorbing the lives of men to the exclusion of other and higher things.” 7
Lismer’s dismay at this materialism and his belief in “other and higher things” were shaped in a large part by his admiration for Edward Carpenter, the English mystic and social reformer whose book The Art of Creation accompanied him to Canada in 1911. Born in 1844, Carpenter was a Cambridge graduate, ordained Anglican priest, associate of William Morris (with whom he formed the Socialist League in 1884), and enthusiastic disciple of Walt Whitman. He had studied Eastern religions in India and Ceylon and since the early 1880s lived in the Derbyshire village of Millthorpe, ten kilometres south of Sheffield. Here he grew his own vegetables and manufactured sandals. He shocked Victorian society by living with his working-class male lover and wearing open-necked shirts.
Carpenter wrote numerous books, from works on homosexuality such as the pamphlet Homogenic Love and a collection of essays called The Intermediate Sex, to philosophical treatises steeped in Eastern mysticism. Of these latter, The Art of Creation, published in 1904, was typical. Carpenter married up-to-date science and psychology with what he called “the world-old wisdom of the Upanishads” to argue that the “materialistic view of the world”—the notion that the world around us is merely dead matter—was passing out of favour. For Carpenter, as for much Eastern philosophy, the physical world was instead to be understood as “the outcome and expression of the mental,” with “a vast unity underlying all.” Carpenter was influenced by Whitman’s famous line from Leaves of Grass (another book that found its way into Lismer’s luggage for his transatlantic voyage): “Objects gross and the unseen soul are one.” 8 It was the duty of the artist to explore this underlying connection between the mind of man and the “other world of the mountains and the trees and the mighty ocean and the sunset sky.” 9 He therefore advocated in one of his other books, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, a “return to nature . . . This is the way back to the lost Eden, or rather forward to the new Eden, of which the old was only a figure.” 10
Besides discussing these writings with other members of the Eclectics, Lismer used to attend Carpenter’s lectures on Sunday mornings at a Unitarian church in Sheffield. He was suitably impressed by the man known as the “Noble Savage.” “I would listen with my mouth open,” he later claimed.11 He may even have visited Millthorpe with his fellow Eclectics, because Carpenter kept an open house and regularly entertained visitors from far and wide. In any case, arriving in Canada and hearing Thomson describe the wonders of places such as the Mississagi Forest Reserve sparked in Lismer a desire to escape “civilization”—which Carpenter regarded as a disease through which humanity must pass—and see for himself the “other world” of nature.
THE OPPORTUNITY PRESENTED itself in September 1913, when Dr. MacCallum invited Lismer, his wife, Esther, and four-month-old daughter, Marjorie, to his cottage in Go Home Bay. Laden with sketching equipment and baby bottles, they were transported across open waters towards the island, over three kilometres from shore, in a small motor launch piloted by a “sinewy youth.” 12
The Lismers quickly experienced nature red in tooth and claw. A storm—appropriately for Lismer, a September gale—blew in across Georgian Bay, a body of water so vast that Champlain, arriving on its shores in search of the sea route to China, had called it La Mer douce (the Freshwater Sea). The journey became hazardous, the youth having to navigate the small craft through choppy waters past the island known as Giant’s Tomb, where a Huron legend held that Ki-chi-ki-wa-na, or Rockman, lay buried. Much larger vessels had come to grief in the area. Only two years earlier, the Thomas Cranage, a 305-foot freighter that was once the largest ship in the American fleet, went aground on Watcher Reef, northeast of Giant’s Tomb, breaking up and sinking in waters almost seventeen metres deep. Over the years, the number of wrecks, including those of the Imperial and the Lottie Wolf, helped earn Georgian Bay the nickname “Graveyard of the Great Lakes.”
Although Lismer probably knew little of these maritime disasters, as the gale mounted he might have reflected that death by water was something of an occupational hazard for a Canadian painter: less than a month earlier, Edmund Morris, one of Canada’s finest landscapists and a subtle and sympathetic painter of First Nations portraits, drowned in the St. Lawrence near Quebec City at the age of forty-one. Little more than a year earlier, in August 1912, Go Home Bay was itself the scene of tragedy as one of Canada’s most distinguished philosophers, thirty-eight-year-old George Blewett, Ryerson Professor of Moral Philosophy at Victoria University, drowned while swimming near Dr. MacCallum’s cottage. Their deaths, like Neil McKechnie’s, were poignant reminders of the dangers lurking in Canada’s lakes and waterways.
The party eventually found refuge on a small island where a Yorkshireman named Billy France lived. Following some hastily improvised sleeping arrangements, they made their way safely to Dr. MacCallum’s cottage on the following day. West Wind Island was in Monument Channel, northeast of Split Rock, views of which MacDonald had painted the previous summer. The house was fairly typical of the summer cottages that had been appearing on the shores of Georgian Bay islands for the previous few decades. Built on a rocky point, it was Y-shaped, with a wing of bedrooms facing the water and a high-ceilinged, wood-panelled living room with an open fire and a massive stone chimney breast; a wide veranda ran around the perimeter, and nearby a houseboat was moored in a sheltered cove.
Whereas Tom Thomson preferred a primitive sojourn in the woods that harked back to the experiences of the explorers and fur traders, Lismer’s first taste of the Canadian “wilderness” was much the same as that enjoyed by the cottagers who each summer packed their croquet mallets and water wings and descended by the hundreds on Muskoka and Georgian Bay. Living in well-appointed houses with verandas, balconies and even turrets, they often enjoyed much the same standard of comfort as they did at home: one Torontonian, William Elliott, president of the Mendelssohn Choir, had built himself a beautiful Arts and Crafts cottage on Lake Joseph, to which each summer he transported a cow from his Rosedale residence. Already popular with Americans, Ontario’s cottage country received international attention in the summer of 1913 owing to the presence on Lake Rosseau of a vacationing President Woodrow Wilson, elected only the previous March. The publicity surrounding his visit caused even more Americans to buy property in the area.13
Lismer was less experienced and, understandably therefore, less adventurous than Thomson when it came to paddling a canoe. Nonetheless, each morning he would set off from Dr. MacCallum’s wharf, pass the slash and sawdust heaps of the defunct lumber company town of Muskoka Mills, and enter the Musquash River, collecting milk and other supplies from a farm before paddling back to the island. The landscape through which he passed did not disappoint. The Wisconsin glacier had sculpted the area, exposing the bedrock and leaving only rocky outcrops and a thin soil in which only the hardiest vegetation could flourish. Also left behind was the archipelago known as the 30,000 Islands, a maze of inlets and islands so bewildering that even David Thompson got lost as he surveyed the area.
Lismer almost believed he had discovered the “new Eden” promised by Edward Carpenter: “Georgian Bay!” he would later write, “Thousands of islands, little and big, some of them mere rocks breaking the surface of the waters of the Bay—others great, high roc
ks tumbled in confused masses and crowned with leaning pines, turned away in ragged disarray from the west wind.” He called them the “happy isles, all different, but bound together in a common unity of form, colour, and design. It is a paradise for painters.” 14
Altogether Lismer spent several weeks in these “happy isles,” painting and exploring near the MacCallum cottage. Despite the fact that he had seen the controversial 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists—his interest possibly sparked by the fact that the curator Roger Fry was a protege of Edward Carpenter—his style was still fairly conventional. Regardless of how dramatic he found the scenery, he used an Impressionistic style to catch the effects of light dappled on the waters in Georgian Bay, as in a painting called Georgian Bay. Although beautiful and accomplished in its own way, it showed no attempt to explore the underlying connections between the mind of man and the “other world” of mountains and trees.
AT THE END of September, as Arthur Lismer and his family waited for transport to take them back to Penetanguishene, a motor launch appeared on the island’s dock. Out stepped A.Y. Jackson, ready to begin his own sojourn at the cottage.
Lismer and Jackson had met briefly several months earlier, in Toronto, after Jackson used the money Lawren Harris paid for The Edge of the Maple Wood to fund a trip to Ontario. Harris had been away at the time on yet another sketching expedition with MacDonald: first at Mattawa, the site of an old Hudson’s Bay Company trading post on the Ottawa River that closed only in 1908; and then at Témiscaming, fifty kilometres farther north on the Ottawa. Returning to Toronto and realizing he had missed Jackson, Harris sought him out in Berlin, where Jackson had gone in June to visit his two paternal aunts.
The fateful meeting between Harris and Jackson appears to have taken place at Geneva Lodge, the antique-crammed, servant-filled home of A.Y.’s aunt Geneva Jackson. She was a grand old lady whose father, Henry F.J. Jackson, of Jackson & Flowers, had constructed, in association with Sir Casimir Gzowski, the stretch of the Grand Trunk Railway between Breslau and New Hamburg.15 On the triangle bounded by King, Water and Francis streets in Berlin, Henry Jackson had built himself a large home that he named in honour of his daughter. Here the unmarried Geneva lived in somewhat distressed gentility. She owned a Krieghoff and what she mistakenly believed to be a Caravaggio. A dabbler in oil paints, she regarded her nephew’s productions as “pictures no sane person could understand.” 16
Jackson had listened to Harris’s optimism about the burgeoning Canadian art movement in Toronto, and he may also have been reassured by the more sympathetic reception given his paintings at the osa. But in the spring of 1913 he was already making plans to try his fortune, like so many other Canadians, in New York. Before departing for the United States, he went north to Georgian Bay to spend time with some distant relations, the Breithaupts, members of a prominent Berlin family (the father had served as both mayor and mpp) who owned a cottage and houseboat near Penetanguishene.
Jackson was no stranger to what, during his time in France, he nostalgically called “the good Canuck wild woods.” As a young man, especially in Paris, he had adopted the self-consciously bohemian air of the Left Bank artiste or flâneur, wearing a corduroy suit and celluloid collar and dosing his head with coal oil to preserve what remained of his vanishing and prematurely greying hair. But he claimed to be at home in the bush as well as on the boulevard. “I have passed so much time out in the woods by myself,” he boasted as a student, “that I can get all the company I need out of a pencil and a piece of paper.” 17
Jackson had already visited Georgian Bay three years earlier, in the summer of 1910. On that occasion he had been in the company of the three artistic Breithaupt girls—Edna, Rosa and Catherine—and another set of distant Berlin relations, the Clements. The Clement family owned a cottage on the southern tip of Portage Island, and while staying with them Jackson would take a canoe and paddle over to the Breithaupt property.18 His short voyage might have been motivated by more than a need for fresh air or exercise on the open water, since he was apparently in love with Rosa Breithaupt, recently graduated from her art studies at the Ontario Ladies’ College in Whitby.19 In the summer of 1913 Jackson did a painting of twenty-two-year-old Rosa posing at her easel on Chippewa Island.
Like Lismer, Jackson would likewise call the 30,000 Islands of Georgian Bay the “happy isles.” In 1910 he and his cousins had enjoyed the usual cottage-country delights. They took to the water in dinghies, enjoyed marshmallow roasts and ice cream, and picnicked on Giant’s Tomb.20 Yet he did not find the area encouraging as far as painting went. Georgian Bay was no stranger to artists: that inveterate painter and traveller Lucius O’Brien had already worked there in the 1880s, creating works such as Among the Islands of Georgian Bay. But Jackson could see few pictorial possibilities. With his head full of European cathedrals and Dutch scenery of the sort he had just depicted on the wall of his Aunt Geneva’s bedroom, he disdained the area as a place for artists. “It’s a great country to have a holiday in . . . but it’s nothing but little islands covered with scrub and pine trees, and not quite paintable . . . Sketching simply won’t go.” 21 The Canuck wild woods of Georgian Bay did not, at least in 1910, seem worth the pencil and paper.
In the summer of 1913 Jackson was more favourably disposed to the scrubby boulder-and-water landscape. He had no doubt been influenced by the enthusiasm of the Toronto painters he met a short while earlier, as well as by some of the art he had recently seen in Europe. Georgian Bay’s wind-sculpted pine trees, clear atmosphere, expanses of water and masses of Precambrian rock seemed to call for the strong outlines, broad patches of colour and dynamic forms that Van Gogh, for example, had used to capture the clear light and gesticulating cypresses in the south of France, or that had served Gauguin when he painted Brittany’s weather-beaten granite churches and whitewashed cottages.
Jackson remained on the bay after his cousins returned to Berlin, occupying the Clement family’s old boathouse on Portage Island and—as he was accustomed to doing from his days in Fontainebleau or on the Brittany coast—making numerous plein-air sketches in the woods and on the shore. Portage Island, as it happened, was only a few kilometres south of West Wind Island. Dr. MacCallum had been planning to close the cottage for the winter following Lismer’s visit when he received a letter from Lawren Harris describing how a Montreal artist named Jackson was working in the area. “We want to get him to come to Toronto,” Harris wrote, “but he’s hard up and talks about going to New York. If you see him, have a talk with him about it.” 22
HARRIS AND Dr. MacCallum were only too aware that, for lack of opportunity, many Canadian artists had been forced to base themselves more or less permanently abroad. Sometime after returning from the Mississagi Forest Reserve, Will Broadhead joined the exodus to seek his fortune in New York City. His initial optimism about his adopted country had rapidly faded. “I feel that I can do some real good work, if only I get the proper opportunity,” he wrote home to his parents, “and I can see that that opportunity will not come in this city.” 23 Around the same time, Tom Thomson’s other canoeing companion, Harry B. Jackson, likewise left town for greener American pastures. Their attitude was summed up by A.Y. Jackson in a letter of October 1910. “As far as Canadian Art concerns me, it can go to——. There never will be a school of Canadian art. The natural centre for Eastern Canadian artists will be New York, and it will be better for themselves and their art when they realize it.” 24
The climate in Canada was indeed inhospitable for an aspiring artist. The collectors were apathetic, the public oblivious and the critics benightedly conservative. Daniel Wilkie, a banker who served as honorary president of the Canadian Art Club, despaired that a Canadian artist returning to his native land after studying abroad “experienced a shock in realizing the lack of sympathy with his aims and objects, the lack of artistic facilities of every kind, the lack of intelligent critics, the lack of suitable buildings where works of art c
an be properly shown, and, above all, the lack of any apparent desire to see things change for the better.” 25
Even artists with international reputations, such as Maurice Cullen and J.W. Morrice, found Canadian sales difficult. The Montreal-born Morrice sold paintings to the French government and the wealthy Russian collector Ivan Morozov, but his sales in Canada (apart from a few to connoisseurs) were few and far between. In 1911 he refused to send his paintings for exhibition in Toronto: “Nothing is sold . . . nobody understands them.” 26 Since 1890 he had lived in Paris. Many other Canadian painters worked in London or New York. Hamilton-born William Blair Bruce, who died prematurely in Sweden in 1906, spent most of his working life in France and then on the Swedish island of Gotland. Halifax-born Ernest Lawson, founder of the Harlem River School and the inspiration for the painter Frederick Lawson in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, lived for so long in the United States that he took to denying his Canadian roots: he told everyone he came from San Francisco.
MacCallum and Harris were probably aware of how yet another promising artist had just been lost in this great diaspora. The painter besides Jackson condemned by the Montreal Daily Herald as a member of the “Infanticist School” was twenty-seven-year-old John Goodwin Lyman. Lyman left Montreal in 1907 to study in Europe: first at the Royal College of Art in London and then the Académie Julian in Paris (where he studied under Laurens one year after Jackson). Haunted by the “summary intensity” of a Matisse painting at the 1909 Salon des Indépendants, he enrolled in the Académie Matisse, which he called a “nest of heretical fledglings.” 27 Early in 1913 he returned to Canada to show work at the Art Association of Montreal. Braving the poor reviews, he staged a solo exhibition of forty-two paintings in May, with catalogue copy composed by his wife that read, “Art is not an imitation of nature . . . Art that has an air of the natural is a nonsense; art must be artificial.” 28 The response was even more savage. In the Montreal Daily Star Samuel Morgan-Powell attacked his canvases as examples of the dreaded Post-Impressionism, haughtily dismissed as “a fad, an inartistic fetish for the amusement of bad draughtsmanship, incompetent colourists, and others who find themselves unqualified to paint pictures.” 29 In the kind of intemperate language used in not even the most acrimonious political debate, he condemned Lyman’s works as “travesties, abortions, sensual and hideous malformations” whose creation “would shame a school boy. His composition would disgrace an artist of the stone age.” 30 At least Lyman was in good company: Morgan-Powell had denounced Van Gogh as a “raving maniac” and Gauguin a “Post-Impressionist mountebank.” 31 But the result of this critical mauling was that Lyman immediately left Montreal in disgust: he would spend the next eighteen years in Europe.