by Ross King
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.” 29
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.
Even more to the point, many Scandinavian painters, as Harris and MacDonald noted in Buffalo, had turned unapologetically to winter scenes of frozen lakes and snow-blanketed forests to convey what they regarded as their particular national characters. By 1914 the influence of the exhibition of Scandinavian art on the painters of the “young school” was unmistakable. The snow-laden fir branches painted by Harris and MacDonald, in particular, revealed their efforts to imitate the style of Gustaf Fjaestad, whose “snow-hung boughs” MacDonald had so admired two years earlier.
The reviews of the osa exhibition were generally positive, with the Toronto Daily Mail & Empire commending the “power and poetry” of the artists and Hector Charlesworth, in Saturday Night, praising their “pigmentary enthusiasm.” Perhaps most enthusiastic was Lismer’s Sunglow, a work whose clashing colours, applied in thick dabs and divided brushstrokes, confirmed his involvement in the Studio Building’s Neo-Impressionist discussions and experiments. Charlesworth singled out Thomson’s Northern River as “fine, vigorous and colourful” and “a most effective composition.” 30 Northern River was then bought by the National Gallery for its asking price of $500. The recognition was welcome, and the sum promised to end Thomson’s financial worries fo
r the next few months at least—though he once claimed that each year he spent $500 (the equivalent of almost five hundred tubes of paint) on pigment alone.31
Also purchased by the National Gallery was Beatty’s Morning, Algonquin Park and, though it had not appeared at the osa exhibition, Jackson’s The Red Maple. The director, Eric Brown, was holding true to his promise, made in 1913, that there would be a “constant addition” to the collection as “the claims of the younger men become strong and urge recognition.” 32
ALTHOUGH THEY FAILED to find anything in the way of private buyers other than Dr. MacCallum, by 1915 most members of Algonquin Park School were represented in public collections, either in the National Gallery or in the collections of the Government of Ontario. The one member of the group whom this kind of success still eluded was Fred Varley. At the 1915 OSA exhibition he showed a single painting, an Algonquin scene entitled Autumn that attracted little attention. An irascible loner, Varley was something of an outsider to the group. He had no quarters in the Studio Building, possibly owing to his chronic lack of funds. Like the other painters, he was in straitened circumstances. Early in 1915, dunned by creditors, he moved house for the fifth time since Maud’s arrival in Toronto two and a half years earlier. The couple was now living with their two young children on Pacific Avenue, north of High Park. Maud had become pregnant during their stay at Mowat Lodge, and a third child was now on the way.
Varley was comfortable only with Thomson and Lismer, and sometimes he fell out even with them. In what was becoming a regular habit, he caused a disturbance at a party hosted by Lismer and his wife in the third week of March. The Lismers had invited Varley and Maud, together with Thomson and Carmichael, to their house on Delaware Avenue, north of Bloor. “It was not quite as enjoyable an evening as I have spent there before,” Carmichael observed in rueful understatement a day or two later. “Through no fault of ours, or Arthur’s, Fred is again showing a side of his nature which does not always make for sociability.” No sooner had Varley arrived through the door than he said “a few words”—an insult that Carmichael had no wish to repeat—that caused deep offence to Thomson in particular. “I have never seen Tom so angry,” Carmichael told Ada. He added, “It is rotten and I feel as if I want to chuck Fred entirely.” 33
Although the exact details of the transgression went unrecorded, it is easy to imagine the conversation straying onto controversial topics, such as the war, about which Thomson held firm opinions. Another possibility is that Varley insulted Jackson, whose reputation and rewards—for paintings Varley did not admire—far outstripped those of the belligerent Yorkshireman.
One result of the argument was that Varley did not go north with Thomson, despite his expressed wish to return to Algonquin Park and “paint the out-door figure.” 34 Thomson travelled alone into the park at the end of March, laden with sketching equipment and camping gear. First, however, he spent a few days in Huntsville, a logging town on the Muskoka River.
THOMSON HAD A number of friends in Huntsville, including John McRuer, the local doctor and a fellow fishing enthusiast who had opened a practice in the town in 1908. But the “Doc,” as Thomson called him, was seriously ill with tuberculosis, and at the end of 1913 he and his wife had moved to Denver, Colorado (possibly a somewhat unexpected move considering the volumes of tourist publicity extolling the pure air of Muskoka as a tonic for respiratory ailments). In 1915 Thomson was probably visiting Winnifred Trainor, the eldest daughter of Hugh Trainor, a foreman for the Huntsville Lumber Company. Thomson and the thirty-one-year-old Winnie, who worked as a bookkeeper, might have been introduced during one of Thomson’s visits to Dr. McRuer, or else they might have met at the Trainors’ house, which offered itself to paying guests as a boarding house. It is more probable, though, that they met at Canoe Lake, possibly as early as 1912 or 1913, since for the previous three years Hugh Trainor had leased a small summer cottage, known as The Manse, which stood only a short distance from Mowat Lodge.
Thomson’s relations with women were ambiguous and obscure. He appears to have shared the same timidity or reticence towards women as his fellow bachelors Arthur Heming and Will Broadhead. Heming never married, so the explanation went, “because he could never summon up enough courage to ask a woman to marry him.” 35 Broadhead was strongly averse to the idea of marriage: “The last thing on earth I dream of is being anchored to any female,” he once wrote to his mother. He did, however, enjoy a romantic interlude in Bisco with what he called a “little half-breed girl . . . the only girl who has ever stolen my affections for any time.” 36
Thomson seemed equally disinclined to marry. He regarded himself as a “wild man” unfit for female company, though his cultured upbringing and expensive tastes should have marred this self-image. More likely a combination of bashfulness and awkwardness were behind his maladroit courtship of Alice Lambert, his rejection of Varley’s sister-in-law and his discourtesy towards the “attractive looking lady” who tried to engage him in conversation at Canoe Lake. Winnie Trainor appears to have been one of the few women with whom he sustained a relationship of any length or significance. Yet even the most basic details of their affair, such as how and when they met, are strangely scarce.
Whatever its eventual state, in the spring of 1915 the relationship was neither serious nor rewarding for Thomson, because in the middle of May he wrote Carmichael a distressed and slightly self-pitying letter about his lack of female companionship. He worked as a fishing guide after leaving Huntsville, and following his return from escorting American tourists he learned of Carmichael’s engagement to Ada Went (the two were to be married in September). Clearly his young friend’s wedding plans—and Carmichael’s unfeigned and touching happiness—set Thomson to thinking about his own marital status as he approached his thirty-eighth birthday. It was unusual for a man of his age to remain a bachelor: the average Canadian man of his generation married at twenty-eight. Bachelordom was even rarer as a man got older, since 91 per cent of Canadian men ultimately tied the knot.37
Thomson sent his congratulations to Carmichael, offering the couple as a wedding present anything in the way of “wall decoration” (as he put it) from his shack. Carmichael wrote to Ada, “It may sound hoggish, but I have such a deep admiration for his work I would like to clear the place out.” But he also told Ada how Thomson’s letter was “not untinged with a certain bitterness” towards anyone who claimed that bachelordom and what Carmichael called “the state of celibacy” were the ideal existence for an artist. He did “a little moralizing on his own account about a bachelor’s life . . . giving me the benefit of what seems to be his own personal experience.” Carmichael was slightly alarmed by the unhappy temper of the letter, which revealed his friend’s essential loneliness. “Poor old boy,” he wrote to his fiancée, “the whole tone of his letter seemed to be so blue—I wanted to rush up to the park just to have a chat with him, and cheer him up a bit. He has these streaks occasionally.” 38
Thomson ended his letter to Carmichael by saying he was planning a long canoe trip through Algonquin Park. Soon afterwards, he bought a new Chestnut canoe, silk tent and other camping supplies and started out from Canoe Lake on another long solo voyage.
*Christened Francis Hans Johnston, he was known as Frank or (in some catalogues) as “Francis H. Johnston” until 1927, when, influenced by numerology, he adopted the name Franz.
2 THE GREAT EXPLOSION
IN THE THIRD week of April in 1915, Canadian troops were engaged in some of the most notorious battles of the Great War. Late in the radiantly sunny afternoon of April 22, German soldiers seven kilometres north of Ypres released onto a northeast wind 168 tons of chlorine gas. Within minutes, the 3rd Canadian Brigade was reporting “a cloud of green vapour several hundred yards in length” approaching the French trenches to their left.1 The Battle of Gravenstafel Ridge—later known as the Second Battle of Ypres—had begun.
Over the next few hours, as French and Algerian tro
ops died in the trenches or staggered away in retreat, the Germans advanced four kilometres south into Allied territory. Late that evening, the 10th and 16th Canadian Battalions received orders to stop the Germans with a counterattack: they were to clear the enemy from an oak plantation called the Bois des cuisiniers and known to the English as Kitchener’s Wood. The plantation with its captured British battery was retaken after a heroic charge under moonlight and machine-gun fire, but at a cost of more than six hundred Canadian lives.2
Two days later, more horror and more heroism. At four o’clock in the morning of April 24 the Germans released poison gas directly into the Canadian line northeast of Ypres at St. Julien. Realizing the only place of safety was towards the German trenches, the Canadians rushed forward, urine-drenched cotton bandoliers serving as rudimentary gas masks. This latest confirmation of the ferocity of the Canadian troops was achieved at the cost of a thousand dead and almost five thousand wounded.
The use of poison gas, together with the Zeppelin raids over the English coast, the torpedoing of the unarmed British luxury liner rms Lusitania, the deployment of “Big Bertha” artillery with shells weighing 820 kilograms, all served as brutal testament to the horrors of a war of unprecedented savagery. Stories abounded of German atrocities. In the middle of May The Times reported a crime of “insensate rage and hate,” claiming a Canadian sergeant had been crucified against a fence by the Germans during fighting at Ypres: “Bayonets were thrust through the palms of his hands and his feet, pinning him to the fence. He had been repeatedly stabbed with bayonets, and there were many punctured wounds on his body.” 3 A few days later a Canadian soldier wrote home claiming that not one but six Canadian soldiers had been crucified, their corpses marked with plaques warning other Canadians to stay at home.4