Tom Thomson

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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 1 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” 28
Tom Thomson Life & Work by David P. Silcox Pine Trees at Sunset 1915 29
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Tom Thomson

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