Defiant Spirits Read online

  To my three brothers: Bryan, Randy and Stephen

  Copyright © 2010 by Ross King

  First U.S. edition in 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system

  or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the

  publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright).

  For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Douglas & McIntyre

  An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.

  2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201

  Vancouver BC Canada V5T 4S7

  www.douglas-mcintyre.com

  McMichael Canadian Art Collection

  10365 Islington Avenue

  Kleinburg ON Canada L0J1C0

  www.mcmichael.com

  Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

  ISBN 978-1-55365-362-2 (cloth)

  ISBN 978-1-55365-882-5 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-1-55365-807-8 (ebook)

  Editing by David Staines

  Copy editing by Ruth Gaskill

  Cover design by Naomi MacDougall

  Front cover illustration by Tom Thomson (Canadian, 1877–1917),

  Twisted Maple (detail), 1914, oil on plywood, 26.7 x 20.9 cm, McMichael Canadian

  Art Collection, Gift of Mrs. Margaret Thomson Tweedale, 1974.9.4

  Dimensions of artwork are given as height x width

  An adaptation of “White Feathers and Tangled Gardens”

  appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of Canadian Art.

  Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the

  Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia

  through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Government of Canada

  through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

  Now what shall be our word as we return,

  What word of this curious country?

  DOUGLAS LEPAN, “Canoe-Trip”

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  BOOK I

  1 A Wild Deserted Spot

  2 This Wealthy Promised Land

  3 Ein Toronto Realist

  4 Eerie Wildernesses

  5 Life on the Mississagi

  6 Wild Men of the North

  7 The Infanticist School

  8 The Happy Isles

  9 Rites of Paysage

  10 The Young School

  BOOK II

  1 Men with Good Red Blood in Their Veins

  2 The Great Explosion

  3 White Feathers and Tangled Gardens

  4 The Line of Beauty

  5 Imperishable Splendour

  6 Shades of Grey

  7 The Vortex of War

  8 The Dweller on the Threshold

  9 The Great Konodian Army

  BOOK III

  1 The Spirit of Young Canada

  2 A Septenary Fatality

  3 Are These New Canadian Painters Crazy?

  4 Multiples of Ugliness

  5 By the Shining Big-Sea-Water

  6 Gypsies, Lepers and Freaks

  7 Wembley

  EPILOGUE: The End of the Trail

  NOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  NEVER BEFORE IN the course of writing a book have I received or required so much help from friends and strangers alike.

  My deepest thanks and greatest obligation is to Tom Smart, executive director and ceo of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. Tom nurtured and encouraged this project from its very beginnings (a lunch on a rainy day in Oxford in December 2006) and along the way became a close and valued friend. I’m also grateful for the support and friendship over the years of Noreen Taylor, chair of the McMichael’s Board of Trustees during the time that I did the bulk of the work on the project. The third figure in this magical trinity has been Scott McIntyre, chairman, ceo and publisher of Douglas & McIntyre. All three have shown not only a belief in Defiant Spirits but also a dedication to Canadian art and Canadian publishing.

  The team at the McMichael offered me a tremendous amount of wisdom and assistance—and treated me with much patience and understanding. Thanks to their efforts I feel I am in the position of an obese and undeserving tourist who has been escorted to the top of Mount Everest by an infinitely more worthy and capable team of Sherpas. Katerina Atanassova, the chief curator, and Chris Finn, assistant curator, have given me much advice and have put in more hours of planning and detective work on my behalf than I can bear to think about. Linda Morita, the McMichael’s indispensable librarian and archivist, was a constant source of help and wise counsel. She made my days in the archives pleasant and (I hope) productive, and she also located all of the archival images for the book. Janine Butler found all of the colour images and—in a task whose magnitude and frustration I cannot imagine—arranged all of the loan requests for the exhibition. Shelley Falconer and Shawna White, curators at the McMichael when I started the project, provided early encouragement, and Christine Lynett arranged my first visits to the McMichael and showed me her collection of papers from the Tweedale family, now in the McMichael’s archives. I’m also obliged to Stephen Weir, the McMichael’s inveterate publicist, for countless services. Among the introductions he orchestrated was a memorable one to James Mathias, for whom I am grateful for a fascinating tour of the Studio Building.

  The Canadian Art Foundation gave me the chance to air earlier versions of the book, both in print (in Canadian Art magazine) and in lectures delivered in Toronto and Winnipeg. For these opportunities I’m grateful to Ann Webb, Melony Ward and Richard Rhodes. Another chance to think aloud in front of an audience came at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and Creativity at the University of Saskatchewan, for which I thank David J. Parkinson and Peter Stoicheff. Teresa Howe arranged for me to give a preview of Defiant Spirits for the Canadian Women’s Club in London, England; and Judy Craig at the Arts Society King, in King Township, Ontario.

  Many people responded to my requests and provided valuable information in the course of my research: Susan Mavor, head of Special Collections, University of Waterloo Library; Cyndie Campbell, head of Archives, Documentation and Visual Resources in the National Gallery of Canada’s Library and Archives; Cathryn Walter and the other members of the staff at Library and Archives Canada; Scott James, librarian at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto; Nora Hague, senior cataloguer in the Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum, Montreal; Isobel MacLellan, librarian, Archives and Special Collections, Mitchell Library, Glasgow; Lisa Cole, assistant curator, Gallery Records, Tate Gallery, London; Graeme Siddall in the Sheffield Archives; Laura Lamb in the Special Collections Department of the Hamilton Public Library; the periodicals and email reference staff of the Worcester Public Library in Massachusetts; Ken Dalgarno at the Moose Jaw Public Library; Damien Rostar at the Local History Department at the Hackley Public Library in Muskegon, Michigan; and Roberta Green at the Huntsville Public Library.

  Other people generously responded to my queries or supplied other assistance. Angie Littlefield provided information on Tom Thomson’s early years, Ron Hepworth on Ontario’s flowers and vegetation, and Dr. Ken Reynolds on the fate of the 60th Battalion. I am grateful to Barb Curry, Rick Thompson and Jayne Huntley of the Sheddon Area Historical Society and to Annie Robertson, who shared with me her memories of Coboconk.
Mary Gordon told me about Christina Bertram’s dealings with A.Y. Jackson and Tom Thomson. Louis Gagliardi gave me a private view of paintings by J.W. Beatty and P.C. Sheppard. Dr. Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov’s tremendous support, along with that of Annie Smid, gave a great boost to the exhibition at a crucial point in its development.

  I was fortunate to receive cooperation from the descendants of a number of the people mentioned in the book. William D. Addison granted permission for me to quote from Mark Robinson’s diaries, now in the Trent University Archives in Peterborough; and Catharine Mastin allowed me to quote from Franklin Carmichael’s letters, held in the McMichael’s archives. Kim Bullock kindly gave me much information on her great-grandfather, Carl Ahrens. She also made available to me passages from Madonna Ahrens’s unpublished memoirs and provided the photograph of Carl Ahrens reproduced in the book.

  The formidable logistics of writing on Canadian history and Canadian art while living in England were solved thanks to help from a number of friends. Victor Shea offered me a bed in Toronto, and Tasha Shea photocopied journal articles that were unavailable to me in the U.K. I am also thankful for the generous hospitality in Toronto of John and Chris Currie, who on several occasions gave me the keys to their beautiful house.

  Chris Labonté, Susan Rana and Peter Cocking—along with other of their colleagues at Douglas & McIntyre—made the process from manuscript to book efficient, enjoyable and remarkably painless. Ruth Gaskill expertly copyedited the manuscript.

  Two people, both in Ottawa, went above and beyond the call of duty in their assistance. I was extremely fortunate in having as my wise editor Dr. David Staines of the University of Ottawa. He scrutinized the various iterations of the manuscript with a keen and rigorous eye, offering many editorial insights. I was also the happy recipient of a huge amount of help and advice from Charles Hill of the National Gallery of Canada. Despite his own busy schedule, Charlie read the manuscript in its entirety and gave me the benefit of his extraordinary knowledge of Canadian art in general and the Group of Seven in particular. He rescued me from numerous faux pas. As for any that remain, this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.

  Like anyone writing about the Group of Seven, I am indebted to a number of art historians who over the years have held high the torch for Canadian art. Besides that of Charlie Hill, I wish to acknowledge the work of Dennis Reid, David Silcox, Joan Murray and the late Robert Stacey. Many other scholars are cited in my notes. One of the numerous pleasures of researching Defiant Spirits was discovering the tremendous breadth and depth of recent writing on Canadian art and Canadian history—all of it testimony to the health and vigour of Canadian studies.

  Two people in England were vital to the production of the book: my agent, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, and my wife, Melanie. Besides giving her love and support, Melanie patiently endured my frequent absences from home and, when I was at home, my long hours shut away in my studio with “the Canadians.”

  I must also thank my family in Canada: my mother, brothers, sisters, nephews and niece. Writing and thinking about Canadian art, after a decade of work on Italian and French art and history, took me back to my Canadian roots. For that reason the dedicatees of Defiant Spirits are three people—my brothers Bryan, Randy and Stephen—with whom I shared a happy boyhood on the Saskatchewan prairies.

  BOOK I

  1 A WILD DESERTED SPOT

  IN MAY 1912 two men from Toronto arrived in Algonquin Provincial Park, armed with fishing rods and a letter of introduction to the superintendent. The park, an eight-thousand-square-kilometre fish and game preserve in Northern Ontario, was inaccessible by road, so the men made the 220-kilometre journey north from Toronto on the Grand Trunk Railway. They would have changed trains at Scotia Junction, north of Huntsville, before arriving via a single-track railway line at Canoe Lake.

  For the past few years, the Grand Trunk Railway (whose president, Charles Melville Hays, perished on RMS Titanic less than a month earlier) had been transporting affluent tourists and overworked city dwellers into the Ontario hinterlands for what a 1910 issue of Rod and Gun in Canada called “a rest cure in a canoe.” 1 Canoes and fishing rods were widely publicized antidotes for modern ills and anxieties at a time when the urban population of Ontario for the first time outnumbered the rural. 2 Promoting itself as the “Highway to Health and Happiness,” the Grand Trunk advertised Algonquin Provincial Park in full-page spreads as one of “the beauty spots of the Dominion” that appealed to sportsmen, nature lovers and artists alike. “This country is increasing in popularity every year,” declared one advertisement, “and has become a favourite tourist resort of Britons and Americans who are flocking to this country for their vacation in increasing numbers.” 3 The company already operated two lakefront hotels: the thirty-five-room Hotel Algonquin at Joe Lake Station and the seventy-five-room Highland Inn on Cache Lake. In 1912 there were plans for two more.

  The two visitors who presented their letter of introduction to the park superintendent were typical of those who descended by the trainload on Algonquin Park. Tom Thomson and Harry B. Jackson were city dwellers lured north on a two-week fishing holiday by promises of lakes abundant with black bass and speckled trout. Both were graphic designers who worked at Grip Limited, a commercial art firm in downtown Toronto. Their modest salaries of $30 per week meant they declined the luxuries of the Highland Inn, which boasted hot and cold running water, indoor washrooms, private baths and an elegant dining room. On the advice of one of the rangers, who assured them of “good meals and excellent beds,” 4 they availed themselves instead of the more rustic conveniences of Camp Mowat.

  A former barracks for the mill workers of the bankrupt Gilmour

  Lumber Company, Camp Mowat was on the northwest shore of Canoe Lake, in the semi-derelict village of Mowat. Its air of decrepitude meant that even the Grand Trunk’s most enthusiastic copywriter would have struggled for words. According to one visitor, it was “a wild deserted spot.” 5 The village’s population had shrunk from a high of five hundred at the turn of the century to a little more than one hundred. Camp Mowat itself was a bleak-looking warehouse of a building whose rows of windows faced what the daughter of a park ranger later described as “a treeless, desolate area of thirty acres or more covered with pine slabs and sawdust.” 6

  The area immediately beyond Mowat was barely more inspiring. One Torontonian who owned a cottage on Canoe Lake described the park as “a paradise of virgin wilderness,” 7 but in fact much of the area around Mowat was neither paradisal nor virgin. Hundreds of acres of the surrounding forest were either clear-cut, flooded by dams or swept by fire. With the vast logging operation defunct, Mowat was left with an abandoned mill surrounded by decaying tree stumps and dunes of sawdust. There was also a deserted hospital and a cemetery with two inhabitants.

  It was in these unpromising environs that Thomson and Jackson unpacked not only their brand-new fishing gear but also—since they had come to Canoe Lake for something more than black bass—a Kodak camera and their paintbrushes. They were not the first landscapists to paint in the park. A decade earlier three members of the Toronto Art Students’ League had come north, clambered into canoes and, with the help of a guide, paddled the waterways in search of picturesque landscapes. More recently the park was visited by Tom McLean, a friend of Thomson and a fellow employee of Grip Limited. A specialist in scenes of canoes and voyageurs (those staples of Canadian landscape painting), the thirty-one-year-old McLean was a true man of the woods. He had worked in Northern Ontario as a prospector, fire ranger and surveyor, and he was present in 1904 when his friend Neil McKechnie, another Toronto painter with a love of the outdoors, drowned while shooting the rapids on the Mattagami River.

  Thomson and Jackson produced a number of oil sketches during their stay. Jackson commemorated their visit with a small portrait of Thomson smoking his pipe and wearing a hat festooned with trout flies, and Thomson painted several landscapes. One of them, Old Lumber Da
m, Algonquin Park, showed, in an eerie adumbration of his none-too-distant fate, an overturned canoe. But these were fairly amateur efforts, because in 1912 Thomson was a painter of limited skill and no repute. Two months shy of his thirty-fifth birthday, he was more experienced in angling than in landscape painting, a technique in which he had little formal training. As Jackson later recalled, Thomson “used to chuckle over the idea” that his work would ever be taken seriously. 8

  thomas john thomson was a striking man: slim, six feet tall, with black hair—“as black as midnight,” according to a friend 9—and fine, almost delicate features. According to one of his brothers, he was “always neatly attired in the best of clothes.” 10 Portraits taken in his younger days showed him in waistcoats, bow ties and celluloid collars. In one photograph a plug hat is tipped back from his brow; in another, looking like a raffish undergraduate, he poses with a cigarette between his lips and sports a dapper moustache. One family photograph reveals him with his hair parted in the middle—a style that in Victorian Ontario, an age of close-cropping and side-parting, lay one open (as a newspaper reported) to charges of “dandyism” and “dudism.” 11

  Sartorial flair belied Thomson’s shy, self-effacing personality. “There was no atom of pretence about Tommy Thomson,” a friend later recalled, “not the slightest swank or swagger.” 12 According to another, he possessed “a quiet reserve, a reticence almost approaching bashfulness.” 13 One of his closest friends noted how he was “a man of few words,” 14 and a woman with whom he would share studio space found him “shy and unassuming.” 15 This self-effacing personality masked a darker side. His mood swings could be alarming. He was by turns “jovial and jolly ready for a frolic of any kind” and then “quite melancholy and defeated in manner”; when one of these melancholy moods came upon him, he could turn “almost angry in appearance and action.” 16 According to yet another acquaintance, he was subject to fits of depression, a condition he was suspected of self-dramatizing and sometimes intensifying with an excess of drink. 17