by Ross King
Jackson did one final painting before leaving Toronto. On the first night of his stay with Thomson in Algonquin Park, the two men had camped below Tea Lake Dam, a sixty-foot-long timber construction built by the Gilmour Lumber Company to raise the water level so that logs could be driven more easily along the Oxtongue River. He might not have been in the “mood to produce” during this trip, but here, Jackson made a quick sketch of a maple sapling beside the rushing river. The scene was, as he must have realized as he returned to Toronto, quintessentially Canadian. Back in the Studio Building, he began working up his small sketch into an oil painting. On a canvas eighty-two centimetres high and a metre wide he depicted, from the low point of view of someone seated on the riverbank, rapids in the Oxtongue as seen through the delicate screen of the maple sapling. The painting showed Jackson approaching the summit of his powers and confirmed his position as the most creative and daring landscapist working in Canada. Using deep blues, ochres and, to tinge the boulders, mauve, he contrasted the stillness and fragility of the young maple with the turbulence of the churning waters beyond. Most striking of all in this, yet another of his brilliantly keyed canvases, was the flaming crimson of the maple leaves elegantly flecked across the artist’s field of vision.
The Red Maple is an astonishing image of the beauty, frailty and power of the natural world. But for Jackson, troubled by thoughts of war, the painting must have had a significance beyond his visit to Tea Lake Dam. By 1914 the maple leaf had long been a symbol of Canadian identity. In 1867 Alexander Muir wrote “The Maple Leaf Forever” (with its line “The Maple Leaf, our emblem dear”) as the Confederation song. The maple leaf was included on the flag of the governor general as well as on the coats of arms of Ontario and Quebec, and between 1876 and 1901 it appeared on all Canadian coins. Most poignantly of all, in 1914 the maple leaf was on the badge of members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, such as Jackson’s friend Randolph Hewton, who were shipping overseas.
It is not difficult to see symbolic meaning in a maple sapling perched on the brink of a violent torrent. In this depiction of promise and threat, fragility and power, Jackson poetically captured the terrible predicament in which all young Canadians of his generation suddenly found themselves.
JACKSON’S MOVE TO Montreal at the end of 1914 was a great loss to Tom Thomson. Jackson, with his extensive European training and experience, had begun to foster Thomson’s talent, recognizing his raw skills and helping to refine them. When for two months the previous summer Thomson was unable to paint, it was Jackson’s company that unleashed his creative abilities. The two men spent only a matter of months together, but over the course of that time Thomson began developing artistic gifts the depth and power of which his earlier works had given scant hint.
Jackson did not exaggerate when he said Thomson was getting to the end of his tether financially. With his year-long patronage from
Dr. MacCallum at an end, and with discouraging prospects of earning a comfortable living through commercial design, he was forced to make economies. At the end of the year he moved out of his latest lodgings—a boarding house at Wellesley and Church—and into a tumbledown shack behind the Studio Building. Situated on sloping ground and surrounded by saplings, the shack had formerly served as the workshop of a cabinetmaker and even for a time as a henhouse. Lawren Harris and Dr. MacCallum paid $176 to have the modest structure re-roofed and insulated with beaverboard. An east window was added for light, and the shack was furnished with a bunk and a box stove. Thomson was then allowed to occupy it for the peppercorn rent of $1 per month.
Harris had an affection for this primitive kind of jerry-built,
lumber-and-tarpaper shack; many examples would later appear in his art. Although the exact origins of this particular shack are unclear, it was probably one of the many self-builds that mushroomed in Toronto over the previous decade as immigration soared and many poor British immigrants built themselves two- and three-room shacks with no plumbing or electricity. Thomson’s new home was probably technically illegal as a residence, as efforts to clean up Toronto saw the city council pass Bylaw 6691 in 1913 “to regulate the installation of sanitary conveniences under the Public Health Act.” 4 He nonetheless made himself happily at home, spending his leisure moments carving axe handles and decorating the walls with paddles, lures and trolling spoons—mementos of the self-sufficient life in the bush. The shack represented an attempt to replicate, in the heart of Toronto, his primitive living conditions in Algonquin Park. Its unadorned decrepitude evoked the humble shelter-houses occupied by the park’s rangers and loggers.5
If the shack provided him with cheap living quarters, Thomson spent the winter of 1914–15 sharing workspace in the Studio Building with Frank Carmichael. Despite the age difference (Thomson was thirteen years older) the two men had much in common. Both came from Scottish Presbyterian backgrounds in rural Ontario; both were avid readers and accomplished musicians (Carmichael played the violin, cello, bassoon, piano and flute); and both were instinctive loners.6 Carmichael’s experiences studying in Europe, however abbreviated, keened all the more Thomson’s appetite for modern art, already whetted by Jackson and Harris over the previous year.
Although lacking Jackson’s or Harris’s wide experiences, during his brief stay Carmichael probably saw the 1913 World Exhibition in Ghent, and in England he admired the work of Constable and Turner. Belgium had numerous examples of Jugendstil design (Brussels billed itself as the “capital of Art Nouveau”), and at some point Carmichael developed an appreciation of Japanese woodblock prints. He was not the first of Thomson’s friends to share this enthusiasm, since Will Broadhead had been another aficionado: he had books on Japanese art shipped to him from England.7 Japanese prints had been in vogue in Europe since at least the 1890s. Their curvilinearity and organic forms inspired both Art Nouveau (Siegfried Bing, proprietor of the Paris gallery L’Art Nouveau, spent two years in China and Japan in the 1880s) and painters such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard.
The studio shared by Thomson and Carmichael took on the carefree and disarrayed air of bachelordom. It was cluttered with easels bearing half-finished canvases, and on the floor, as Carmichael wrote to his girlfriend, Ada Went, lay “canvases and frames in great array, and not without disorder. The table too is covered with half-used tubes of paint, brushes, bottles of oil, turpentine, bottles, sketches, colour boxes with sketches standing up against the wall. Under it are colour boxes and tubes with a pile of sketches at one end, looking not unlike a bunch of shingles broken open.” Their cooking was equally chaotic, including mishaps and “queer sights . . . when a finger is burnt or some stuff boils over.” They often ate with Bill Beatty, who treated them to fried potatoes and oyster stew. Thomson’s specialty was mulligan stew, and he also made preserves from the berries he picked in the north. He seems to have been something of an impromptu chef: MacDonald’s son, Thoreau, remembered seeing him mash potatoes with an empty bottle.8
Away from their easels, the two men played chess, often in the company of Heming. Recreations became livelier with the arrival in the building of Alex G. Cumming, the manager of Art Metropole on Temperance Street, where most of the artists bought their materials. The financial plight of the painters persuaded Harris to rent space to a non-artist. He lived to rue the arrangement, since Cumming proved a “lively and frolicsome fellow” who threw parties in his studio. Dance tunes from his gramophone blared down the corridors. Thomson may not have been troubled by the introduction of wine, women and song into the Studio Building. Cumming’s wild ways, however, soon began to chafe some of the more abstemious artists, such as the fastidious Heming, who “never smoked or drank” and was “shy with women.” 9
More calm and well-behaved visitors were welcomed onto the premises, such as Dr. MacCallum, whom Carmichael called the “patron saint” of the Studio Building. According to Carmichael, the doctor “comes in, flops down on a chair, throws matches on the floor and talks in an inte
lligent way about our work, taking as keen an interest as one’s self. His very attitude makes one feel at ease, and as though one had known him for years.” 10
Although several women were eventually to work in the Studio Building, the Toronto Daily Star had stressed that it was “not a place for pink teas or tango” 11—the recreations of well-heeled Rosedale women. The emphasis on what Beatty called “men with good red blood in their veins” made it a decidedly—and even self-consciously—masculine environment. At least one tenant was aware that a nation characterized by physically demanding and exclusively masculine occupations such as mining and lumberjacking might view an artist with suspicion. “I always had the juvenile illusion,” Heming confessed in a 1912 interview, “that an artist was some long-haired effeminate freak.” 12 For many Canadians Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trial forged the image of the artist as a homosexual.13 Some Studio Building painters hoped to sever this link by having the artist bunk down—metaphorically speaking—with Canadian machos such as Mounties and river drivers. Like his near-namesake Ernest Hemingway’s own hairy-chested posturings, Heming’s strenuous exertions with canoes and snowshoes were in part attempts to disabuse the suspicious (most of all, perhaps, himself) of the notion that artists were what Canadians euphemistically called “Oscar Wilde types.”
The concern for manly vigour was hardly unique to Canada or Canadian artists. The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed Lord Baden-Powell trying to instill manliness in the youth of England, while the most frequent adjective on the lips of an English schoolmaster was “manly.” Not only Boy Scouts and schoolboys but artists, too, required manliness. The most famous art instructor in America, Robert Henri, told his students that the artist must be “a real man” (a category for which he qualified by dint of a boyhood among cowboys and a surname that was not French—so he insisted—but rhymed with “Buckeye”). Meanwhile, London’s Slade School of Fine Art was drumming out of its students the perceived effeminacies of the 1890s Aesthetic Movement—whose cynosure was Oscar Wilde—by feeding them a diet of Friedrich Nietzsche. The Slade course could boast its successes. England’s most renowned painter, Augustus John, a Slade graduate, when not painting raw and remote scenery, was bedding his models, downing pints of beer and getting into scrapes that culminated in police pursuits and county court summonses.14
The artists of the Studio Building took their manly pleasures more innocently. Thomson, Carmichael, MacCallum and Heming often attended boxing matches. Although the sport had recently been taken to task for attracting to ringside “a great many turbulent and otherwise undesirable persons,” 15 Carmichael was anxious to assure Ada that the matches in Toronto the Good were, relatively speaking, wholesome performances. “It was of course amateur sport, and as clean as could be,” he told her after attending a series of bouts. “True, some boxers were knocked out, but that is to be expected. They were fine specimens of men physically, and I must say I have never seen such fine action. Altogether, it was an enjoyable evening, and we came home refreshed.” 16 Carmichael might have underplayed the violence, because the report of the matches in the Toronto Daily Star was a brutal catalogue of boxers “knocked dizzy” and dispatched “into Dreamland,” and a graphic description was offered of a “husky, gritty boy” named Martin who took a “right smash” to the head and was “dragged to the corner inert.” 17
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.