Defiant Spirits
Page 51
22. Saturday Night, 3 January 1914. For information on Earlscourt, see R. Harris, Unplanned Suburbs, pp. 1–3 passim.
23. The Times, 29 August 1919.
24. Eates, Paul Nash, p. 21.
25. Canadian Theosophist, 15 July 1926.
26. W. Campbell, The Beauty, History, Romance and Mystery of the Canadian Lake Region, p. 93.
27. Housser, A Canadian Art Movement, p. 138.
28. Lawren Harris, Woodend, Allandale, ON, to J.E.H. MacDonald, August 1918,
MCAC Archives.
29. Brooke, Letters from America, pp. 99–100.
30. Lawren Harris, Woodend, Allandale, ON, to J.E.H. MacDonald, York Mills, undated letter [summer 1918], J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 3.
31. Ibid.
32. Lawren Harris, Woodend, Allandale, ON, to MacDonald, York Mills, 31 August 1918,
J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 3.
33. The Rebel, March 1918.
34. Lawren Harris, undated letter [summer 1918] to Frank Johnston, Mary Bishop Rodrik and Franz Johnston Collection, R320, Volume 1, File 7, LAC.
35. Lawren Harris, Woodend, Allandale, ON, to J.E.H. MacDonald, York Mills,
August 1918, MCAC Archives.
36. Mason, A Grand Eye for Glory, p. 17.
37. Casson, “Group Portrait,” in Fetherling, Documents in Canadian Art, p. 60.
38. Doris Speirs, interview with Charles Hill.
39. Sir Edmund Walker to Frank Johnston, 3 September 1918, Mary Bishop Rodrik
and Franz Johnston Collection, R320, Volume 1, File 7, LAC.
40. The Lamps, November 1919.
41. Harris, “The Group of Seven in Canadian History,” p. 34.
42. Quoted in Duval, The Tangled Garden, pp. 86–87.
43. Quoted in Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (London: Thames & Hudson, 1975), p. 19.
44. E.T. Cook and Wedderburn, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 3, p. 630, and
vol. 26, p. 115.
45. Naomi E. Maurer, The Pursuit of Spiritual Wisdom: The Thought and Art of Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin (Cranbury, NJ:Associated University Press, 1998), p. 60; Michael Robertson, Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 43–44; T.E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” in Herbert Read, ed., Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), p. 118; Davis, The Logic of Ecstasy, p. 48; and Whitman, Leaves of Grass, pp. 125, 167. For Whitman’s influence on Gauguin and Van Gogh, see Maurer, The Pursuit of Spiritual Wisdom, pp. 3, 16. Whitman mentions “Kanada”—often in relation to lakes and snow—in poems such as “Me Imperturbe,” “Our Old Feuillage,” “From Paumanok Starting
I Fly Like a Bird,” and “By Blue Ontario’s Shore.”
46. Quoted in Duval, The Tangled Garden, p. 87.
CHAPTER 9: THE GREAT KONODIAN ARMY
1. Quoted in Tippett, Stormy Weather, p. 96.
2. Quoted in ibid., pp. 95, 97.
3. Ibid., p. 97.
4. Ibid., p. 98.
5. Daily News, 13 August 1918.
6. Quoted in Hill, The Group of Seven, p. 65.
7. F.H. Varley, Camblain l’Abbé, to Arthur Lismer, 2 May 1919, photocopy in the
MCAC Archives.
8. Quoted in Tippett, Stormy Weather, p. 105.
9. Ibid., p. 109.
10. The Times, 12 and 15 November 1917, and 5 December 1917.
11. The Times, 30 July and 8 October 1917.
12. Quoted in Tippett, Stormy Weather, p. 106.
13. Quoted in Davis, The Logic of Ecstasy, p. 31.
14. Quoted in Tippett, Stormy Weather, p. 107.
15. The Observer, 5 January 1919.
16. Quoted in Holroyd, Augustus John, p. 435.
17. For John’s ignominious career with the CWMF, see Holroyd, Augustus John, pp. 430–36.
18. The Times, 6 May 1924.
19. Christian Science Monitor, 10 February 1919.
20. Canadian Magazine, November 1919.
21. The Observer, 19 January 1919; The Nation, 11 January 1919; and Sir Claude Phillips,
quoted in The Rebel, March 1919.
22. Quoted in Tippett, Stormy Weather, p. 110.
23. Quoted in ibid., p. 113.
24. The Rebel, March 1919.
25. Quoted in Susan Butlin, “Landscape as Memorial: A.Y. Jackson and the Landscape of the Western Front, 1917–1918,” Canadian Military History 5 (Autumn 1996), p. 68.
26. Quoted in Alex Danchev, Georges Braque: A Life (New York: Arcade, 2005), p. 140.
27. The Studio, September 1919.
28. Michael L. Hadley and Roger Flynn Sarty, Tin-pots and Pirate Ships: Canadian
Naval Forces and German Sea Raiders, 1880–1918 (Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), p. 190.
29. Toronto Globe, 11 October 1918.
30. Arthur Lismer, Bedford, NS, to J.E.H. MacDonald, Studio Building, 21 March 1919,
J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 1, LAC.
31. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 51.
32. Arthur Lismer, Bedford, NS, to J.E.H. MacDonald, Studio Building, 21 March 1919,
J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 1, LAC.
33. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 51.
34. Quoted in Hill, The Group of Seven, p. 85.
35. A.Y. Jackson, London, to J.E.H. MacDonald, York Mills, 6 April 1918, J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 2a, LAC.
Book iii
CHAPTER 1: THE SPIRIT OF YOUNG CANADA
1. Dan Franck, Bohemian Paris: Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse and the Birth of Modern Art,
trans. Cynthia Liebow (New York: Grove Press, 2003), p. 136.
2. A.Y. Jackson, 247 Lees Road, Oldham, to Arthur Lismer, 22 May 1918,
MCAC Archives.
3. Quoted in Hill, The Group of Seven, p. 43.
4. Toronto Daily Star, 26 March 1919.
5. A.Y. Jackson, undated letter to the editor of the Montreal Daily Star, c. 1919,
J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 2a.
6. Quoted in Adamson, Lawren S. Harris, p. 76.
7. Toronto Telegram, 8 March 1919; The Weekly Sun, 26 March 1919.
8. Quoted in Zurier, Picturing the City, pp. 121–22.
9. Quoted in Hill, The Group of Seven, p. 83.
10. Quoted in ibid., p. 81.
11. Saturday Night, May 1919; Mail & Empire, 10 May 1919.
12. A.Y. Jackson, Shoreham-by-Sea, to Mrs. J.E.H. MacDonald, 18 November 1916,
J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 2a.
13. Laing, Memoirs of an Art Dealer, vol. 1, p. 24.
14. Quoted in McLeish, September Gale, p. 65.
15. Arthur Lismer, Bedford, NS, to J.E.H. MacDonald, Studio Building, J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 1.
16. Quoted in McLeish, September Gale, p. 69.
17. Tippett, Art at the Service of War, p. 94.
18. F.H. Varley, Camblain l’Abbé, to Arthur Lismer, 2 May 1919, MCAC Archives.
19. Tippett, Stormy Weather, pp. 46–47.
20. Quoted in ibid., p. 120.
21. Quoted in ibid., pp. 145–46.
22. Toronto Daily Star, 23 August 1919.
23. New York Times, 15 June 1919.
24. Nevinson, quoted in Michael J.K. Walsh, “‘A Veiled and Virgin Shore’: C.R.W. Nevinson and the (end of an) American Dream,” in Michael J.K. Walsh, ed., A Dilemma of English Modernism: Visual and Verbal Politics in the Life and Work of C.R.W. Nevinson
(1889–1949) (Cranbury, NJ: Associated Univers
ity Presses, 2007), p. 92.
25. New York Times, 8 June 1919.
26. Quoted in Holroyd, Augustus John, p. 433.
27. Quoted in Tippett, Art at the Service of War, p. 80.
28. Toronto Globe, 8 September 1919; Saturday Night, 13 September 1919.
29. Quoted in Tippett, Art at the Service of War, p. 88.
30. The Lamps, December 1919; The Rebel, October 1919.
31. Quoted in David P. Silcox, Painting Place: The Life and Work of David B. Milne (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 7. For details of Milne’s early life, see pp. 3–12.
32. Quoted in Morrin et al., The Advent of Modernism, p. 131.
33. Quoted in Francis M. Naumann, Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of
Man Ray (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p. 123.
34. Christian Science Monitor, 24 February 1913; New York Times, 3 November 1913.
35. Quoted in Silcox, Painting Place, p. 92. For Milne’s military service and work with the CWRO office, see ibid., pp. 89–116; and R.F. Wodehouse, “David Milne: 1918–19,”
National Gallery of Canada Bulletin 2 (1963), pp. 18–27.
36. Quoted in Silcox, Painting Place, p. 96.
37. New York Times, 3 November 1912.
38. Ibid.
39. Quoted in Silcox, Painting Place, p. 69. For Milne’s peregrinations through the Taconics, see his essay in the New York Evening Post entitled “One-Day Trip to the Taconic Wilds,” 28 April 1922.
CHAPTER 2: A SEPTENARY FATALITY
1. Quoted in Owen Dudley Edwards and Jennifer H. Litster, “The End of Canadian Innocence: L.M. Montgomery and the First World War,” in Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly, eds., L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999),
p. 45, note 5.
2. Papineau’s famous open letter to his cousin Henri Bourassa, an opponent of French-Canadian participation in the war, was first published in the Montreal Gazette on
28 July 1916, and then reprinted in The Times on 22 August 1916. It has been included
(with Bourassa’s response) in Thorner and Frohn-Nielsen, A Country Nourished on
Self-Doubt, pp. 218–25.
3. Brown and R. Cook, Canada, 1896–1921, p. 287.
4. Quoted in ibid., p. 338.
5. Quoted in Craig Heron, “Introduction,” The Workers’ Revolt in Canada, 1917–1925
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 5.
6. Montreal Gazette, 1 April 1918, The Times, 2, 3, 4 April 1918.
7. Quoted in Philip Ziegler, King Edward VIII: The Official Biography (London: Collins, 1990),
p. 119. For the report of the Prince’s visit to Fort William, see The Times, 10 September 1919.
8. Canadian Courier, 30 August 1919.
9. Ibid.
10. Quoted in Mackintosh, “The Development of Higher Urban Life,” p. 704.
11. Quoted in Zurier, Picturing the City, p. 41.
12. MacDonald regarded Reid as one of the “pioneers and encouragers” of Canadian art, and he admired his City Hall murals: see J.E.H. MacDonald, 40 Duggan Ave., Toronto, to
F.B. Housser, unsent letter dated 20 December 1926, MCAC Archives.
13. Quoted in Marylin Jean McKay, A National Soul: Canadian Mural Painting, 1860s–1930s (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), p. 49.
14. Quoted in McKay, A National Soul, p. 49. For Reid’s murals in Toronto, see ibid.,
pp. 39–41, 159–61.
15. Quoted in J.M. Bumstead, “Making Culture,” Canadian Historical Review 72 (1991), p. 265.
16. The Statesman, 22 March 1919; The Rebel, November 1919.
17. MacDonald described this journey in an article in the December 1919 issue of
The Lamps entitled “ACR 10557.”
18. The Times, 19 September 1919; and Dan Douglas, Northern Algoma: A People’s History (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1995), p. 94.
19. Frank Johnston, Hubert, ACR, to Florence Johnston, Toronto, 29 September, 1 October, 6 October 1919, Mary Bishop Rodrik and Franz Johnston Collection, R320, Volume 1,
File 8, LAC.
20. New York Times, 9 September 1919; The Times, 10 September 1919.
21. John Taliaferro, Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America’s Cowboy Artist (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996; reprinted, Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003),p. 216. The painting given to the Prince of Wales was When Law Dulls the Edge of Chance.
22. Hill, The Group of Seven, p. 84.
23. Quoted in Hill, The Group of Seven, p. 88.
24. Quoted in Farr, J.W. Beatty, p. 26.
25. Carl Schaefer, interview with Charles Hill.
26. Lawren Harris, Woodend, Allandale, ON, to J.E.H. MacDonald, the Studio Building,
Toronto, 7 August 1919, J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Container 1, File 3.
27. H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and
Philosophy (London: Theosophical Publishing Co., 1888), vol. 1, p. 158.
28. H.P. Blavatsky, “The Number Seven and Our Society,” Theosophist (September 1880);
and AE, “The Hour of Twilight,” Irish Theosophist, 15 February 1893, “The Element Language,” Irish Theosophist, 15 October 1893, and “The Ascending Cycle,”
Irish Theosophist, 15 November 1893.
29. Quoted in Mason, A Grand Eye for Glory, p. 38.
CHAPTER 3: ARE THESE NEW CANADIAN PAINTERS CRAZY?
1. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 55.
2. Canadian Magazine, December 1916.
3. Quoted in Milton A. Cohen, Movement, Manifesto, Melee: The Modernist Group, 1910–1914 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), p. 299.
4. Peter Howard Selz, Harold Joachim, and Perry T. Rathbone, Max Beckmann
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), p. 23.
5. Alasdair Alpin MacGregor, Percyval Tudor-Hart, 1873–1954: Portrait of an Artist
(London: P.R. Macmillan, 1961), p. 115.
6. Toronto Globe, 2 September 1920.
7. Percy Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment: An Intellectual Biography
(London: Hutchinson, 1950), p. 129.
8. Quoted in Cohen, Movement, Manifesto, Melee, p. 180. For Cohen’s discussion of how modernism became a casualty of the war, see pp. 180–82.
9. Quoted in Robin Walz, Modernism: A Short History of a Big Idea (Harlow, Essex: Pearson, 2008), p. 77.
10. A.J. Casson, “Reminiscences of the Group of Seven,” The Empire Club of Canada
Speeches, 1982–1983, ed. A. Carlyle Dunbar and Douglas L. Derry (Toronto: Empire Club Foundation, 1984) p. 52.
11. See Hill, The Group of Seven, p. 88, figure 33. William Colgate claimed that Harris was
the author of the piece: see Canadian Art: Its Origin & Development (Toronto: Ryerson
Press, 1967), p. 82.
12. Quoted in Tippett, Stormy Weather, p. 134.
13. Quoted in Tooby, “Orienting the True North,” in Tooby, The True North, p. 24–25.
14. Canadian Courier, 22 May 1920.
15. Christian Science Monitor, 7 June 1920.
16. Canadian Courier, 22 May 1920.
17. Quoted in Tippett, Stormy Weather, p. 128.
18. The Rebel 3, no. 5, 1919.
19. A.Y. Jackson, Toronto, to Georgina Jackson, Montreal, 11 May 1920, Naomi Jackson
Grove Fonds, Box 96, File 22.
20. Toronto Daily Star, 7 May 1920; Mail & Empire, 10 May 1920.
21. Quoted in Finlay, The Force of Culture, p. 29.
22. Quoted in ibid., p. 128.
23. F.H. Varley, Thornhill, to Eric Brown, 29 November 1919, photocopy of original held in Christopher Varley Curatorial Papers, Se
ries II, File 1, MCAC.
24. For the contemporary appreciation of this painting, see Mellen, The Group of Seven, p. 96.
25. A.Y. Jackson, Toronto, to Georgina Jackson, Montreal, 11 May 1920, Naomi Jackson Grove Fonds, Box 96, File 22.
26. Mail & Empire, 10 May 1920; Canadian Courier, 22 May 1920.
27. Quoted in Hill, The Group of Seven, p. 95.
28. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, p. 65.
29. Canadian Courier, 30 August 1919.
30. For MacDonald’s ex libris, see Stacey and Bishop, J.E.H. MacDonald, Designer,
pp. 100–103. For Jackson’s mural, see Jackson, A Painter’s Country, pp. 65–66. Some of
Jackson’s drawings for the mural are in the Firestone Collection at the Ottawa Art Gallery.
I am grateful to Chris Finn for information on tracking down (via fire plans) information
on the Kent-McClain factory and the fate of the mural, which seems to have been
destroyed in the 1930s.
31. Quoted in Hill, The Group of Seven, p. 125.
32. The Ubyssey, 18 November 1920.
33. Canadian Bookman, December 1920.
34. For this article and the responses to it, see Anton Wagner, “Saving the Nation’s Aesthetic Soul: B.K. Sandwell at the Montreal Herald, 1900–1914, and Saturday Night,
1932–1951,” in Anton Wagner, ed., Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian
Theatre Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 188–89.
35. Canadian Bookman, April 1919.
36. Walt Whitman, Specimen Days (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1882), pp. 164–65.
37. Charles Sangster, “The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay,” in The St. Lawrence and the
Saguenay, and Other Poems (Auburn, NY: Miller Orton & Mulligan, 1956), lines 1066–67.
38. Eric Brown, Ottawa, to Francis H. Johnston, 96 Keewatin Avenue, Toronto, 21 August 1918, Mary Bishop Rodrik and Franz Johnston Collection, R320, Volume 1,
File 7, LAC.
39. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Joel Porte, ed.,
Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of America 1983), pp. 70, 53.
40. Walt Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” in Francis Murphy ed.,
Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 1996), lines 3–4.
41. Quoted in H. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger and David Park Curry, “Introduction,”
American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885–1915