Tom Thomson

Tom Thomson
Life & Work by David P. Silcox
Diverse Influences
In the early 1900s in Toronto, Thomson had no opportunities to see first-hand what
was going on in Europe or even in New York—a city he never visited. The art he was
exposed to came in the form of reproductions in The Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of
Fine and Applied Art and other art magazines, or was filtered through the interpretations
of art movements by his colleagues, the future members of the Group of Seven, all of
whom were trained in art and art history.
Consequently, what we find in Thomson’s work are smatterings of many earlier
art movements: Impressionism, Expressionism, Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts motifs,
stray examples of American versions of French Impressionism, and Victorian and
Edwardian English landscape traditions. The Pointers, 1916–17, shows Thomson flirting
with Impressionism, for example, while The West Wind, 1916–17—especially the
foreground and the sinuous branches of the tree—draws on Art Nouveau. Thomson’s
nod to Expressionism crops up most strongly in 1916 and 1917 as he moves toward
abstraction in such works as After the Storm, 1917 and Cranberry Marsh, 1916.
Any art books or magazines that floated into Thomson’s view would have had
mostly black and white images. From the various influences he eagerly absorbed, he
received a wealth of possibilities, none of which, however, reflected the vital modernist
movements (Cubism, the Fauves, Surrealism) that had been roiling through Europe
during the two decades before his death in 1917.
In works such as Approaching Snowstorm, 1915, Thomson was drawn to the
English landscape painter John Constable (1776–1837), who had been introduced to
him by Arthur Lismer (1885–1969) and J.E.H. MacDonald (1873–1932). Constable was
the first artist to approach the landscape not just as a painting genre but as an
experience of a natural event—a rainstorm, a brilliant rainbow, an unusual cloud
formation, a misty sunrise. In this respect, he and his contemporary William J.M. Turner
(1775–1851) rewrote the rules for landscape painting. In 1888 a critic described
Constable’s small oil sketches as “faithful and brilliant transcriptions of the thing of the
moment—nature caught in the very act.” He might have been writing of Thomson’s
small sketches almost three decades later.
1
Tom Thomson, Study of a Woman’s Head,
c. 1903, ink and crayon on paper, 11 x 8 cm,
Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, Owen
Sound, Ontario. Thomson’s carefully drawn
sketch is based on the iconic “Gibson Girl,”
created by the American illustrator Charles Dana
Gibson and often reproduced in magazines in the
early 1900s
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