Thomson, Tom

Category: Artist and sculptor

Thomas John Thomson (August 5, 1877 – July 8, 1917) was a Canadian artist active in the early 20th century. During his short career he produced roughly 400 oil sketches on small wood panels along with around 50 larger works on canvas.

Thomson started painting not long after Europe had been taken by storm by the Impressionists and the Pointillists.  Georges-Pierre Seurat, for example was one of the leading French pointillists.  Seurat was born in Paris, on 2 December 1859, but died young on 29 March 1891 aged only 31.  Although Seurat’s paintings are of landscapes, they are monumental in size and the majority were done using sketches in his studio.  Thomson in contrast worked in the open air and his works consist almost entirely of landscapes depicting trees, skies, lakes, and rivers. The meticulous highly controlled painting style developed by Seurat in his Pointillist paintings, would never have worked for Thomson, so instead his paintings use broader brush strokes and a liberal application of paint to capture the fleeting Light and Movement, Beauty and Colour of the Ontario landscape.

Their aims were thus not so different.  Areas of pure colour, which when seen from afar give you a more vibrant living landscape bursting with shimmering light.  Tragically, Thomson also died young at 39.  But his influence lives on.  Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Thomson is that he was largely self-taught, whereas Seurat had had an academy training.  Thomson is thus much more of a mystical painter, acquiring his inspiration directly from his immersion in Nature and a simple fulfilling and loving life.

Although he died before the formal establishment of the Group of Seven [shown left] , Thomson is often considered an unofficial member.

His art is typically exhibited with the rest of the Group's, nearly all of which remains in Canada—mainly at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg and the Tom Thomson Art Gallery in Owen Sound.

From whence cometh inspiration?

Communing with nature

Born August 5, 1877, in Claremont, Ontario, Thomas John Thomson grew up on a farm in Leith, a small town near Owen Sound to which his family had moved when he was a few months old. He was the sixth of ten children of Margaret J. Matheson and John Thomson.  Thomson’s father was something of a naturalist, an interest he passed on to Tom.

Home schooling

Thomson was happy as a child, but ill.  And it was an illness which kept him at home and out of school.   Since part of the treatment, along with appropriate rest, was exercise, he was encouraged to wander freely through the countryside, and enjoyed long, uninterrupted hours of fishing and - initially - hunting. In this way, he developed his love of the outdoors. Later, he gave up shotgun and rifle, having found the look in a dying deer’s eyes too upsetting, but he stayed with fishing. 

Tom’s mother loved literature and, due to her influence, the family had a good library. Being home schooled, was thus no disadvantage, as their library contained a good cross section of books on archaeology, geology and astronomy, as well as poetry (Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott were special favourites) and fiction, particularly Charles Dickens and George Eliot.  Tom’s education was thus beneficially broad.

Beauty, music and art

The family also had time for music, and most of them played instruments or sang, or both. Tom played the cornet, violin and mandolin, and had a fine tenor voice. Almost all the family sketched.

Believing in the spiritual world – humility and gratitude

Thomson’s early work reveals an admiration for Robert Burns – a family favourite. He often painted Burns’s “Blessing” with a decorative surround, usually of landscape, as a gift for family members and friends.   The Blessing is more commonly known as the Selkirk Grace, and is ‘a prayer said afore eatin that's attreebute tae Robert Burns’:

Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be Thankit!

He also illustrated a short message of Henry van Dyke’s –  “The Foot Path to Peace,” which exhorts the reader “to be glad of life because it gives you a chance to love, and to work, and to play, and to look up at the stars…and to spend as much time as you can with body and with spirit in God’s out-of-doors.”  So there is also gratitude and humility in this belief in God’s kingdom and natural contentment.

Thomson often experienced self-doubt.  A. Y. Jackson recalled that in the fall of 1914, Thomson threw his sketch box into the woods out of frustration, and was "so shy he could hardly be induced to show his sketches". Several of the canvases he sent to exhibitions remained unsigned.  Thankfully the turning point in his career came in 1914, when the National Gallery of Canada, under the directorship of Eric Brown, began to acquire his paintings. Although the money was not enough to live on, it gave him more confidence in his ability and motivated him to keep going.

Early training

Moving out of doors

At the turn of the 20th century, Thomson met those who eventually formed the Group of Seven, including J. E. H. MacDonald, Lawren Harris, Frederick Varley, Franklin Carmichael and Arthur Lismer. MacDonald, encouraged his staff to paint outside in their spare time to better hone their skills. In December 1910, artist William Smithson Broadhead was hired, joined by Arthur Lismer in February 1911. Robson eventually hired Frederick Varley, followed by Franklin Carmichael in April 1911.
Although Thomson was not himself a member, it was at the Arts and Letters Club that MacDonald introduced Thomson to Lawren Harris.

Dr. James MacCallum, a frequent visitor to the Ontario Society of Artists' (OSA) exhibitions recognized Thomson's and A. Y. Jackson's talents and offered to cover their expenses for one year if they committed themselves to painting full time.  But Thomson hesitated.  MacCallum wrote that when he first saw Thomson's sketches, he recognized their "truthfulness, their feeling and their sympathy with the grim fascinating northland ... they made me feel that the North had gripped Thomson as it had gripped me since I was eleven when I first sailed and paddled through its silent places." After Thomson's death, it was Dr MacCallum who helped preserve and advocate for his work. 

MacDonald left Grip in November 1911 to do freelance work and spend more time painting, after the Ontario government purchased his canvas By the River (Early Spring) (1911).

Eventually Thomson accepted MacCallum's offer travelled around Ontario with his colleagues, especially to the wilderness of Ontario, which was to become a major source of inspiration.  And in May 1912, Thomson visited Algonquin Park—a major public park and forest reservation in Central Ontario—for the first time. Regarding Algonquin Park, he wrote in a letter to MacCallum: "The best I can do does not do the place much justice in the way of beauty."

He became enraptured with the area and repeatedly returned, typically spending his winters in Toronto and the rest of the year in the Park.

The lure of love

There is no doubt at all that Thomson was attracted to Algonquin Park for its own sake, but there may have been an added attraction that rarely gets mentioned.  While returning to Toronto in November 1912, Thomson stopped in Huntsville. The visit was to meet with Winfred Trainor, whose family owned a cottage on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park.

Trainor was later rumoured to have been engaged to Thomson with a wedding planned for late 1917, so in the end love also played a part in the creative process and grief.

Left Sunset 1915

Artistic flowering (1915–17)

In the spring of 1915, Thomson returned to Algonquin Park earlier than he had in any previous year and had already painted twenty-eight sketches by April 22. From April through July, he spent much of his time ‘fishing’, assisting groups on several different lakes, and sketching ‘when he had time’.  In July, he was invited to send paintings to the Nova Scotia Provincial Exhibition in September. Because he was in Algonquin Park, his friends selected three works for him.

In late November, he returned to Toronto and moved into a shack behind the Studio Building that Harris and MacCallum fixed up for him, renting it for $1 a month.  Artists earn practically nothing, and a shack is hardly suitable accommodation for a wife, he must have been in turmoil.  But in the end angst and separation from his lover seems to have produced some of his most memorable work

But maybe we know better now.

Death

References

• Davis, Ann (1992). The Logic of Ecstasy: Canadian Mystical Painting, 1920–1940.
• Harris, Lawren (July 1926). "The Revelation of Art in Canada". Canadian Theosophist. 7: 85–88.
• Pringle, Gertrude (April 10, 1926). "Tom Thomson: The Man, Painter of the Wilds Was a Very Unique Individuality". Saturday Night. 41 (21): 5.
• Jackson, A. Y. (1919). Foreword. Catalogue of an Exhibition of Paintings by the Late Tom Thomson, March 1 to March 21, 1919. By Arts Club of Montreal.
• ——— (1935). Foreword. A Study of Tom Thomson: The Story of a Man Who Looked for Beauty and for Truth in the Wilderness. By Davies, Blodwen

Observations

For iPad/iPhone users: tap letter twice to get list of items.

• Thomson, Tom - Algonquin Park winter afternoon 1914
• Thomson, Tom - Moonlight
• Thomson, Tom - Moonlight and birches
• Thomson, Tom - Northern Lake
• Thomson, Tom - Northern River 1914–15
• Thomson, Tom - The Jack Pine
• Thomson, Tom - The Pool, Winter
• Thomson, Tom - The West Wind
• Thomson, Tom – In the Northland