Tom Thomson

Tom Thomson
Life & Work by David P. Silcox
What is remarkable about The Pointers is that the great red autumn hill, except
for a few low evergreens, is reflected in both the sky and the water. The paint application
is slightly different in each area, but viewers are not confused by the repeating colours.
The clouds, in puffy clusters and two sweeping bands, help them instantly to read the
painting as intended, just as the loggers’ boats make identification of the lake surface
easy. Thomson has produced an enclosed space, a northern Eden, where his devices
convince viewers to suspend disbelief and accept his idealization of a world they would
like to visit or live in.
The Pointers is a studio work, not an on-site sketch. So far as is known, it was not
based on a sketch, yet like others of Thomson’s large works, it has a stately, formal
quality, despite the plushness of the colours. The debt Thomson owed to other strains of
historical Western painting traditions has been subsumed into his own sensibility and allembracing
observation.
The West Wind 1916–17
Georges Seurat, Study for “A Sunday on La
Grande Jatte,” 1884, oil on canvas,
70.5 x 104.1 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York. Seurat knew that, from a distance, the
human eye perceives contrasting dots of colour
applied in tiny brush strokes as one brilliant hue
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