Defiant Spirits
Page 47
11. G. Blair Laing, Memoirs of an Art Dealer, 2 vols. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1979),
vol. 1, p. 109.
12. Anne McDougall, Anne Savage: The Story of a Canadian Painter
(Montreal: Harvester House, 1977), p. 37.
13. A.Y. Jackson, Chicago, to Georgina Jackson, Montreal, 18 September 1906,
Naomi Jackson Groves Fonds, Container 96, File 2.
14. For Jackson’s positive reactions to Mucha’s art and lectures, see his letters to his mother of 28 October and 4 November 1906, Naomi Jackson Groves Fonds, Container 96, Files 2 and 3. An exhibition of Mucha’s work was staged at the Art Institute of Chicago in October and November 1906.
15. A.Y. Jackson, Chicago, to Georgina Jackson, Montreal, 2 March 1907, Naomi Jackson Groves Fonds, Container 96, File 5. The catalogue for the exhibition (listing two paintings by Skarbina, including On the Canal, Berlin) was published as Catalogue of an Exhibition of Contemporary German Paintings (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1907).
16. A.Y. Jackson, Chicago, to Isabel Jackson, 11 November 1906, Naomi Jackson Grove Fonds, Container 96, File 3.
17. On the Académie Julian, see H. Barbara Weinberg, The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991),
pp. 221–62.
18. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 8.
19. A.Y. Jackson, c/o American Art Association of Paris, 74 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs,
Paris, to Georgina Jackson, 69 Hallowell Avenue, Montreal, 5 March 1908,
Naomi Jackson Grove Fonds, Box 96, File 6.
20. C.R.W. Nevinson, Paint and Prejudice (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1938),
p. 60.
21. Quoted in Dominique Lobstein, “Paris 1907: The Only Salon of Italian Divisionists,”
in Vivienne Greene, ed., Arcadia & Anarchy: Divisionism/Neo-Impressionism (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2007), p. 60. For Jackson’s visit to the exhibition, see A.Y. Jackson, Paris, to Georgina Jackson, Montreal, 12 December 1907, Naomi Jackson Grove Fonds,
Box 96, File 6.
22. A.Y. Jackson, Paris, to Georgina Jackson, Montreal, 5 March 1908, Naomi Jackson Grove Fonds, Box 96, File 6.
23. A.Y. Jackson, Amsterdam, to Georgina Jackson, Montreal, 12 July 1909, Naomi Jackson Grove Fonds, Box 96, File 11. For Jackson’s time in the Low Countries, see Tovell,
“A.Y. Jackson in France, Belgium and Holland,” pp. 31–51.
24. A.Y. Jackson, Montreal, to Catherine Briethaupt, Boston, 17 January 1921,
Catherine Breithaupt Bennett Papers.
25. For Van Gogh’s influence in the first dozen years of the twentieth century, see
Jill Lloyd, Van Gogh and Expressionism (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2007).
26. Leo Stein, Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose (New York: Crown, 1947), p. 174.
27. The Saturday Review, 12 November 1910.
28. Schapiro, Modern Art, pp. 137–38.
29. Quoted in Townsend Ludington, Marsden Hartley: The Biography of an American Artist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 79. Hartley arrived in Paris several months after Jackson in April 1912. Jackson’s address is given as 26 rue de Fleurus in the catalogue for the 1912 Canadian National Exhibition and in a letter to his mother of 1 June 1912: Naomi Jackson Grove Fonds, Box 96, File 16. For a description of 27 rue de Fleurus, with its numerous visitors and its drawings by Matisse and Picasso tacked to the doors, see Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (London: Bodley Head, 1935), pp. 7–8.
30. James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company (New York: Praeger, 1974), pp. 3–4.
31. Louise Dompierre, John Lyman, 1886–1967 (Kingston: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 1986), p. 29.
32. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 23.
33. Montreal Herald, 27 May 1912.
34. A.Y. Jackson, Étaples-sur-mer, to Georgina Jackson, Montreal, 11 June 1912,
Naomi Jackson Grove Fonds, Container 96, File 16.
35. Quoted in Hill, The Group of Seven, p. 38.
36. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 23.
37. Jackson and MacDonald had already corresponded regarding staging an exhibition together in Montreal with Randolph Hewton: see A.Y. Jackson, Assisi, to Georgina Jackson, Montreal, 4 December 1912, Naomi Jackson Grove Fonds, Box 96, File 17. Jackson writes that he and Hewton have contacted “a Toronto man named MacDonald.”
38. A.Y. Jackson, Sweetsburg, QC, to Georgina Jackson, Montreal, 7 March 1910,
Naomi Jackson Grove Fonds, Box 96, File 12.
39. Quoted in Housser, A Canadian Art Movement, pp. 79–80.
40. New York Times, 14 September 1910.
41. Quoted in Tippett, Stormy Weather, p. 80.
42. Canadian National Problems, ed. Ellery C. Stowell (Philadelphia: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1913), pp. 171–76.
43. Toronto Daily Star, 12 April 1913.
44. Toronto Daily Mail & Empire, 5 April 1913.
45. Quoted in Stacey, “Tom Thomson as Applied Artist,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 51.
46. Quoted in Hill, “Tom Thomson, Painter,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 117.
47. Gail Dexter, “Tom Thomson’s Dollar-a-Month Shack Becomes a Group of Seven Shrine,” Toronto Daily Star, 1 June 1968. I am grateful to Christine Lynett for allowing
me to see this clipping, which is in her archive of the Tweedale family papers.
The “middle-aged woman” who related the story to Dexter at the McMichael
Conservation Collection of Art in 1968 is not identified.
CHAPTER 8: THE HAPPY ISLES
1. Quoted in Bridges, A Border of Beauty, p. 15.
2. Quoted in Grigor, Arthur Lismer, p. 8.
3. Quoted in McLeish, September Gale, p. 48.
4. Quoted in ibid., p. 29.
5. Quoted in ibid., p. 22.
6. Parr Traill, The Canadian Settler’s Guide, p. 217.
7. Quoted in Brown and R. Cook, Canada, 1896–1921, p. 79.
8. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891–92), p. 173.
9. Edward Carpenter, The Art of Creation (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005).
My quotations all come from Chapter Two, “The Art of Creation.”
10. Edward Carpenter, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921),
p. 58. This work was originally published in 1889.
11. McLeish, September Gale, p. 9. See also Grigor, Arthur Lismer, p. 16.
12. McLeish, September Gale, p. 30.
13. Liz Lundell, Old Muskoka: Century Cottages & Summer Estates (Erin, ON: Boston Mills
Press, 2003), pp. 80, 103–5.
14. Quoted in Grigor, Arthur Lismer, p. 62.
15. William Velores Uttley, A History of Kitchener, Ontario (Waterloo: Chronicle Press, 1937),
p. 87.
16. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 67.
17. See the following of Jackson’s letters to his mother, Naomi Jackson Grove Fonds:
April 1909 (Box 96, File 11); 25 March 1908 (Box 96, File 10); 5 June 1909 (Box 96, File 11);
8 December 1906 (Box 96, File 3).
18. See Rosa M. Breithaupt, interview with H. Spencer Clark, 21 August 1978, Breithaupt Hewetson Clark Collection, University of Waterloo. For the location of the Clement cottage, see “Note for Portage Point Log,” Florence Clement Papers, Clement Bowlby Family Fonds, University of Waterloo.
19. Rosa M. Breithaupt, interview with H. Spencer Clark.
20. See the Florence Clement Papers, Clement Bowlby Family Fonds. For Jackson’s reference to the “happy isles,” see A.Y. Jackson, Murray Bay, QC, to Florence Clement, Toronto, 14 March 1926, Clement Bowlby Fam
ily Fonds.
21. Quoted in Reid, The Group of Seven, p. 34.
22. Quoted in Housser, A Canadian Art Movement, pp. 85–86.
23. William Broadhead to the Broadhead family, LD 1980/15b, Sheffield Archives.
24. Quoted in Lynda Jessup, “Prospectors, Bushwhackers, Painters: Antimodernism and the Group of Seven,” International Journal of Canadian Studies 17 (Spring 1998), p. 193.
25. Quoted in Lamb, The Canadian Art Club, p. 6.
26. Quoted in Harper, Painting in Canada, p. 229.
27. Canadian Art, Winter 1955.
28. Corinne Lyman, “Avant Propos,” Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by John G. Lyman (Montreal: Art Association of Montreal, 1913).
29. Montreal Daily Star, 25 May 1913.
30. Montreal Daily Star, 23 May 1913.
31. Montreal Daily Star, 10 May 1913.
32. “Growing Pains,” in The Complete Writings of Emily Carr, ed. Doris Shadbolt
(Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997), p. 437.
33. Toronto Globe, 4 June 1914.
34. Quoted in Ord, The National Gallery of Canada, p. 77.
35. David R. Spencer, “Fact, Fiction or Fantasy: Canada and the War to End All Wars,”
in Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt, eds., Picturing the Past: Media, History and Photography (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois, 1999), p. 191.
36. Toronto Daily Star, 12 December 1913. The entirety of the article is reprinted in Fetherling, Documents in Canadian Art, pp. 43–48.
37. Fry, Vision and Design, p. 27.
38. Quoted in J.B. Bullen, ed., Post-Impressionists in England, p. 99.
39. Toronto Daily Star, 18 December 1913.
40. Emerson’s Literary Criticism, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 19.
41. Quoted in Colleen Denney, At the Temple of Art: The Grosvenor Gallery, 1877–1890
(Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), p. 220.
42. For this neglected aspect of modernism, see Richard R. Brettell, Modern Art
1851–1929: Capitalism and Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
pp. 197–210; and especially Walter L. Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2007).
43. I take the term “ethno-scape” from Athena S. Leoussi, ed., Encyclopaedia of Nationalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 2001), p. 10.
44. Quoted in Nina Maria Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence:
The Painter in His Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 2.
45. For Picasso’s Catalan nationalism at this time, see Christopher Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 136–47.
Although born in Málaga in Andalusia, Picasso regarded Catalonia as his true home:
see Lael Wertenbaker, The World of Picasso, 1881–1973 (New York: Time-Life Books, 1967),
p. 13. For Stein’s comments on Picasso’s work, see Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother:
Gertrude & Leo Stein (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), p. 306.
46. Quoted in W.L. Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes, p. 139.
47. This term was originally the motto of The Nation, the short-lived paper of Young Ireland in the 1840s: “To create and foster public opinion in Ireland and to make it racy of the soil.” By the 1890s the phrase was frequently used in Canada, especially with regard to poetry: see D.M.R. Bentley, The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, 1880–1897
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 28.
CHAPTER 9: RITES OF PAYSAGE
1. The Thoreau MacDonald Collection, The Papers of L. Bruce Pierce, Binder 1, File 25,
MCAC Archives. For the average house price in Toronto, see R. Harris,
Unplanned Suburbs, p. 162.
2. See W. Douglas Brown, “The Arts and Crafts Architecture of Eden Smith,” in
David Latham, ed., Scarlet Hunters: Pre-Raphaelitism in Canada (Toronto:
Archives of Canadian Art and Design, 1998), pp. 144–53.
3. Toronto Daily Star, 28 February 1914.
4. Dennis Reid has written that the Studio Building was an “essentially Arts and Crafts utopia of a non-hierarchical community of artist-craftsmen living in a totally aestheticized environment in healthy accord with nature” (“Tom Thomson and the Arts and Crafts Movement,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 79).
5. Lawren Harris, 4760 Belmont Ave., Vancouver, to A.Y. Jackson, Toronto,
14 January 1955, MCAC Archives.
6. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 27.
7. Quoted in Adamson, Lawren S. Harris, p. 49.
8. Eric Brown, quoted in Dorothy M. Farr, J.W. Beatty, 1869–1941 (Kingston: Agnes
Etherington Art Centre, 1981), p. 28.
9. Toronto Globe, 13 April 1912. For Heming’s biography, see his entry in Henry James Morgan, ed., Canadian Men and Women of the Time (Toronto: William Briggs, 1912), p. 521.
10. Floyd S. Chalmers, “Arthur Heming,” 5 August 1941, p. 1, Arthur Heming Collection,
Box 1, File 1, National Gallery of Canada Archives; Laing, Memoirs of an Art Dealer,
vol. 2, p. 40.
11. Chalmers, “Arthur Heming,” p. 11.
12. The Lamps, October 1911.
13. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 33.
14. Quoted in Stacey, “A Contact in Context,” p. 44.
15. Toronto Daily Star, 28 February 1914.
16. Ibid.
17. Quoted in Hunter, “Mapping Tom,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 45.
18. Toronto Globe, 29 June 1904.
19. See Jeffrey W. Andersen, “The Art Colony at Old Lyme,” in Connecticut and American Impressionism (Storrs, CT: University of Connecticut, 1980), pp. 114–37; and
Arthur Heming, Miss Florence and the Artists of Old Lyme (Old Lyme: Lyme
Historical Society, 1971).
20. Naomi Jackson Grove Fonds: 20 November 1908, Container 96, File 7;
20 November 1908, Container 96, File 7; 4 November 1906, Container 96, File 2;
and 11 November 1906, Container 96, File 3.
21. Naomi Jackson Grove Fonds: 26 September 1907, Container 96, File 6;
14 November 1907, Container 96, File 6; 26 July 1908, Container 96, File 7;
12 December 1907, Container 96, File 6; 26 June and 2 July 1908, Container 96, File 9;
and 1 June 1912, Container 96, File 16.
22. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 34.
23. Christina Bertram was a friend of Jackson’s cousin Florence Clement: see the many references to her in the Florence Clement Papers, Clement Bowlby Family Fonds. For the information on Christina Bertram’s interactions with the painters, I am grateful to Mary Gordon for passing on to me the recollections of Christina’s late granddaughter Ruth Hamilton Upjohn (personal communication, 6 June 2007).
24. Quoted in Joan Murray, “Tom Thomson,” in Morrin et al., The Advent of Modernism, p. 167. Murray repeats the story in The Birth of the Modern: Post-Impressionism in Canadian Art, c. 1900–1920 (Oshawa: Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2002), p. 78. Jackson made this claim in an interview with Murray on 4 March 1971.
25. Paul Signac, quoted in Floyd Ratliff, Paul Signac and Color in Neo-Impressionism
(New York: Rockefeller University Press, 1992), p. 262; and D.S. MacColl, quoted in
Kate Flint, ed., The Impressionists in England: The Critical Reception (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 174.
26. For this second phase of Neo-Impressionism, see John Sillevis, A Feast of Colour:
Post-Impressionists from Private Collections (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 1990),
27. Quoted in ibid., p. 198.
28. La Grande Revue, 10 October 1907. For an excellent study of this process, see Roger Benjamin, “The Decorative Landscape, Fauvism and the Arabesque of Observation,”
The Art Bulletin 75 (June 1993), pp. 295–316.
29. Quoted in Adamson, Lawren S. Harris, p. 49.
30. Quoted in ibid.
31. For Segantini’s al fresco painting expeditions, see Luigi Villari, Giovanni Segantini
(London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901), p. 152. For his reputation and influence in the years after his death, see Annie-Paule Quinsac, Segantini: Catalogo generale, 2 vols. (Milan: Electa, 1982). The first person to note Segantini’s influence on Harris appears to have been
Jeremy Adamson: see Lawren S. Harris, p. 50.
32. Housser, A Canadian Art Movement, p. 91.
33. The Studio, 15 September 1914.
34. The Studio, 15 July 1914.
35. Toronto Daily Star, 14 March 1914.
36. The Studio, 15 July 1914.
37. Jackson, “Foreword,” Catalogue of an Exhibition of Paintings by the Late Tom Thomson, March 1 to March 21, 1919 (Montreal: The Arts Club, 1919).
38. A.Y. Jackson, Canoe Lake, to J.E.H. MacDonald, Studio Building, 14 February 1914,
J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 2.
39. Ibid.
40. Quoted in Hill, “Tom Thomson, Painter,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, pp. 123–24.
41. Quoted in Nasgaard, The Mystic North, p. 166.
42. Quoted in Hill, The Group of Seven, p. 51.
43. Brooke, Letters from America, p. 76.
44. J.E.H. MacDonald, “A Landmark of Canadian Art,” in Fetherling, Documents in Canadian Art, p. 40.
45. R.P. Little, “Some Recollections of Tom Thomson,” p. 213.
46. Saunders, Algonquin Story, p. 167.
47. A.Y. Jackson, Canoe Lake, to J.E.H. MacDonald, Studio Building, 14 February 1914, J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 2.
48. Saunders, Algonquin Story, pp. 129–30, 179.
49. Mark Robinson, transcript of interview, pp. 2, 3.
50. Kemp, “A Recollection of Tom Thomson.”
51. Mark Robinson, transcript of interview, pp. 6–7.
52. Toronto Daily Star, 28 February 1914.
53. Gaye I. Clemson, Algonquin Voices: Selected Stories of Canoe Lake Women