Tom Thomson

Tom Thomson
Life & Work by David P. Silcox
Thomson didn’t abandon his urge to
document as he developed what his patron
Dr. James MacCallum called his “Encyclopedia
of the North.” In Hot Summer Moonlight, 1915,
he captured a common lake scene in Algonquin
Park, though as a nocturne, not, as most artists
preferred, by day. The sermon the future
members of the Group of Seven wanted to
preach to their fellow Canadians relied on
representation. As David Milne (1881–1953),
writing to Harry McCurry of the National Gallery
of Canada, Ottawa, in April 1932, expressed it,
“Tom Thomson isn’t popular for what aesthetic
qualities he showed, but because his work is
close enough to representation to get by with the
average man.”
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Judging by his sketches from the spring
and summer of 1917, Thomson may have begun
to realize there was a limit to the challenges and
the rewards of Algonquin Park as a subject. If he
was to respond honestly to his deepening sense
of art’s power and of being an artist in touch with
his times, he must have had intimations that he could not go on in that manner forever:
he would have to acknowledge the Expressionist tendency toward abstraction and
gestural painting that was already evident in his work, as revealed in one of his last
sketches, After the Storm, 1917.
Tom Thomson, Hot Summer Moonlight, 1915, oil on wood, 21.4 x 26.7 cm, National Gallery of Canada,
Ottawa. Thomson probably painted this scene as he sat in his canoe on the water. He depicted the huge
sky and the moonlit water surrounding the low, rounded hills dramatically in short, quick brushstrokes of
blue, green, purple, brown, and yellow paint
Photography
Thomson lived in the midst of the momentous
transitions from art to photography, and on the
cusp of the shift from representation to
abstraction in painting. We know of his interest
in photography because he lamented the loss of
many rolls of exposed film when his canoe
capsized twice on the Spanish River in 1912.
The few photographs we have from him are
ordinary snapshots, not aesthetic statements.
His paintings, in contrast, quickly sweep past
mere illustration and into strong emotional
expression. Painters like Thomson don’t
Tom Thomson, Canoeing through Drowned Land,
I, c. 1912, photograph, Library and Archives
Canada, Ottawa
necessarily paint what they see: they paint how they want us to see and to feel.
Tom Thomson, Beaver Lodge, I, c. 1914,
photograph, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa
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