Tom Thomson Part 4; Albert Robson's 1937 Biography Designed By Rous & Mann of Toronto

PART FOUR OF THOMSON SERIES
JANUARY 2015

ALBERT ROBSON'S 1937 BIOGRAPHY OF TOM THOMSON BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED BY THE HISTORIC GRAPHICS COMPANY, ROUS & MANN, OF TORONTO

PRINTED BY THE RYERSON PRESS IN HARDCOVER - A RARE FIND AS A THOMSON RELIC

     I can remember one sparkling fall day, back in the mid-1990's, waking up, and with the beautiful sunlight cascading into the bedroom, shortly after sunrise, I felt I had to wake Suzanne up; telling her with unwanted enthusiasm, that it was a "Tom Thomson day." She knew what this meant, because I'd repeated it often, in the days we regularly camped and traversed the lakes and rivers of Algonquin Park with our then young lads, Andrew and Robert.
     On this day, it meant waking the boys up earlier than usual, and setting out the canoe and gear, in preparation for a trip up to Canoe Lake. We could load our canoe, and fasten it down to the van, in about thirty minutes, and Suzanne would set out the picnic dishes and utensils; and a bag of extra clothing, in the event one, or all of us, wound up in the lake by misadventure. We always picked up our food provisions at Robinson's Store in Dorset. It was a treat to have breakfast or lunch at the Canoe Lake store, before heading out onto the water.
     We arrived at the Canoe Lake Store, in time for a late breakfast, and watched as hundreds of park visitors wandered around the information centre, the store and docks, where many rentals were being set out by store staff, for eager novice paddlers; awaiting their canoes to be outfitted with paddles and life jackets. When we finally set out later that morning, our mission was to arrive an hour or so later, at Hayhurst Point, to have a picnic, high above Canoe Lake, and see the memorial cairn erected shortly after Tom Thomson's death, by J.E.H. MacDonald, and his son Thoreau, also a good friend of the artist. We had paddled by the site, but it was always late in the day, and an historic, spiritual place, we felt deserving of more time to experience properly.
     The day was magnificent in terms of weather. Cool with a breeze, but brilliant with that mature autumn sun, illuminating the colored leaves of the distant hardwoods, against the vibrant greens of neighbor evergreens. It was a smooth paddle, with four of us Curries in the canoe, plus our dog Kramer, at the bow. The water was still and reflective like glass, mirroring the azure sky and the painted landscape. It was in every way, a Tom Thomson day in Algonquin Park. We arrived at the Hayhurst Point dock, an hour and a half after we left the Canoe Lake beachfront, after a very enjoyable, calming traverse, over water having only light ripples to that point.
     We climbed to the top of the hill, where the memorial cairn is situated, and settled down at a picnic bench to enjoy our lunch and what can only be described as a spectacular view. After finishing, son Andrew went to the base of the cairn, to read the inscription made in Thomson's honor, shortly after the artist's death. I joined him at the plaque, and at my suggestion, he traced each letter of the words, as he read the content. As Andrew was a very thorough little fellow, who very much liked the art work of Tom Thomson, he was slow, thoughtful, and deliberate in his tracing of the letters. I helped him along, and also traced some of the lettering to help him move along, pronouncing out some of the words. In the middle of this, I yelled back to Suzanne, still at the picnic table, that we may be spiritually communicating with Thomson at this point, who may, in fact, still have been buried in the Canoe Lake Cemetery, just across the channel. (There is differing opinions as to whether Thomson's body was ever exhumed, by the Huntsville undertaker, charged with the task; as it was supposed to be, on order of the Thomson family, and moved to a family plot in Leith, Ontario).
     As we were still tracing out the letters of the plaque, I started to feel a cold wind hitting us from west to east, and at one point, it blew my baseball cap into the nearby tree cover. The words we were tracing, in content, read as follows:
     "To the memory of Tom Thomson, Artist, Woodsman, and Guide, who was drowned in Canoe Lake, July 8th, 1917. He lived humbly but passionately with the wild. It made him brother to all untamed things in nature. It drew him apart and revealed itself wonderfully to him. It sent him out from the woods only to show these revelations and it took him to itself at last."
     By time we had finished, I looked around to find Suzanne and second son Robert, trying to pull our paper plates and napkins out of the border trees, while out on the lake, the whitecaps were pounding at the canoe, pulled only halfway up the shore. I couldn't believe the transition in only a few minutes. It was a spectacular change of weather, even though it was still sunny without a cloud in the sky. When I took a closer look, back over the expanse of Canoe Lake, to where we had to paddle in order to return to the Canoe Lake Store, I saw a half dozen canoes overturned, with lots of folks tossed into the water, fortunately wearing lifejackets.
     After recovering our scattered picnic wares, we hustled down the hillside, to secure the canoe before it was swept away by the waves dashing over the stern. That's when I saw another three canoes, overturned between Hayhurst Point, and the former hamlet of Mowat. Suzanne and I pulled the canoe further up the embankment, because there was no way we could traverse the lake at that point. It was way too dangerous, and we had four family members to infill the canoe plus a dog and gear. We resigned ourselves to wait for a calmer period before re-launching. Had we conjured up the spirit of Tom Thomson? I had never seen the lake like this before, and we had done a lot of paddling through three seasons of numerous years prior to this. The rogue windstorm truly came out of the blue. It was getting late in the afternoon, by this point, and there weren't many folks up at their cottages, at this time of the year. If we were forced to shore, we would have had to seek shelter for the night. As Suzanne and I had work the next morning, and we didn't have a phone with us, to call our family at home, our failure to return would set off a panic, and inevitably, an expensive search for the missing Curries. We still kept it as an option, if we found it too dangerous to cross back over the lake.
     After about forty minutes, it seemed to die-down enough to allow us safe passage, at least to the adjacent shoreline, that we could stay close to, most of the distance back to the beachfront. We no sooner got halfway across, to Mowat, than the wind roared back to life, and nearly capsized us three or four times, before we could navigate closer to the shore. At first, we got into an east side marsh, and although it wasn't deep, we were being driven deeper within, and it was stopping our progress altogether. When we did emerge from the tall blowing marsh grasses, we got hit by the wind broadside, and it took everything we had, with four paddlers, to keep from over-turning. When we finally hit the Mowat shoreline, we could take the wind bow-first, which didn't help move us along, but at least wasn't tipping us over. The only problem was the waves rebounding off the rocks on shore, and then hitting us on the opposite side, creating a precarious rocking motion, than made the boys seasick. All along the route back, we could watch as area cottagers, in a variety of small watercraft, were trying to rescue canoeists dumped into the water, mid-lake, and it was showing overall as being wildly chaotic, had someone had been shooting a video of the windswept waterway. We managed to get back safely, but it was most definitely the most aggressive traverse we had ever known, on any lake; and we certainly would not have taken to the water that day, if we had known what was about to happen. There hadn't been any mention of a potential windstorm for that day, in that location. We always did our homework for those outings.
     So is it possible, if that is, you believe in the paranormal, that Tom Thomson's spirit turned Canoe Lake into the way he liked it most, as an artist; turbulent and vibrantly colored? It was certainly strange, that we were tracing the words of his memorial, at the time the wind began to huff and puff out there. Ever since I began working on the Tom Thomson mystery, in the mid 1990's, there have been all kinds of strange occurrences and coincidences, that quite honestly, made the researcher wonder, if the artist was trying to participate in the new-age investigation, into the circumstances, which ultimately led to his death. A flipped over canoe, a bump on the head, leading to a drowning by misadventure. Or was it the case he hit his head on a tumble onto the floor, during a fisticuff with Mowat hotelier, Shannon Fraser, still the most likely perpetrator of Thomson's death? Did Shannon Fraser and his wife, load Thomson's body in a hotel canoe, tow it by rowboat, out into the lake, in the Algonquin starlight, to be dumped then, quietly down into the depths, anchored by fishing line to a rock. It is said, Thomson didn't die of a blow to the head, but drowned according to the coroner's report. Thus, he would have been dumped into the water unconscious, but definitely not dead. Maybe Thomson's spirit desires to bring the matter of accountability back to the forefront, and blame assigned to the killer.
     Most researchers today, who have been fascinated by the mystery of Thomson's death, agree that murder is the most likely reason the painter died, on that July day in 1917. It rests largely on the detail, that Thomson was an expert canoeist, and on the calm day he left the Mowat hotel dock, there was nary a breeze, or waves to make the traverse to the Gill Lake portage, (where he was heading - just across the lake) more than a minor challenge or even inconvenience to what was normal to the outdoorsman. While we can't reverse the Coroner's report, on his death, we don't have to accept that foul play had nothing to do with the outcome. Many Canoe Lake residents, from that 1917 neighborhood, also thought murder was a distinct possibility.

ACCORDING TO ALBERT ROBINSON -

     "There was a mirror of the wilderness like one of his own clear northern lakes that reflect with extraordinary vivideness the beauties of the surround country and ever-changing skies." This quotation opens artist Albert Robson's 1937 biography, entitled simply "Tom Thomson," following up his 1932 book, "Canadian Landscape Painters, " and "Paddle and Palette," written and published by Blodwen Davies in 1930. The small format hardcover edition, was designed by well known Toronto graphics company, "Rous & Mann," and was printed by the Ryerson Press. This book was released twenty years following the alleged drowning death, of iconic Canadian landscape artist, Tom Thomson, during a canoe traverse of Algonquin Park's Canoe Lake, in early July, 1917.
     Robson, a well known Canadian graphic artist and painter, had worked with Tom Thomson in the field of commercial art, for a period of time early in the 1900's, and composed a well written overview of his associate, his art career, and his personal life.
     I have used portions of Robson's book previously, but for the purposes of this short series of articles, I will delve into some of his other descriptions of Thomson, most will not have read previously. Robson puts the story together with considerable competence, and gives us a slightly different version of the artist, than provided by Blodwen Davies. Robson, of course, had worked and socialized with Thomson, giving him a distinct advantage in the biographical sense of the story.
     "Except to a very limited number of friends, Tom Thomson is a remote and mystical figure that broke into the art firmament with a sudden and dazzling brilliancy, and then disappeared as suddenly from the great unknown. During the last decade his career has been wrapped in mists of mystery and half truths somewhat obscuring a clear a clear vision of the man and his work. These facts remain, that in March, 1913, Thomson exhibited his first canvas, 'A Northern Lake,' at an exhibition of the Ontario Society of Artists in Toronto. This picture was immediately purchased by the Ontario Government. In July of 1917, his tragic and unexpected death carried away, at the age of forty, a man who in those short intervening years left a profound and lasting imprint on the art of Canada. The work which he produced during those four years is sufficient to proclaim him, beyond question, one of the most significant painters in the art history of the Dominion," wrote Albert Robson, to open the biography.
     "Thomson's truly amazing accomplishment is explainable mainly through the intensely passionate love he had for the lakes, woods and rolling granite-ribbed hills, of the country he interpreted so sensitively and so beautifully. He painted the lake country with firey concentration, rarely travelling farther than his beloved Algonquin Park, where Canoe Lake was his regular headquarters. Other Canadian artists had painted the north country before Thomson; it is both unfair and untrue to say that he discovered it as a paintable material. But it is true to say, that he was the first painter really, to interpret the north in its various subtleties of mood and feeling, free from influences of European traditions and formulas. His personal knowledge of the country and his inherent honesty dictated its own technical methods of expression.
     "It is not easy to explain,' writes Robson, "in words the power and magic beauty of Thomson's sketches. There is subtle insight revealed in the fluency of his expression, and intimate understanding that radiates from every brush stroke, lifting his paintings to the highest level of Canadian artistic achievement. He had that rare inner vision that sees beauty in subjects which would not commonly be called beautiful. Through windows of his own eyes he interpreted intrinsic truths with unerring accuracy. While many of Thomson's sketches are amazingly facile, there was no conscious arriving after cleverness, for cleverness is a superficial quality which casts a fog between us and true beauty of expression. In his work he adhered to the broad base of representation, weaving a selective concrete realism into a lyrical pattern glowing with vitality and sparkling with individuality."
     The artist points out that "Thomson did not travel the well-trodden highways of derivative painting, but made trails of his own where no man had stepped before. His passion for the woods was so intense that he could paddle the lakes and streams, and camp under the stars by himself, apparently without any sense of loneliness. The feeling of personal kinship which he thus gained resulted in numerous sketches of widely varying woods of the north, not usually observed by the more casual visitor.
     "While the pictures he produced between 1913 and 1917 represent his major contribution, the background and training for this magnificent outpouring explains to some extent the quality of his work. Thomson lived as a boy in the neighborhood of Georgian bay, and here his inborn love of the lakes, woods and streams, was nourished through his childhood. He was passionately fond of fishing, and in later years attained an enviable reputation as an angler even among the professional guides of the park. In the early spring, before the ice broke from the streams and rivers, he made his own tackle from beads, feathers and pieces of metal, with the loving hands of a true enthusiast."
    Robson remembers that "My first meeting with Thomson was about 1908. A tall, lanky young man in a dark blue serge suit and gray flannel shirt applied for a position in the art department of Grip Limited, where I was art director. He was clean cut, almost classical in features, with a mop of black hair combed down over his right forehead. There was something intriguing about Thomson, a quiet reserve, a reticence as he handed me a bundle of his work and asked if there was an opening in the art department. His samples consisted mostly of lettering and decorative designs applied to booklet covers, and some labels. A quick glance at his drawing revealed something more than mechanical and technical proficiency, there was feeling for spacing and technical proficiency; there was feeling as aesthetic approach to his work, and we quickly closed arrangements for him to join the staff. Shortly after hiring him I received a gratuitous and unsolicited telephone call from his previous employer belittling Thomson as an erratic and difficult man in a department. This was as absurd as it was untrue. Thomson was a most diligent, reliable and capable craftsman. Nothing seemed to disturb the even tenor of his way. Only once did I ever see him lose his temper and that was in 1912. A man under the influence of liquor got into the studio and made himself as objectionable as possible. Tom tried to continue his work, but when the visitor became personally abusive Tom's slow temper finally rose. He took off his coat and threw the visitor out of the building. The noise of overturning chairs and tables attracted my attention, but by the time I got there Tom was brushing imaginary dust off his hands and settling back to finish his drawing."
     "Tom Thomson possessed a complete and satisfactory world within himself. He apparently did not feel any great need for human companionship and so made friends slowly," suggested his painter friend, Mr. Robson. "When he joined 'Grip,' it was some time before he found common interests with other members of the art staff. Among the fellow workers in the department were such men as J.E.H. MacDonald, F. Horsman Varley, Frank Carmichael, Arthur Lismer, William Broadhead, Frank Johnston, T.W. McLean, Ben Jackson, Ivor Lewis and many others. These men sketched and painted in their spare time and during their holidays. Ben Jackson was an enthusiastic fisherman who arranged his sketching trips with angling opportunities. Thomson and Jackson were soon planning trips together, lunge fishing in Scugog Lake, or trout fishing in some favourite stream known to Tom. (Ben) Jackson took his paints along as a mild diversion from fishing and on one of these trips made a sketch of Tom which now hangs in the National Gallery, Ottawa. Jackson who had fished the streams of New Brunswick with crack fishermen, from the New England states said that he never saw anyone who could cast a fly with the ease and precision of Thomson. On some of these trips Tom began making the causal sketch, and occasionally joined other members of the staff on their sketching trips round Toronto."
     According to "William Broadhead, a brilliant young English artist, after listening all winter to McLean's stories of canoeing and camping in the wilds, was fired with a desire to see the country himself, and in the summer of 1911 Broadhead and Thomson set out on a canoe trip through the Mississauga Reserve, leaving the rails at Biscotasing. This was, I believe, Thomson's first experience of an extended camping trip in the north. It was also Thomson's first serious sketching trip. He brought back a number of sketches although he lost some in a canoe upset. These sketches were timid and self conscious, but had caught the real northern character. I recall one in particular of drowned land which impressed me as having the weird loneliness of the country. It was on this trip also that Thomson met Grey Owl (the Brit, Archie Belaney, portraying First Nation ancestry), now known in America and Europe as author and lecturer, who visited him in Toronto the following winter." (note: This was before Belaney was exposed by a reporter from the North Bay Nugget, I believe).
     "In 1912," wrote Robson, "In 1912 I became associated with Rous & Mann Limited, and several of the artists, including Thomson, followed to the new art department, where he worked until the spring of 1914. In the summer of 1912 Thomson took his first extended vacation in Algonquin Park, and brought back a series of sketches which showed a tremendous advance in technical power and purity of colour. Strolling up from the station in his woodsman outfit and carrying the bundle of sketches, he reported his return to work and left the sketches for inspection. We urged him to paint one of his sketches upon a large canvas, and gave him the keys and use of the studio on weekends. So 'A Northern Lake,' came into being in 1913, his first attempt on a large canvas. It attracted the admiration of his fellow artists, and to his astonishment was purchased by the Government of Ontario. J.E.H. MacDonald told Dr. J.M. McCallum of Toronto, about Thomson's north country sketches. The genial doctor soon looked him up and persuaded him to devote his entire time to painting. His art training had been and continued to be the association with competent painters. The few remaining years of his life he devoted whole-heartedly to painting, sketching in the spring, summer and fall, and returning to his studio 'Shack' on Severn Street to work on large canvases during the winter months.
     "The basic knowledge of design obtained through his commercial art training, explains the decorative beauty of composition and arrangements, which so marks his painting. In this respect there is a common bond between Thomson and J.E.H. MacDonald. Both were eminent and capable designers, and both approached the problem of landscape painting with a finely discriminating knowledge of form and arrangement. MacDonald, however, felt the appeal of a greater variety of subject matter, while Thomson concentrated with intensity on the Northern Ontario wilderness which claimed his whole devotion. Both of these men made important contributions to Canadian painting, evolving techniques which were personal and adequate and unclouded either by convention or tradition. The work of each was alive with charm of design and beauty of color."
     Albert Robson astutely noted, "From year to year Thomson grew in ability to summarize, in the beauty of his colour arrangements, in confidence, and brilliancy of technique. His paintings are frank and beautiful statements of the moods and inner meanings of the scenes freed of all extraneous and distracting detail. His sense of design and colour wove enchantments into a sketch, never cluttering or confusing it, but rather adding a richer and more subtle significance. Thomson left probably more than four hundred sketches, perhaps twenty important canvases with as many slighter or experimental pictures. His tragic and untimely death on Canoe Lake robbed our Dominion of a great interpreter of the Canadian wilderness - faithful student whose sincerity, unresting passion for the true and swift insight into the heart of all that was beautiful, gave him skill and power to isolate the essentials, which lifted his landscapes from the purely representative to the realms of personal creative art."
     Robson describes the revered Thomson painting, "The West Wind," with the follow statement: One can almost feel the cool west wind as it sweeps out of the purple hills across the turbulent lake, and sings through the gnarled and wind-blow Jack Pine in the foreground. This picture has caught the mood of the time and place, and transmits it to the observer, in a masterly and poetical interpretation. The movement of clouds and water both interpret the almost ceremonial pomp of the march of wind. The billowing sail-like curve of the arrangement of pine foliage adds materially to the suggestion of blow. The vague suggestion of harp shape in the Jack Pine is more than a beautiful space-filling arrangement; it may be a deliberate and fanciful liberty taken with actual representation to carry the suggestion of the music of the wind in the pines. This was Thomson's last large canvas."    
     Thanks so much for visiting with me today. Please feel free to drop in again soon. Lots more wild and wooly collecting and antique adventures coming-up. For anyone who thinks the antique and collectable business is dull and uneventful, well, I hope to change your opinion.