/ARTS WEEKLY/ART-CANADA: Painter’s Northern Works Helped Create Wilderness Myth

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Mark Bourrie

OTTAWA, Aug 20 2002 (IPS) - Tom Thomson’s career was the stuff of artistic legend: a young, talented, solitary man takes to the forest and almost instantly re-interprets the way his country sees its vast wilderness.

He spends his summers guiding tourists on trout fishing expeditions to support his painting career, then winters in a cabin in a rustic corner of Toronto to paint dramatic canvasses that will, within a decade, become familiar to school children.

And, at 42, he dies mysteriously, leaving his admirers to craft myths that link the artist even more strongly with his country’s craving for an identity that is neither British nor American.

Canada’s National Gallery has launched a major show of Thomson, one of the country’s best-known and enigmatic artists, which will attempt over the next three years to link Canada’s first home-grown artistic movement and the young country’s thirst for a separate identity.

Thomson’s work was at the forefront of a movement to create a unique new Canadian artistic culture. Technically, it shared much with the work of the French Impressionists, but its focus was distinctly northern.

The painter belonged to a group of nationalistic artists centred in Toronto. Finding that the urban landscape offered little to set the country apart, they looked to the vast wilderness that stretches across the middle of the country: the wild and empty shores of the northern Great Lakes, the dramatic cliffs of the Canadian Shield, and, after Thomson’s death, the wide horizons of the arctic.

They turned scenes of forests, hills and lake shorelines into political statements of a strong, unspoiled North that challenged its citizens and tempered their character.

Even his mysterious death added to his legend. Thomson disappeared in the summer of 1917 while on a painting trip in northern Ontario province. His body was found several days later with a length of fishing line tied to one leg and a massive gash on his temple. A coroner ruled the death a canoe accident, but most Thomson experts believe he was murdered.

Thomson died exactly 50 years after Canada was granted quasi-independent status by Great Britain. The country had just come through two decades of internal struggles over free trade with the United States and concerning its military role within the British Empire.

Thomson grew up in a small town, trained as a graphic artist and spent most of his adult life in cities in Canada and the United States. In 1911, he deliberately set out to create his new persona as a man of the wilderness.

His first paintings show his roots as a draftsman, but, by the end of his short career, he developed a bold, impressionistic style that relied on a stunning choice of colour for dramatic interpretations of wilderness scenes.

The art world, and many Canadians, would view these images as symbols of the Canadian psyche, despite the fact that most citizens lived on farms and in cities and rarely, if ever, visited the wilderness. Even today, the places where Thomson painted draw only a few thousand visitors a year.

He never ventured far from railways or roads, and, when painting in the wilderness, could return to his home base in Toronto within a few hours.

Thomson accomplished a great deal in a startlingly brief career. He painted for only six years in the woods of northern Ontario, but critics embraced his work from the start, with major Canadian galleries vying for his large canvasses.

He was constantly experimenting: it wasn’t unusual for Thomson to move trees, switch seasons and recklessly play with colour in his canvasses.

When he died, he left nearly 550 sketches and 45 larger works, all painted between 1911 and 1917, most of them pure landscape. “His inspiration,” says Charles Hill, the gallery’s curator of Canadian art, “came from nature.”

Later, Thomson’s friends would foster the myth that the country’s cultural elite shunned the artist. In fact, by the time he died, Canada’s largest galleries were bidding on his work and pressing his agent to put more pictures on the market, says co-curator Andrew Hunter.

For example, some of the exhibit’s best works are from the National Gallery’s own collection and were purchased during Thomson’s career or within months of his death.

The painter’s colleague, A.Y. Jackson, whose 50-year career as a landscape painter and founder of the Group of Seven painting school made him a force in Canadian art, wrote: “without Tom the north country seems a desolation of bush and rock. He was the guide, the interpreter, and we the guests.”

The National Gallery Thomson exhibit, a partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario, is the first major show on Thomson in more than 30 years. It will travel to Vancouver, Quebec City, Toronto, and Winnipeg over the next three years.

The exhibition is divided into sections designed by several individual curators. In features 140 of Thomson works, mostly small oil sketches made in the wilderness, chosen and arranged by the National Gallery’s curator of Canadian art, Charles Hill.

It is also placed in the context of the budding Canadian nationalism of the time. Articles written about Thomson after his death echo the writings about fallen Canadian soldiers, who were killed by the thousands that summer at the Somme and Vimy Ridge.

“It’s impossible,” co-curator Hunter says, “to project a foolproof, clear picture of Thomson. We’re so far removed and the evidence so scant. Thomson in a sense has become a work of art. It’s about interpretation.”