Defiant Spirits

by Ross King

If painting Corporal Kerr held little appeal to a landscapist like Jackson, the young soldier’s story was at least a remarkable one. Jackson jocularly called him “the boy who took 62 Huns hisself.” 21 A former lumberjack in Kootenay and homesteader in Spirit River, Alberta, Kerr had trekked fifty miles to Edmonton in the middle of winter in order to enlist. During the Battle of the Somme in September 1916, in a mind-boggling feat of toughness and daring, he single-handedly seized sixty-two German prisoners at Courcelette, having penetrated enemy lines and assaulted the entrenched Germans with grenades and a rifle before rounding them up in their dug-out. He told Jackson that if he had also been armed with a bottle of rum “he could have induced a whole battalion to come over.” 22

  Jackson apologized to the corporal that a landscapist had been sent to execute his portrait. He then began painting at the CWMF’s Earl’s Court studio with “considerable trepidation . . . I drew in the head and rubbed it out many times; later I scraped out the painting until finally I got a passable likeness and took no more chances.” 23

  AS JACKSON PAINTED the young man’s portrait, the Canadian Corps was back in action in France, capturing Hill 70, a supposedly impregnable bastion above the French city of Lens. They then defended it against counterattacking Germans armed with mustard gas and flame-throwers. The valour of Ypres and Vimy Ridge was reprised, with six soldiers receiving the Victoria Cross.* Jackson was in the vicinity soon afterwards, doing his first work in the field (and taking the leisure to visit Baker-Clack and other friends in Étaples: all were doing a roaring trade selling their landscapes as souvenirs to the soldiers).24 As an artist he received a chilly reception from the troops “until they found that earlier I had been in the line with the infantry. Then they could not do enough for me.” 25

  A more insuperable problem was what to paint. The Second Battle of Ypres was being reconstructed in Richard Jack’s studio by rifle-toting uniformed veterans of the Western Front. “Nothing was left undone to secure accuracy,” an official for the CWMF later wrote.26 But creating this kind of multi-figure action scene was unappealing to Jackson, though he did consider, apparently seriously, “a big composition of General Currie Crossing the Rhine.” 27 Such a painting, however “accurate” on the surface, would not capture what Jackson believed to be the unique horror of modern warfare. His time in the trenches had drummed out of him any notions of martial glory. “This trench warfare,” he wrote to MacDonald in 1916, “is exasperating . . . It don’t feel heroic in the least.” 28 Or as he later observed, “War had gone underground, and there was little to see. The old heroics, the death and glory stuff were gone for ever.” Taking his sketches back to London in the autumn, to a studio he began renting in Charlotte Street, he produced only “charming landscapes.” 29

  Another chance for Jackson to see action on the Western Front arrived in November when twenty thousand men from the Canadian Corps, fighting on muddy reclaimed marshland, captured the Belgian village of Passchendaele. There was death and glory aplenty, with sixteen thousand casualties and nine Victoria Crosses. But the capture of the shattered village was a strategically meaningless exercise. It had been rigidly promoted by Field Marshal Haig against the wishes of the commander of the Canadian Corps, General Sir Arthur Currie, who correctly predicted the massive casualties: the New Zealand Division had already suffered terrible losses in their own failed assault. The futility of capturing Passchendaele at such horrendous cost would be made painfully evident in the spring of 1918 when Haig blithely gave orders to abandon the village to the Germans in order to reinforce units elsewhere in Flanders.

  Jackson crossed the Channel with the rest of the cwro in November, coming within a few miles of where he had been wounded at Sanctuary Wood. He made only pencil sketches because he “found it hard to manage a sketch box while shells were dropping here and there.” 30 He at least avoided the notorious Passchendaele mud, lodging in a house near the railway station at Poperinghe, a small town, known to the soldiers as “Pop,” that served British and Commonwealth troops as a place of rest and recreation. Reminders of the war were plentiful, as German airplanes tried every night to bomb the railway station, “and if there were bombs left over they dumped them in our vicinity.” 31

  After more than three years of war, few charming landscapes remained to be painted in this muddy, cratered, burned-out part of Flanders. Jackson once again found himself struggling as he toured the battlefields, like the other war artists, in a chauffeur-driven staff car. “Drizzle, rain and mud and the costly and useless offensive at Passchendaele took the heart out of everyone,” he wrote.32 He was relieved both to return to his studio in London and then to receive a commission to paint not scenes of death and glory but two more vc winners. Soon after he began work on these portraits, he learned that he was to be joined in London by another member of the Algonquin Park School, F.H. Varley.

  ALTHOUGH SHORT OF money as usual, Varley had been one of the few Toronto painters not to suffer too drastically during the war. Still working as a designer at Rous and Mann, he was supplementing his slender means with freelance work for the Canadian Courier, doing front-cover portraits of such as Lloyd George, Sir Robert Borden and Woodrow Wilson. He was also illustrating short stories in the Canadian Magazine and designing a recruiting manual for the Imperial Royal Flying Corps. His work with his paintbrush was, as ever, sporadic, devoted to portraits rather than landscapes, but in February 1916 he had completed enough to stage a solo exhibition at the Arts and Letters Club.

  Despite his interest in figure painting, Varley had still been eager to paint the “outdoor country” of Canada. In the summer of 1916, financed by Dr. MacCallum, who covered the cost of his train fare from Toronto to Honey Harbour, he painted landscapes on Georgian Bay. Here he produced sketches that in the next few months he would turn into Squally Weather, Georgian Bay, by far his most ambitious and arresting landscape to date.33 Painted at the same time as Thomson’s The West Wind and The Jack Pine—and with the two men probably comparing notes as they worked—Varley’s canvas used the motif of a lone, wind-twisted pine tree on a rocky shoreline to show the power of nature “in all its greatness.” A high horizon line and elevated vantage point on a blustery cliff allowed him to present a broad expanse of the bay, with its eddying inlets and scything whitecaps. Varley’s talents lay primarily in portraiture, and in many ways Squally Weather, with its jack pine posed dramatically in the foreground, dominating the design, was, like Thomson’s two paintings, a portrait of solitude and fortitude in a beautiful, destructive wilderness. It was also, like The West Wind and other of Thomson’s landscapes, a kind of self-portrait, a “landscape of the mind” that expressed the fierce convolutions of the painter’s spirits.

  Varley had written to his sister in 1914 that in painting the Canadian landscape he was endeavouring to rid himself of all “preconceived ideas.” But no one ever sees a landscape, let alone paints one, without imposing preconceived ideas, whether consciously or not. Varley would have seen many landscapes as an art student, and it is intriguing that in tackling the subject he looked back to his days at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. The tradition of Western landscape painting had begun—ironically, considering the flat and featureless topography—in the Low Countries. The first Western painter known to have specialized in landscapes was the Flemish artist Joachim Patinir (or Patenier), an exact contemporary of Raphael. Varley could have been familiar with his work from his years in Antwerp, since Landscape with the Flight into Egypt and St. Christopher Bearing the Christ Child were both held in Antwerp museums, and another of his works, Landscape with St. John the Baptist Preaching, was nearby in the Musées royaux des beaux-arts in Brussels.34

  Patinir’s particular style of composition set a standard for landscapes. He and the many painters who followed him, including Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Jan van Amstel, painted atmospheric bird’s-eye-view panoramas looking out across reaches of water interrupted by gnarled trees and jagged rocks.* Calle
d “northern expressionists” by one art historian, they suggested with their distorted, corkscrewing trees and rocks not only a wonder at untamed nature but also the mysterious and malevolent forces of the universe in an era when Western Europe was convulsed by violent disorder. Almost three centuries later, their pierced rocks and frenzied trees would reappear in the landscapes of another artist from the Low Countries, Vincent Van Gogh, who likewise studied in Antwerp. Thus, although Squally Weather is a faithful portrait of an inlet on Georgian Bay, in composing his work Varley took from these Flemish works his elevated perspective and expansive view, as well as the fury and the menace of a nature agitated and unsubdued.35

  Squally Weather appeared at the 1917 OSA exhibition with another of Varley’s Georgian Bay landscapes. His work impressed Augustus Bridle, who later wrote of Varley that he “goes after the big, essential virilities,” showing “strength and realism” and a “strong massing of forms and colours.” The virility of these paintings was, Bridle believed, an extension of Varley’s own sinewy nature. In Bridle’s excited account, Varley was one of the reddest of Canadian art’s red-blooded men: a brawny stevedore with a hobo’s wanderlust and a poet’s soul. “He has had a lot of experience that knocks the guff out of any man,” wrote Bridle. “He knows what it is to be a wayside man without enough to eat, a dock walloper, a companion to those who never see three meals straight ahead in a row, the knights of the empty pocket and the full soul.” Some parts of Bridle’s account, had he seen it, may well have caused Jackson to shake his head in disbelief as he recalled Varley’s reluctance to abandon Mowat Lodge and sleep under canvas: “He believes in the splash of rain on the pelt, the bite of the hard wind, the glint of a naked, hot sun.” 36

  The point of this flattering hyperbole (which echoed Bridle’s treatment of Heming a few years earlier) was that early in 1918 the cwro announced that Varley would sail to Europe to begin work was a war artist. By this time more than fifty artists were at work for the cwmf, with artists from Belgium, Australia, Denmark and even Serbia scattered in studios all over London.37 Believing Canadian painters still to be underrepresented, the osa in combination with the Royal Canadian Academy recommended a number of artists to Sir Edmund Walker, who duly passed their names to Lord Beaverbrook. Consent was quickly granted. At the end of March, Varley left behind Maud and his three children (forced into yet another move, the family was now living on the edge of the Humber Marshes) and departed for Europe. He was given the rank of captain, a salary of $1,900 per year and an allowance of $600 for art materials.38

  Joining Varley on the voyage were Bill Beatty and two artists from Montreal, Maurice Cullen and Charles W. Simpson. Varley was easily the least known of the quartet (and he was selected only when C.W. Jefferys declined). The fifty-two-year-old Cullen, a one-time friend of Whistler and Henri Rousseau, had enjoyed an international reputation for more than two decades. His Impressionist-inspired work had appeared at the Paris Salon, and in 1899 he became the first Canadian to be elected an associate member of the Société nationale des beaux-arts. Beatty taught at the Ontario College of Art and regularly exhibited in both Toronto and Montreal. The forty-year-old Simpson, a former student of both Cullen and William Brymner, specialized in Impressionist-inspired scenes of Montreal’s harbour in winter and was represented in the National Gallery of Canada by no fewer than three paintings. Varley appears to have been given the nod in part because of his supposed hardscrabble tenacity. That and the fact that Beatty, the original painter with “good red blood” in his veins, was also selected, suggest that Tom Thomson, had he lived, might have been one of the painters selected for duty.

  At the end of March the painters left the ravages of Halifax Harbour on the troopship RMS Grampian, bound for Glasgow. Varley did not enjoy himself owing to the noise from artillery practice and the presence of a ukulele player, but the voyage was made tolerable thanks to fifty-six young women on their way to work as cooks and maids for the Voluntary Aid Detachment in London. He lived up to his reputation for being hardbitten by energetically promenading the decks, disdaining a lifebelt while his fellow passengers were laid low in their berths or lolling queasily on deck.

  Arriving in Britain, he and the other Canadian artists were accommodated in considerable style and expense at the Strand Palace Hotel in London, described at its 1909 opening as “the last word in luxury,” with marble wash basins in every room and a telephone on each of its ten floors.39 The “knight of the empty pocket” encountered no difficulties adjusting to such extravagance. “We travel 1st class & swank and tip the plebeians as if we were lords,” he wrote to Maud. “What a life, eh what? I’ve never swanked so much in all my life.” 40

  VARLEY WAS LEFT to repose in this luxury for several weeks. His voyage across the Atlantic coincided with a German offensive, named by General Erich Ludendorff the Kaiserschlacht, the “Emperor’s Battle”—a last desperate push to win the war before the full weight of Allied resources, which now included the Americans, could be brought to bear. The offensive temporarily brought to a halt the efforts in the field of the CWMF, and so Varley and the others found themselves “kicking our heels” in London.41

  During this hiatus, Varley seized the opportunity to see the work being done for the CWMF by the other painters. He was taken round a number of West End galleries by Paul Konody, Lord Beaverbrook’s art adviser. The Hungarian-born Konody had served as the art critic for both the Daily Mail and the Observer as well as the editor of the journals Artist and Connoisseur. He advised Beaverbrook on which paintings to purchase for his own personal collection, and his influence over the CWMF, of which he was the director, became such that he was lampooned in an anonymous verse as the all-powerful leader of “the great Konodian army”:

  I’m a judge of ancient and modern Art.

  In Art I take the leading part.

  Of a great concern I am the start;

  For I am the brain, the mind, the heart

  Of the great Konodian Army.

  Men of genius great and small

  Wield their brush at my beck and call

  I hire the greatest men in Town;

  I raise them up or I dash them down

  With a friendly nod or haughty frown

  In my great Konodian Army.42

  Konody wished to show Varley the work of some of these “greatest men in Town.” There was certainly much in the London art world that was new for Varley to see. He had left England fewer than six years earlier, but in that time the country’s artistic climate had changed dramatically as London became the home of a distinctive avant-garde. In 1916 Ezra Pound wrote that “new masses of unexplored arts and facts are pouring into the vortex of London,” bringing about “changes as great as the Renaissance changes.” 43

  The best examples of these changes were Italian Futurism and its homegrown English version, Vorticism. The Futurists vehemently rejected all art of the past as “fetid gangrene,” celebrating instead what they called the “overwhelming vortex of modernity,” with its “crowds, its automobiles, its telegraphs, its bare lower-class neighbourhoods, its sounds, its shrieks, its violence, its cruelties, its cynicism.” 44 In October 1913 the Doré Gallery in London hosted the Post-Impressionist and Futurist Exhibition, followed in the spring of 1914 by an exhibition of Works of the Italian Futurist Painters and Sculptors. This latter exhibition, which caused a riot, included a poetry recitation by Filippo Marinetti (“peculiarly blood-thirsty concoctions,” in the opinion of one audience member) accompanied by the cannon-like booming of drums.45

  Italian Futurism involved a good deal of ludicrous posturing, but English artists began responding with their own equivalent. Christened “Vorticism” by Pound, its most boisterous adherents were Percy Wyndham Lewis and C.R.W. Nevinson. Just as the painters in the Algonquin Park School claimed the Canadian landscape called for new artistic forms, so Wyndham Lewis believed the “vortex” of a city like London demanded the dynamism of Fut
urism and Vorticism: a man passing his days “amid the rigid lines of houses, a plague of cheap ornamentation, noisy street locomotion, the Bedlam of the press, will evidently possess a different habit of vision to a man living amongst the lines of a landscape.” 46 The results were paintings with abstracted geometrical images and Cubist-style planes that interlocked like the teeth of sprocket wheels or shattered in violent, clangorous colour. Wyndham Lewis further sounded the murkier fathoms of modern art by creating for a Soho club a sculpture made entirely from raw meat.

  Although he wrote books on Raphael and Filippo Lippi, as well as guides to the Louvre and the Uffizi, Konody was sympathetic to new artistic movements such as Vorticism. In fact, he had recruited both Wyndham Lewis and Nevinson into the cwmf, along with David Bomberg and Paul Nash, two audaciously talented and experimental young graduates of the Slade School of Fine Art. Like A.Y. Jackson, Konody had realized that the “death and glory stuff” painted by war artists of the previous century was woefully inadequate to capture the intensity of modern industrial warfare. Early optimism about the war’s suitability for poetry and pictures—“Oh God! what a lovely war,” wrote Guillaume Apollinaire in “The Cavalier’s Farewell” 47—swiftly faded in the face of the bleak and unromantic reality. Heroic cavalry charges had been supplanted by muddy battles in the trenches. As early as 1915 The Times published an article entitled “The Passing of the Battle Painter” in which the correspondent lamented how war had been “robbed of its beauty.” 48 Modern war, like modern life, was ugly and impersonal, a vortex of speed, brutality and mechanical paraphernalia.

  Konody believed that anyone trying to paint the Great War needed to approach his subject differently from previous war artists. He stressed that he did not want “visions of winged figures with laurel leaves” or “long rows of imaginary battle pictures invented or reconstructed by the professional battle painters in the undisturbed comfort of their studios” (which was, however, exactly what Richard Jack was doing). The cwmf was, in his opinion, about art as much as war: he wanted not only a record of Canada’s contribution to the war but also “as complete as possible a picture of all the artistic currents and tendencies in vogue at the time of the world’s war.” 49 The only painter who could successfully grapple with what he called “the unprecedented conditions of modern warfare” was “an adherent of the modern school.” 50 He therefore took Varley to see the work of other painters under his wing, giving him a viewing of some of London’s most progressive art.