Defiant Spirits Page 3
Not even the Canadian Arctic was a territory uncharted by painters. The British midshipman Robert Hood, a member of Sir John Franklin’s 1819–21 expedition, executed watercolours of animals and birds, his brush sometimes freezing to his paper as he worked. In 1859 Frederic Edwin Church, an American, journeyed to the southeastern tip of Labrador to paint icebergs. Two years later another American artist, William Bradford, donned sealskins, chartered a twenty-ton schooner and began producing hugely popular studies of the Labrador coast.
And yet, for all these thousand miles by canoe, train or whaling ship, and for all these canvases of jagged mountains and misty cascades, by the turn of the new century the accusation lingered that the “true North” had not yet been captured with a distinctively Canadian flavour, with a style adequate to the matchless geography. The point was made in 1908 by Harold Mortimer-Lamb, a British-born employee of the Canadian Mining Institute who became a pictorialist photographer and art critic. “No painter,” Mortimer-Lamb contended in the Canadian Magazine, “has yet experienced the spirit of the great northland; none perhaps has possessed the power of insight which such a task would demand.” 25
THE PROBLEM WAS partly a matter of technique, of learning to see the particulars of the Canadian landscape—its flora, its geology, its clear and brittle atmosphere—through distinctively “Canadian” eyes in a way that would channel or interpret Hulme’s fright of the mind. European travellers of the nineteenth century always compared the Canadian wilderness to the beauty spots of Europe: the area around Parry Sound to the hills of Killarney, the islands of Georgian Bay to the Hesperides. But if Canada’s northern landscape was unique, then its depiction called for unique representational strategies. Yet O’Brien’s paintings, with their burnished atmosphere and sense of hushed grandeur, hewed closely to the style of American painters such as Church and Albert Bierstadt.
Or again, the canvases of two of Canada’s most renowned landscapists, Homer Watson and Horatio Walker, were resolutely European in style. Watson was even known as the “Canadian Constable,” and Walker depicted Quebec farm life in a sentimentally heroic style recalling the peasant scenes of the French painter Jean-
François Millet. Both men enjoyed enormous success, both in Canada and abroad. Watson’s works were owned by both Oscar Wilde and Queen Victoria, and in 1902 a New York art critic hailed Walker (winner of numerous international prizes) as “the man to whom the first place among American painters should unanimously be conceded.” 26 Yet they painted Canadian scenes with few concessions to the local conditions. A young art student, visiting Watson’s studio near Berlin, Ontario, in 1910, was surprised to find his sombre works a complete contrast to “the country in which he lives. You would never recognize it from his work.” 27
The lack of an indigenous Canadian artistic style was noted by various foreign observers. An 1886 exhibition of Canadian paintings in London struck an English artist with its “evident traces of French influence,” and a critic reviewing the same show could have believed himself in “a good European art gallery.” 28 A generation later, the European imprint was as pronounced as ever. A critic for the Morning Post, surveying Canadian paintings at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool in 1910, saw “the beginning of a movement that will produce great things in the future.” But he lamented that the essence of the Canadian landscape was “crushed out by a foreign-begotten technique” because Canadian painters had been forced to seek their means of expression “in the ateliers of a foreign land.” 29
Tragically, one of the few artists celebrated for painting the landscape in a uniquely “Canadian” style—for painting the Canadian wilderness in a manner praised as “free, strong, untrammeled of convention”—had been Neil McKechnie, who drowned at the age of twenty-seven.30 McKechnie’s death on the Mattagami showed all too plainly how the Canadian painter’s relationship to the landscape was fundamentally different from that of the French or English or Dutch to theirs. The Canadian landscape was not only vaster and less populous, but it was also more intractable and potentially dangerous. Life in many parts of the Dominion was more basic and elemental than in Europe, leading to a very different sense of place and—allegedly—calling for a different type of character. The Canadian landscape was, in history and legend, where people froze to death, drowned, starved or went mad from isolation. Even in an area as apparently colonized by trains and tourist hotels as Algonquin Provincial Park, it was still necessary, in the middle of winter, for cottagers to connect their doors to their woodsheds and outhouses by means of rope lines to avoid getting lost in blizzards and dying in what was literally their own backyard.31
Canadian landscape art had produced martyrs in both McKechnie and Robert Hood. The latter was shot through the head by one of his starving companions, a voyageur known as “Michel the Iroquois”; two other members of the expedition, driven mad by hunger, murdered Michel and stayed alive by eating Hood’s buffalo robe.32 Franklin, famously, ate his own boots. Clearly this was not a Dutch riverside or the sheep-clad Surrey hills. How could Canadian painters possibly respond to their physical environment in the same way the Dutch or British did to theirs? A new idiom of landscape was called for.
FOR SEVERAL YEARS Tom Thomson’s supervisor at Grip Limited had been J.E.H. MacDonald. If Thomson clashed with his superiors in the past, his relationship with the gentle, retiring and slightly shambolic Jim MacDonald was far more temperate and satisfying. MacDonald was called by friends “a wonderful poetic soul, full of humour and patience” and compared to a “secular monk” with the “simple mysticism of St. Francis of Assisi.” 33 He was known for pouring oil on troubled waters. “Often a somewhat delicate situation, with possibilities of wrathful recrimination, would be saved,” a friend later wrote, “by a flash of Jim’s delightful humour which turned anger into laughter.” 34 MacDonald (whom Thomson always addressed formally as “Mr. MacDonald”) no doubt had many opportunities to quell Thomson’s anger. He was also to become one of the most important influences on the younger man’s art.
Four years older than Thomson, the red-haired MacDonald had been born in England, in Durham, to a Canadian father and a British mother. At fourteen he immigrated with his parents to Hamilton, apprenticing soon afterwards with a lithography company while attending evening classes at the Hamilton Art School. In 1890 he moved to Toronto, starting at Grip soon after the demise of Bengough’s magazine. More art lessons followed. In 1898 he enrolled in Saturday classes at the Central Ontario School of Art and Industrial Design, where he, like Thomson a few years later, studied under
Cruikshank. He also joined the Toronto Art Students’ League, a group based on the Art Students’ League of New York, founded in 1875 to provide tuition outside the more conservative art schools. In the Toronto version, nationalism came to the fore. “There was a great stirring of the Canadian ideal,” MacDonald would later write.35 The men gathered in the evening to sing canoeing songs. Determined to depict Canadian scenes, members embarked on cross-Canada sketching trips, the results of which were illustrated calendars published annually between 1893 and 1904. Although some members set off on daring voyages of the sort that cost one of their number, Neil McKechnie, his life, the frail, slender MacDonald generally stuck to Toronto’s suburbs.
MacDonald had eventually returned to England for further employment and training. After marrying a primary school teacher in 1899 and becoming a father two years later, he moved with his young family to London. For the next four years he worked with the Carlton Studios, whose three Canadian founders were all graduates of the Central Ontario School of Art and Industrial Design and former Grip employees. He spent much time in London’s great art museums. Although a wide range of paintings was on offer, the art of Edwardian England had been dominated by landscapes. Each year the exhibitions at the Royal Academy and other venues filled with images of fields, pastures and groves—vistas offering agreeable flights from London’s smoke and ever-inflating population (the city had increased
by 900,000 people during the 1890s: its total population was almost
7 million). In 1906 MacDonald saw what he called “a little forest picture” by a painter of the Barbizon School, Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de la Peña. The work inspired in him the ambition to become a great painter: “I seemed to get a clear feeling, though faint and far off, that someday I, too, would be an artist and produce similar things.” He saw himself, he claimed, “as a forest specialist.” 36
MacDonald returned to Canada in 1906 to become head designer at Grip. He continued to hone his skills as a forest specialist by painting landscapes in High Park, along the Humber River and occasionally in Muskoka. He made his first important sale early in 1911 when the Government of Ontario purchased By the River, Early Spring. In November of that year, in a fateful episode for Canadian art, he staged a solo exhibition of his work at the Arts and Letters Club.
Only a few blocks from Temperance Street, the Arts and Letters Club was founded in 1908 as a venue for staging plays and art exhibitions and otherwise facilitating creative interactions among Toronto artists and writers. Membership was open to all men (and it was exclusively a men’s club) who had “artistic tastes and inclinations.” 37 According to its founder, the journalist Augustus Bridle, the club was “a weird, delightful rendezvous! Absolute escape from all that otherwise made Toronto consumingly commercial.” 38 One early member, Vincent Massey, enjoyed the company of the “weird geniuses” who made the club so different from “the complacent Philistinism of most Toronto drawing-rooms.” 39 After eviction from its premises above the Brown Betty restaurant on King Street East, it had relocated to the second floor of a building housing the Court House of the County of York. The lease specified that members use the tradesmen’s entrance, accessed only after members picked their way past the police horses’ dollops of manure. It was a fitting metaphor for how Toronto’s professional elite regarded those with artistic tastes and inclinations.
MacDonald’s collection of landscapes received great acclaim from his fellow artists in the club. The noted Canadian landscapist C.W. Jefferys was particularly struck. A painter who had made his name with panoramas of the Prairies, Jefferys detested how Canadian scenes were so often expressed through what he called “European formulas.” On too many Canadian paintings, he wrote, “lay the blight of misty Holland, mellow England, the veiled sunlight of France.” 40 But Jefferys believed he saw in MacDonald’s works an original and uniquely Canadian approach. “Mr. MacDonald’s art is native—native as the rocks, snow or pine trees that are so largely his theme. In these sketches there is a refreshing absence of Europe or anything else, save Canada.” 41
MacDonald’s fondness for Narcisse Diaz indicates the extent of Jefferys’s wishful thinking. Some of his early works certainly paid homage to distinctively Canadian subjects, with By the River, Early Spring (painted near the Muskoka cottage of his wife’s aunt) featuring jamcrackers at work before a tumbling waterfall. But the “foreign-begotten technique” was still evident in his choice of sun-etched cloudscapes, a result of his close studies of John Constable at the
Victoria & Albert Museum. The blue shadows in his early snowscapes, as well his broken brushwork, reveal his interest in French Impressionism (neatly characterized by one American critic as the “blue-shadow idea”).42
Still, even if MacDonald’s paintings did not live up to the patriotic rod-and-paddle machismo of the singalong gatherings at the Toronto Art Students’ League, the aspiration to paint Canada on its own terms—and to “awaken artistic consciousness” in Canadians—at least was there.
THE SUCCESS OF MacDonald’s exhibition at the Arts and Letters Club and the sale of his jamcracker painting to the Government of Ontario proved there was an appetite—albeit in refined circles—for northern scenes painted in an Impressionist style. Buoyed by the success of his solo exhibition, and frustrated by the drudgery of commercial work that meant he passed day after day, as he put it, “in the same old way . . . in the same old place, with my nose down to the same old work,” MacDonald resigned from Grip at the end of 1911 to work full-time on his painting.43 A few months later, he sold yet another painting. The National Gallery of Canada bought In the Pine Shadows, Moonlight, a dreamy winter scene that attempted to capture the effects of moonlight and shadows on fresh snow.
A few desks away from MacDonald in the office of Grip Limited, Tom Thomson had undoubtedly taken notice of his superior’s success. Thus far Thomson had painted mostly in the Toronto environs. It was probably MacDonald’s success, and perhaps also his “Canadian ideals,” that inspired Thomson to pack his palette as well as his brand-new fishing rod when he went to Algonquin Park in 1912. By the time he returned to the Grip office at the end of May, he was already planning to take a leave of absence and, equipped with his camera and sketching materials, embark on another trip into Ontario’s Shield country.
3 EIN TORONTO REALIST
ANOTHER MEMBER OF the Arts and Letters Club, besides C.W. Jefferys, took an interest in J.E.H. MacDonald’s 1911 exhibition. Twenty-six-year-old Lawren Harris was intrigued by the same qualities in the paintings applauded by Jefferys. “These sketches,” Harris would write in retrospect, “contained intimations of something new in painting in Canada, an indefinable spirit which seemed to express the country more clearly than any painting I had yet seen.” He added that he saw in MacDonald’s landscapes “the beginning of what I, myself, vaguely felt; what I was groping toward—Canada painted in her own spirit.” 1
Lawren Harris’s background was different from either MacDonald’s or Tom Thomson’s. Always turned out impeccably in a silk shirt and a grey suit—flannel in summer, tweed in winter—he looked, a friend later wrote, “like a Bay Street stockbroker.” 2 He had a neat moustache, crisp manner and fastidious dislike of clutter. A photograph taken in his mid-thirties would show him punctiliously adding paint to a canvas while wearing three-piece salt-and-pepper tweeds.
The patrician manner was genuine. Harris’s grandfather Alanson had founded a wealthy Brantford dynasty whose fortune came from the “Brantford Light Binder,” a horse-drawn reaper that competed with Daniel Massey’s “Toronto Light Binder” until the two firms merged in 1891 to form Massey-Harris, Canada’s largest corporation. A year later Harris’s father died of Bright’s disease, and as the eldest of two brothers, Lawren might have been expected to join the family business. But he had little interest in farm implements. After studying at St. Andrew’s College, a newly opened boys’ school in Rosedale, he enrolled in 1903 at the University of Toronto. His mathematics professor persuaded his mother that the young man was better suited to studying art.
Aspiring young Canadian artists usually set sail for Paris. One Canadian, arriving in Paris in the mid-1890s, discovered “quite a colony of Canadian art students.” 3 Harris, though, went to Berlin. The choice was based less on artistic than on domestic motives, because his thirty-year-old uncle, Dr. William Kilborne Stewart, a Harvard PhD and German instructor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, was pursuing post-doctoral studies there. Arriving in Berlin in 1905, Harris enrolled in private lessons with three different teachers. One of them, Franz Skarbina, was among the city’s most prominent painters.
For the twenty-year-old Harris, Berlin was a wholly new experience. He would later describe the Ontario of his youth as a place where the people were “submerged in the severest orthodoxy, divided and blinded and sustained by sectarian views, comfortably warped by provincialism and remote from all cultural centres.” 4 Religion certainly ran in the Harris family. His maternal grandfather had been a Presbyterian minister, and his paternal great-grandfather, “Elder John,” a circuit-riding preacher commemorated by a stained glass window in the Baptist church in Boston, Ontario. His uncle Elmore Harris, a premillennialist, served as pastor of the Walmer Road Baptist Church in Toronto and as president of the Toronto Bible Training School. An uncle by marriage was minister of the Bloor Street Presbyterian Church. Harris himself had been rais
ed a Baptist, attending church three times a day on Sunday.
Berlin exposed the young Harris to a world very different from this claustrophobic provincialism. In 1905 it had a population of more than 2 million; in Europe, only London and Paris were larger. An English visitor described it as the “chief pleasure town of Germany and the great centre for wealthy persons in search of amusement and dissipation.” 5 Whereas Toronto still did not have a single art museum, for a young student in Berlin an enormous range of paintings from every European school could be seen in large art museums such as the Altes Museum, the Neues Museum, the Nationalgalerie and the newly opened (in 1904) Kaiser Friedrich Museum. There was also the Great Berlin Art Exhibition, held each summer at a large exhibition hall in which thousands of paintings and pieces of sculpture went on show. The city was teeming with other art students, with the Royal Art School and the Berlin Academy of Arts turning out rigorously trained young painters.