Tom Thomson

Tom Thomson
Life & Work by David P. Silcox
Although Thomson retains the basic shape of the pine in his oil sketch, he makes
the foreground considerably brighter in the canvas. The water surface, which in the oil
sketch is hastily laid in with a muddy grey and then a yellowish grey against the far
shore, is transformed into long slabs of pigment in mauves, blues, and yellows—
somewhat in the style of Lawren Harris (1885–1970) and J.E.H. MacDonald (1873–
1932), both of whom excelled in laying down long, unbroken battens of paint one above
the other.
This dramatic change is especially evident in the sky. In the sketch,
Thomson provides only a rapid swirl of nondescript character, deliberately leaving the
wood surface exposed in several places—just as he does in the sketch for The West
Wind. In the canvas, however, and even more emphatically than for the lake surface, he
dresses the sky in wide, horizontal ribbons of paint. With subtle modulations from the
yellow-green sunset clouds at the horizon through to the bluish arc that appears at the
top of the painting, Thomson creates a perfect backdrop to the pine and its
immediate foreground.
The colour of the wood of the small panels has changed since it was milled almost
a hundred years ago. When it was new, it was much lighter, possibly even a bright
yellowish-white tone if it was of birch. The slow oxidizing over the years has turned the
wood into a rich, honey-coloured element in the painting and given it a mellow patina.
What is surprising is the immense variety in the colours Thomson summons up
for The Jack Pine, an array not seen in the sketch: sumptuous hues, complementing
and contrasting light and dark, near and far, minute and grand. Even the softening of the
distant shoreline, compared with the harder treatment in The West Wind, takes The
Jack Pine into that vivid yet dusky and indeterminate hour of the day that fascinated
another great Canadian painter, J.W. Morrice (1865–1924), and clearly bewitched
Thomson too. In the last winter of his short life, Thomson had figured out how to make
truly great and durable art.
After the Storm 1917
Tom Thomson, Sketch for “The Jack Pine,” 1916,
oil on wood, 21 x 26.7 cm, RiverBrink Art Museum,
Queenston, Ontario. It seems that Thomson did
not particularly want to extrapolate from a small
sketch to a large canvas, but in the dozen times
he did, he accomplished it with consummate skill
by inventing new shapes and colours that suited
the basic structure of the initial sketch. The
transformation from rough sketch to majestically
poised canvas was a feat that took great
imagination and intricate skill
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