Tom Thomson

Tom Thomson
Life & Work by David P. Silcox
Given his drift toward abstraction in works such as After the Storm, 1917,
Thomson may not have continued to paint representative landscape scenes in the
manner set out by the Group of Seven before and through the 1920s. As these men
went on to dominate the Canadian art scene until the 1950s, in large part because of
their own smart self-promotion and the nation’s sentimental longing for tradition in the
wake of the two world wars, they intentionally looked away from such European
influences as the Der Blaue Reiter, Cubism, the Fauves, Surrealism, Suprematism,
Futurism, and Orphism. Had Thomson lived longer, these movements may have come
to interest him.
Harold Town (1924–1990) suggests that the Group of Seven intentionally and
intuitively ignored what was happening in the world of art elsewhere by looking inward
instead of outward. In doing so these artists established a starting point and a vocabulary
for a national school that endured. In Town’s words, “It was an implosion, not an
explosion. And by looking inward it gave us an outward identity.”
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A.Y. Jackson, Terre Sauvage, 1913, oil on canvas, 128.8 x 154.4 cm, National
Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. This canvas was a high point in Jackson’s work before
he enlisted in the army and left for France. His creative power was never again as
strong or as original
Lawren Harris, Above Lake Superior, c. 1922, oil on canvas, 121.9 x 152.4 cm, Art
Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Harris’s austere and chiselled approach to landscape
painting was not Thomson’s way. However, Harris encouraged Thomson to find his
own poetic form of expression
The Artist and Nature
In his boyhood and in his last four years, Thomson lived close to nature. As a youth, he
learned from his elderly relative, Dr. William Brodie, a well-known naturalist who worked
in the biology department of what is now the Royal Ontario Museum, how to observe
nature closely and appreciate its mystery. From 1913 on he moved to Algonquin Park as
early as he could in the spring and stayed there until late in the fall. As a result, he
painted the park in all seasons, weathers, and times of day.
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