by Ross King
35. Tom Thomson, Mowat Lodge, Canoe Lake, to J.E.H. MacDonald, 22 July 1915,
Tom Thomson Collection, MCAC Archives.
36. Water Flowers and Wildflowers (MCAC); Marguerites, Wood Lilies and Vetch
(Art Gallery of Ontario); Canadian Wildflowers (National Gallery of Canada).
37. “Krakatoa Provided Backdrop to Munch’s Scream,” The Age, 11 December 2003;
“The Scream, East of Krakatoa,” New York Times, 8 February 2004; “How Old Masters
Are Helping Study of Global Warming,” The Guardian, 1 October 2007. The theory
about Munch and Krakatoa was first put forward by Texas State University professors
Don Olson, Marilynn Olson and Russell Doescher. For reports of the 1915 earthquake
in California, see the New York Times, 22 and 23 May 1915.
38. David Lee, Lumber Kings and Shantymen: Logging, Lumber and Timber in the Ottawa
Valley (Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 2006), p. 179.
39. Oxley, The Young Woodsman, p. 87.
40. Lee, Lumber Kings and Shantymen, pp. 48–49.
41. This image has been noted by Andrew Hunter, who notes that the cross
“seems so obvious and perfectly positioned that it is hard to believe it wasn’t
intentional” (“Mapping Tom,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 34).
42. Quoted in Jonathan Vance, Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the
First World War (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997), p. 51.
43. Toronto Daily Star, 1 May 1915. See also the front-page report on 1 June 1915,
which describes “little wooden crosses on which is rudely painted the man’s
name, number, and the regiment.”
44. Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, and Annette Becker,
France and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
p. 169; and Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, p. 118.
45. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 92; and Alan Gordon,
Making Public Pasts: The Contested Terrain of Montreal’s Public Memories, 1891–1930 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), p. 99.
CHAPTER 3: WHITE FEATHERS AND TANGLED GARDENS
1. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 42.
2. Ibid.
3. L.C. Giles, Liphook, Bramshott and the Canadians (Liphook, Hants: Bramshott
and Liphook Preservation Society, 1986).
4. A.Y. Jackson, letter postmarked 27 January 1916, Bramshott, Hants, to
Georgina Jackson, Naomi Jackson Grove Fonds, Box 96, File 19.
5. A.Y. Jackson, Bramshott Camp, Hants, to J.E.H. MacDonald, Studio Building,
J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 2,.
6. Quoted in Alexander John Watson, Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), p. 86.
7. A.Y. Jackson, undated letter, “Somewhere in France,” to Georgina Jackson,
Naomi Jackson Grove Fonds, Box 96, File 19.
8. The Studio, 15 June 1917.
9. M.O. Hammond, “Journal, 1903–1934,” 10 December 1915, M.O. Hammond Fonds,
Archives of Ontario. I am grateful to Scott James for this source.
10. Quoted in Ian E. Wilson, “Creating the Future: Canada and Its Provinces,”
in Yvan Lamonde, Patricia Lockhart Fleming, and Fiona A. Black, eds., The History of the Book in Canada, vol. 2, 1840–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), p. 175.
11. Hammond, “Journal, 1903–1934,” 10 December 1915. For speculation that the lumberjack is modelled on Thomson, see Landry, The MacCallum-Jackman Cottage Mural Paintings, p. 33.
12. Quoted in Madsen, The Art Nouveau Style, p. 246. The term “cloisonné” refers to the line of metal surrounding the coloured areas in medieval enamel techniques.
13. Quoted in Philip Ball, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (London: Viking, 2001), p. 153.
14. Quoted in Charles A. Riley II, Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy,
Painting and Architecture, Literature, Music and Psychology (Lebanon, NH: University
Press of New England, 1995), p. 73.
15. Quoted in Robinson, “Honey, I’m Home,” in Ballantyne, What is Architecture?, p. 122.
16. Toronto Daily Mail & Empire, 11 March 1916.
17. Toronto Daily Star, 11 March 1916.
18. Saturday Night, 18 March 1916. Ruskin’s attack on Whistler was published in
Fors Clavigera, July 1877.
19. Quoted in Bishop, “MacDonald and the Club,” in Stacey and Bishop,
J.E.H. MacDonald, Designer, p. 113.
20. Saturday Night, September 1906, April 1911, August 1915. These articles are reprinted in Thomas Thorner and Thor Frohn-Nielsen, eds., A Country Nourished
on Self-Doubt: Documents in Post-Confederation Canadian History
(Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2003), pp. 124–25, 218.
21. Toronto Daily Star, 16 March 1916. Ahrens’s article, on p. 3, is entitled “The New Schools
of Art.”
22. For biographical information on Ahrens, I am indebted to Kim Bullock.
23. Madonna Ahrens, “Carl Ahrens: His Life and Work,” unpublished manuscript
in the archival collection of Kim Bullock.
24. The Lamps, December 1911.
25. Madonna Ahrens, “Carl Ahrens: His Life and Work.”
26. See G.S. Simes, “Slang Terms for Homosexuals in English,” in Wayne Dynes, ed., Encyclopedia of Homosexuality (New York: Garland, 1990), p. 1202; and Richard A. Spears, “On the Etymology of Dike,” American Speech 60 (Winter 1985), p. 318.
27. Quoted in S.K. Tillyard, The Impact of Modernism: The Visual Arts in Edwardian England (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 121. For “greenery-yallery,” see Miranda B. Hickman,
The Geometry of Modernism: The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H.D. and Yeats
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), p. 266, note 38. The term was first used to
mock aesthetes in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience (1881).
28. Saturday Night, 8 April 1916.
29. Kafka, Letter to His Father, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins
(New York: Schocken Books, 1953), p. 99.
30. Toronto Daily Star, 10 August 1915.
31. Toronto Daily Star, 28 September 1914. See also the report in the Daily Star on
12 September 1914.
32. Toronto Daily Star, 28 December 1915.
33. Quoted in Jeffrey A. Keshen, Propaganda and Censhorship during Canada’s Great War (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1996), p. 21.
34. W.R. Chadwick, The Battle for Berlin, Ontario: An Historical Drama (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992), p. 68.
35. Quoted in Brown and R. Cook, Canada, 1896–1921, p. 219.
36. Quoted in Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief, p. 112.
37. Quoted in Brown and R. Cook, Canada, 1896–1921, p. 219.
38. Quoted in Tippett, Stormy Weather, p. 85.
39. J.E.H. MacDonald, Studio Building, Toronto, to the editor, Toronto Daily Star,
17 March 1916, MCAC Archives.
40. Uttley, A History of Kitchener, pp. 85–86.
41. For the Breithaupts’ experiences in Berlin (and then Kitchener) during the Great War,
see Chadwick, The Battle for Berlin, pp. 60–73.
42. Toronto Globe, 27 March 1916.
43. Exhibition of Contemporary Scandinavian Art, p. 58.
44. MacDonald’s inscription can be seen on p. 130 of the copy of the Albright catalogue held in the MCAC Archi
ves.
45. Canadian Magazine, April 1912; The Studio, December 1918.
46. For information on the Battle of Mount Sorrel, see Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, pp. 131–37.
47. A.Y. Jackson, “in a dugout somewhere in Flanders,” to Georgina Jackson, Montreal, 10 April 1916, Naomi Jackson Grove Fonds, Box 96, File 19; and A.Y. Jackson, 457316 Signal Station, 60th Canadian Battalion, to J.E.H. MacDonald, Studio Building, 31 May 1916,
J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 2.
48. Quoted in Watson, Marginal Man, p. 92.
49. The following details are found in a letter Jackson wrote to MacDonald: A.Y. Jackson, 247 Lees Road, Oldham, to J.E.H. MacDonald, Studio Building, 10 September 1916,
J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 2.
50. A description of the No. 1 Canadian General Hospital can be found in the Sophie Hoerner Fonds, Letters 1915–1917, MG30 E290, LAC.
CHAPTER 4: THE LINE OF BEAUTY
1. Bruce Cane, ed., It Made You Think of Home: The Haunting Journal of Deward Barnes, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1916–1919 (Toronto: Dundurn, 2004), p. 32.
2. Keshen, Propaganda and Censorship during Canada’s Great War, pp. 32–33; and
Toronto Daily Star, 11 July 1916.
3. Accounts of Thomson painting the sketch are found in Harris, The Story of the Group
of Seven, p. 19, and two letters written by Dr. MacCallum in 1921, quoted in Hill,
“Tom Thomson, Painter,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 137. For Turner’s adventures on board
the Ariel, see Kenneth Clark, The Romantic Rebellion: Romantic versus Classic Art
(London: John Murray, 1973), p. 243.
4. Dr. James M. MacCallum Papers, National Gallery of Canada Archives, quoted in J. Murray, “Tom Thomson’s Letters,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 302.
5. Ed Godin to Blodwen Davies, 17 November 1930, Blodwen Davies Fonds.
6. Dr. James M. MacCallum Papers, National Gallery of Canada Archives, quoted in J. Murray, “Tom Thomson’s Letters,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 302.
7. Thomson wrote to MacDonald on the bottom of a letter he received from Eric Brown:
Eric Brown, Ottawa, to Tom Thomson, 28 June 1916, MCAC Archives.
8. Quoted in Kelly, J.E.H. MacDonald, Lewis Smith, Edith Smith, p. 9.
9. Quoted in ibid., p. 16.
10. Quoted in Grigor, Arthur Lismer, p. 36.
11. Darroch, Bright Land, p. 37.
12. Quoted in McLeish, September Gale, pp. 57–58.
13. Quoted in Tooby, Our Home and Native Land, unpaginated.
14. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, eds., The Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols.
(London: George Allen, 1903–12), vol. 11, p. 263.
15. E.T. Cook and Wedderburn, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 27, p. 96.
16. Grigor, Arthur Lismer, p. 9.
17. Arthur Lismer, Bedford, NS, to Dr. James M. MacCallum, 20 December 1916, MCAC Archives.
18. J.E.H. MacDonald, Studio Building, to Arthur Lismer, Bedford, NS, 21 December 1916,
MCAC Archives.
19. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 52.
20. Brian Winter, Chronicles of a County Town: Whitby Past and Present
(self-published, 1999), p. 299.
21. Mark Robinson, letter to Blodwen Davies, 11 May 1930, Blodwen Davies Fonds.
For a good overview of McGillivray’s career, see J. Murray, Tom Thomson:
Design for a Canadian Hero, p. 77; and idem., The Birth of the Modern, pp. 96–97.
22. Mark Robinson, letter to Blodwen Davies, 11 May 1930, Blodwen Davies Fonds.
23. P.G. Hamerton, quoted in Flint, The Impressionists in England, p. 95.
24. Burlington Magazine, January 1910, reprinted in Reed, A Roger Fry Reader, p. 76.
25. Gil Blas, 20 March 1906; and L’Aurore, 22 March 1906. For much of the following information on Fauves, the decorative landscape and the arabesque, I am indebted
to Roger Benjamin, “The Decorative Landscape, Fauvism and the Arabesque
of Observation,” The Art Bulletin 75 (June 1993), pp. 295–316.
26. Paul Signac, D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionisme (Paris: H. Floury, 1911), p. 89.
This work was first published in 1899.
27. Maurice Denis, Théories, 1890–1910: Du symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique (Paris: L. Rouart et J. Watelin, 1920), p. 170.
28. A.Y. Jackson, Canoe Lake, to J.E.H. MacDonald, Studio Building, 14 February 1914,
J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 2.
29. The International Studio, 31 September 1919.
30. Gil Blas, 20 March 1906.
31. André Lhote, La Peinture, le coeur et l’esprit: Correspondance inédite (1907–1924),
2 vols., ed. Alain Rivière, Jean-Georges Morgenthaler and Françoise Garcia
(Bordeaux: Musée des beaux-arts de Bordeaux, 1986), vol. 1, pp. 29–30.
32. See Sandra Nadaff, Arabesque: Narrative Structure and the Aesthetics of Repetition in the 1001 Nights (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), p. 113.
33. Félix Fénéon, Oeuvres plus que complètes, ed. Joan U. Halperin (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1970), vol. 1, p. 177. On Signac’s use of the arabesque, see Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France, pp. 162–66.
34. Jack Flam, ed., Matisse on Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), p. 210.
35. Quoted in Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900–1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 35. For Matisse’s expression
of abstract ideas through the arabesque, see also Flam’s “Introduction: A Life in Words
and Pictures,” Matisse on Art, pp. 17–1.
36. Quoted in Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief, p. 56.
37. Ottawa Evening Journal, 18 November 1916.
38. Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief, pp. 53, 57.
39. Quoted in Keshen, Propaganda and Censorship during Canada’s Great War,
pp. 12–13.
40. Quoted in Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, The Somme (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 314; and Martin Gilbert, The Somme: Heroism and Horror in the First
World War (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), p. 243.
41. Edward A. Johnson, Fire and Vegetation Dynamics: Studies from the North American Boreal Forest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 100.
42. For the classic statement of this idea, see Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature.
43. Jaroslav Folda, Crusader Art in the Holy Land: From the Third Crusade to the Fall of Acre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 297.
44. Quoted in J. Murray, “Tom Thomson’s Letters,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, pp. 303–4.
45. Saturday Night, 25 December 1926. On John Sloan Gordon’s career, see D. Grace Inglis, “John Sloan Gordon,” in Dictionary of Hamilton Biography, vol. 3 (1925–1939)
(W.L. Griffin: Hamilton, 1992), pp. 78–79. For his interactions with Thomson,
see Paul Duval, Canadian Water Colour Painting (Toronto: Burns & MacEachern, 1954),
p. 297.
46. Owen Sound Sun, 10 April 1917.
CHAPTER 5: IMPERISHABLE SPLENDOUR
1. A.Y. Jackson, Brundall House Hospital, Brundall, Norfolk, to Arthur Lismer,
25 June 1916, MCAC Archives.
2. A.Y. Jackson, Lakenham Military Hospital, Norwich, to Georgina Jackson, 14 June 1916, Naomi Jackson Grove Fonds, Box 96, File 18.
3. Quoted in Watson, Marginal Man, p. 77.
4. Quoted in Watson, Marginal Man, p. 92. For Watson’s discussion of Harold Innis’s psychological scars and reticence to speak of his experiences, see pp. 77–79.
> 5. Quoted in Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 171.
6. A.Y. Jackson, Brundall House Hospital, Brundall, Norfolk, to Arthur Lismer,
25 June 1916, MCAC Archives. For Jackson’s reunion with Baker-Clack, see Jackson,
A Painter’s Country, p. 43.
7. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, pp. 43–44.
8. A.Y. Jackson, Brundall House Hospital, Brundall, Norfolk, to Arthur Lismer,
25 June 1916, MCAC Archives.
9. A.Y. Jackson, St. Leonard’s, East Sussex, to Catherine Breithaupt, 9 April 1917, Catherine Breithaupt Bennett Papers.
10. See Rosa M. Breithaupt, diary entry, 21 May 1913, Breithaupt Hewetson Clark Collection, University of Waterloo Library; and Rosa M. Breithaupt, interview with
H. Spencer Clark.
11. A.Y. Jackson, to Catherine Breithaupt, 9 April 1917, Catherine Breithaupt Bennett Papers.
12. The Times, 10 April 1917.
13. Brown and R. Cook, Canada, 1896–1921, p. 218.
14. The Times, 3 July 1917.
15. Ottawa Citizen, 3 July 1917.
16. J.L. Granatstein, “Conscription in the Great War,” in MacKenzie, Canada and the
First World War, p. 67.
17. See The Times, 10 August 1917.
18. Toronto Daily Star, 7 July 1917.
19. Toronto Daily Star, 4 July 1917.
20. The Times, 10 August 1917.
CHAPTER 6: SHADES OF GREY
1. Tom Thomson to John Thomson, letter postmarked 16 April 1917, quoted in J. Murray,
“Tom Thomson’s Letters,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 303.
2. Tom Thomson to Tom Harkness, letter postmarked 23 April 1917, quoted in
J. Murray, “Tom Thomson’s Letters,” in Reid, Tom Thomson, p. 305.
3. This claim is made by Mark Robinson: see the transcript of interview, p. 10. The Toronto Daily Star reported the death of Charles L. Scrim at the age of thirty-two in its
10 February 1921 edition.
4. R.P. Little, “Some Recollections of Tom Thomson,” p. 216.
5. Mark Robinson, letter to Blodwen Davies, 23 March 1930, Blodwen Davies Fonds.
6. Quoted in Joan Murray, Tom Thomson: The Last Spring (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1994),
p. 95.
7. R.P. Little, “Some Recollections of Tom Thomson,” p. 212.