Tom Thomson

Tom Thomson
Life & Work by David P. Silcox
The shoreline slices across the painting at
a point close to the “golden section,” creating a
pleasant ratio of expansive sky to the dark land
beneath. After his first summer in Algonquin
Park, in 1913 Thomson used this pattern in
numerous paintings—a narrow foreground band
of water, a distant shoreline, and an overarching
sky. He repeated it in some of the other sunset
paintings he created, though always with
variations. Sunset Sky, 1915, which is quite
different in effect and colour, is close to this
painting in composition—both the sky and the
distant shore are reflected in the lake’s surface,
with the dark shore carving two parallel tracks
across the lower part of the panel. Sunset, also
1915, is much more abstract and loosely
painted, though it has the same low point of view
and the same emphasis on the clouds.
Thomson was enthralled by clouds in all
their variety—clouds in stormy weather, puffy
clouds on bright summer days, clouds bringing rain or snow, or clouds, as in Sunset,
setting the sky on fire. The blood-soaked sunsets painted by the Norwegian artist Edvard
Munch (1863–1944) had startled the world in the mid-1880s after Krakatoa, in 1883,
blew tons of volcanic ash into the atmosphere to produce sunsets never seen before.
Nature gave Thomson similar assistance in 1915 after the volcanic eruption of
California’s Lassen Peak in May that year—the “Great Explosion”—caused spectacular
sunsets in the northern hemisphere.
Pine Trees at Sunset 1915
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Tom Thomson, Sky (“The Light That Never Was”), 1913, oil on canvas board, 17.5 x 25.1 cm, National
Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. The painting’s back is inscribed, probably by Dr. James MacCallum,
“Thomson saw this in early morning—Had spent all night in his / canoe out on the Lake because
of the flies”
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