Tom Thomson

Tom Thomson
Life & Work by David P. Silcox
Commercial Art
Alone among his friends in the future Group of Seven, Thomson had not enjoyed a good
art-school education. However, except for Lawren Harris (1885–1970) and A.Y. Jackson
(1882–1974), they all worked as commercial artists. With his training and experience in
advertising, commercial design, and printing, Thomson had a strong background in
illustration before he began to paint seriously.
Thomson spent most of his adult life, 1902–13, working for design and photoengraving
firms, first in Seattle and then in Toronto. Grip Limited, where he was
employed for three formative years, 1909–12, was the leading graphic design company
in the city. It introduced the Art Nouveau style to Canada, along with metal engraving
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and the four-colour process. Yet, in all his years as a commercial designer, Thomson
was never able to draw the human figure successfully. Unlike his colleagues Arthur
Lismer (1885–1969) and Fred Varley (1881–1969), whose art-school training prepared
them to be “figure men” at Grip, Thomson’s lack of skill in this area stayed with him all
his life. His few paintings that include figures (In the Sugar Bush, 1915, Larry Dixon
Splitting Wood, 1915, Figure of a Lady, 1915, and The Fisherman, 1916–17) are
among the most awkward, wooden, and expressionless of his entire production. Only in
his last four years was Thomson able to devote himself entirely to making art, after Dr.
James MacCallum’s support in 1914 launched him into a career of painting full time.
Thomson’s debt to commercial art surfaced occasionally in his work: in the
decorative Art Nouveau style he used in some of his paintings, such as Northern River,
1914–15, and The West Wind, 1916–17, and in compositions such as Decorative
Landscape: Birches and Spring Ice, both 1915–16, where he places a grouping of trees
in the foreground to frame a view across a lake of low hills in the background—a layout
he had used earlier in his design work. As Jackson put it, “We treated our subjects with
the freedom of designers. We tried to emphasize colour, line and pattern.” In Forest
Undergrowth I, II, and III, the panels Thomson painted over the winter of 1915–16 for
MacCallum’s cottage on Georgian Bay, this decorative influence becomes overwhelming
and unoriginal.
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Tom Thomson, Decorative Landscape: Quotation
from Maurice Maeterlinck, c. 1908, ink on paper,
32.6 x 19.5 cm. In the art cards Thomson created
as a graphic designer, such as this that shows the
influence of Art Nouveau, he often combined
illustration with calligraphy, using verses by
Robert Burns, Rudyard Kipling, and Maurice
Maeterlinck
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