Defiant Spirits (20 page)

Even more to the point, many Scandinavian painters, as Harris and MacDonald noted in Buffalo, had turned unapologetically to winter scenes of frozen lakes and snow-blanketed forests to convey what they regarded as their particular national characters. By 1914 the influence of the exhibition of Scandinavian art on the painters of the “young school” was unmistakable. The snow-laden fir branches painted by Harris and MacDonald, in particular, revealed their efforts to imitate the style of Gustaf Fjaestad, whose “snow-hung boughs” MacDonald had so admired two years earlier.

The reviews of the
osa
exhibition were generally positive, with the
Toronto Daily
Mail & Empire
commending the “power and poetry” of the artists and Hector Charlesworth, in
Saturday Night,
praising their “pigmentary enthusiasm.” Perhaps most enthusiastic was Lismer's
Sunglow,
a work whose clashing colours, applied in thick dabs and divided brushstrokes, confirmed his involvement in the Studio Building's Neo-Impressionist discussions and experiments. Charlesworth singled out Thomson's
Northern River
as “fine, vigorous and colourful” and “a most effective composition.”
30
Northern River
was then bought by the National Gallery for its asking price of $500. The recognition was welcome, and the sum promised to end Thomson's financial worries for the next few months at least—though he once claimed that each year he spent $500 (the equivalent of almost five hundred tubes of paint) on pigment alone.
31

Also purchased by the National Gallery was Beatty's
Morning, Algonquin Park
and, though it had not appeared at the
osa
exhibition, Jackson's
The Red Maple.
The director, Eric Brown, was holding true to his promise, made in 1913, that there would be a “constant addition” to the collection as “the claims of the younger men become strong and urge recognition.”
32

ALTHOUGH THEY FAILED to find anything in the way of private buyers other than Dr. MacCallum, by 1915 most members of Algonquin Park School were represented in public collections, either in the National Gallery or in the collections of the Government of Ontario. The one member of the group whom this kind of success still eluded was Fred Varley. At the 1915
OSA
exhibition he showed a single painting, an Algonquin scene entitled
Autumn
that attracted little attention. An irascible loner, Varley was something of an outsider to the group. He had no quarters in the Studio Building, possibly owing to his chronic lack of funds. Like the other painters, he was in straitened circumstances. Early in 1915, dunned by creditors, he moved house for the fifth time since Maud's arrival in Toronto two and a half years earlier. The couple was now living with their two young children on Pacific Avenue, north of High Park. Maud had become pregnant during their stay at Mowat Lodge, and a third child was now on the way.

Varley was comfortable only with Thomson and Lismer, and sometimes he fell out even with them. In what was becoming a regular habit, he caused a disturbance at a party hosted by Lismer and his wife in the third week of March. The Lismers had invited Varley and Maud, together with Thomson and Carmichael, to their house on Delaware Avenue, north of Bloor. “It was not quite as enjoyable an evening as I have spent there before,” Carmichael observed in rueful understatement a day or two later. “Through no fault of ours, or Arthur's, Fred is again showing a side of his nature which does not always make for sociability.” No sooner had Varley arrived through the door than he said “a few words”—an insult that Carmichael had no wish to repeat—that caused deep offence to Thomson in particular. “I have never seen Tom so angry,” Carmichael told Ada. He added, “It is rotten and I feel as if I want to chuck Fred entirely.”
33

Although the exact details of the transgression went unrecorded, it is easy to imagine the conversation straying onto controversial topics, such as the war, about which Thomson held firm opinions. Another possibility is that Varley insulted Jackson, whose reputation and rewards—for paintings Varley did not admire—far outstripped those of the belligerent Yorkshireman.

One result of the argument was that Varley did not go north with Thomson, despite his expressed wish to return to Algonquin Park and “paint the out-door figure.”
34
Thomson travelled alone into the park at the end of March, laden with sketching equipment and camping gear. First, however, he spent a few days in Huntsville, a logging town on the Muskoka River.

THOMSON HAD A number of friends in Huntsville, including John McRuer, the local doctor and a fellow fishing enthusiast who had opened a practice in the town in 1908. But the “Doc,” as Thomson called him, was seriously ill with tuberculosis, and at the end of 1913 he and his wife had moved to Denver, Colorado (possibly a somewhat unexpected move considering the volumes of tourist publicity extolling the pure air of Muskoka as a tonic for respiratory ailments). In 1915 Thomson was probably visiting Winnifred Trainor, the eldest daughter of Hugh Trainor, a foreman for the Huntsville Lumber Company. Thomson and the thirty-one-year-old Winnie, who worked as a bookkeeper, might have been introduced during one of Thomson's visits to Dr. McRuer, or else they might have met at the Trainors' house, which offered itself to paying guests as a boarding house. It is more probable, though, that they met at Canoe Lake, possibly as early as 1912 or 1913, since for the previous three years Hugh Trainor had leased a small summer cottage, known as The Manse, which stood only a short distance from Mowat Lodge.

Thomson's relations with women were ambiguous and obscure. He appears to have shared the same timidity or reticence towards women as his fellow bachelors Arthur Heming and Will Broadhead. Heming never married, so the explanation went, “because he could never summon up enough courage to ask a woman to marry him.”
35
Broadhead was strongly averse to the idea of marriage: “The last thing on earth I dream of is being anchored to any female,” he once wrote to his mother. He did, however, enjoy a romantic interlude in Bisco with what he called a “little half-breed girl
. . .
the only girl who has ever stolen my affections for any time.”
36

Thomson seemed equally disinclined to marry. He regarded himself as a “wild man” unfit for female company, though his cultured upbringing and expensive tastes should have marred this self-image. More likely a combination of bashfulness and awkwardness were behind his maladroit courtship of Alice Lambert, his rejection of Varley's sister-in-law and his discourtesy towards the “attractive looking lady” who tried to engage him in conversation at Canoe Lake. Winnie Trainor appears to have been one of the few women with whom he sustained a relationship of any length or significance. Yet even the most basic details of their affair, such as how and when they met, are strangely scarce.

Whatever its eventual state, in the spring of 1915 the relationship was neither serious nor rewarding for Thomson, because in the middle of May he wrote Carmichael a distressed and slightly self-pitying letter about his lack of female companionship. He worked as a fishing guide after leaving Huntsville, and following his return from escorting American tourists he learned of Carmichael's engagement to Ada Went (the two were to be married in September). Clearly his young friend's wedding plans—and Carmichael's unfeigned and touching happiness—set Thomson to thinking about his own marital status as he approached his thirty-eighth birthday. It was unusual for a man of his age to remain a bachelor: the average Canadian man of his generation married at twenty-eight. Bachelordom was even rarer as a man got older, since 91 per cent of Canadian men ultimately tied the knot.
37

Thomson sent his congratulations to Carmichael, offering the couple as a wedding present anything in the way of “wall decoration” (as he put it) from his shack. Carmichael wrote to Ada, “It may sound hoggish, but I have such a deep admiration for his work I would like to clear the place out.” But he also told Ada how Thomson's letter was “not untinged with a certain bitterness” towards anyone who claimed that bachelordom and what Carmichael called “the state of celibacy” were the ideal existence for an artist. He did “a little moralizing on his own account about a bachelor's life
. . .
giving me the benefit of what seems to be his own personal experience.” Carmichael was slightly alarmed by the unhappy temper of the letter, which revealed his friend's essential loneliness. “Poor old boy,” he wrote to his fiancée, “the whole tone of his letter seemed to be so blue—I wanted to rush up to the park just to have a chat with him, and cheer him up a bit. He has these streaks occasionally.”
38

Thomson ended his letter to Carmichael by saying he was planning a long canoe trip through Algonquin Park. Soon afterwards, he bought a new Chestnut canoe, silk tent and other camping supplies and started out from Canoe Lake on another long solo voyage.

*
Christened Francis Hans Johnston, he was known as Frank or (in some catalogues) as “Francis H. Johnston” until 1927, when, influenced by numerology, he adopted the name Franz.

IN THE THIRD week of April in 1915, Canadian troops were engaged in some of the most notorious battles of the Great War. Late in the radiantly sunny afternoon of April 22, German soldiers seven kilometres north of Ypres released onto a northeast wind 168 tons of chlorine gas. Within minutes, the 3rd Canadian Brigade was reporting “a cloud of green vapour several hundred yards in length” approaching the French trenches to their left.
1
The Battle of Gravenstafel Ridge—later known as the Second Battle of Ypres—had begun.

Over the next few hours, as French and Algerian troops died in the trenches or staggered away in retreat, the Germans advanced four kilometres south into Allied territory. Late that evening, the 10th and 16th Canadian Battalions received orders to stop the Germans with a counterattack: they were to clear the enemy from an oak plantation called the Bois des cuisiniers and known to the English as Kitchener's Wood. The plantation with its captured British battery was retaken after a heroic charge under moonlight and machine-gun fire, but at a cost of more than six hundred Canadian lives.
2

Two days later, more horror and more heroism. At four o'clock in the morning of April 24 the Germans released poison gas directly into the Canadian line northeast of Ypres at St. Julien. Realizing the only place of safety was towards the German trenches, the Canadians rushed forward, urine-drenched cotton bandoliers serving as rudimentary gas masks. This latest confirmation of the ferocity of the Canadian troops was achieved at the cost of a thousand dead and almost five thousand wounded.

The use of poison gas, together with the Zeppelin raids over the English coast, the torpedoing of the unarmed British luxury liner
rms
Lusitania,
the deployment of “Big Bertha” artillery with shells weighing 820 kilograms, all served as brutal testament to the horrors of a war of unprecedented savagery. Stories abounded of German atrocities. In the middle of May
The Times
reported a crime of “insensate rage and hate,” claiming a Canadian sergeant had been crucified against a fence by the Germans during fighting at Ypres: “Bayonets were thrust through the palms of his hands and his feet, pinning him to the fence. He had been repeatedly stabbed with bayonets, and there were many punctured wounds on his body.”
3
A few days later a Canadian soldier wrote home claiming that not one but six Canadian soldiers had been crucified, their corpses marked with plaques warning other Canadians to stay at home.
4

The course of these events was followed closely by A.Y. Jackson. A few months earlier he had been in no hurry to enlist, but by the spring of 1915 he was beginning to change his mind. Since returning to Montreal several months earlier he had taught an art class at the Art Association of Montreal and then gone to Émileville for some
plein-air
sketching. After the excitement of the “young school” developing in Toronto, however, Montreal was a disappointment. A letter to Arthur Lismer proclaimed him to be “out of sympathy with the art world here. Their whole outlook is so puny and narrow.” Events in Europe, furthermore, had left him increasingly unsettled. “The war is not giving me much inspiration to paint,” he lamented.
5

Not only had Jackson's friend Randolph Hewton volunteered, but so too had his brother as well as Arthur Nantel, his former boss at the lithography firm where he had begun his career. Besides the radio reports and the newspapers, there were posters on every street corner urging people to purchase war bonds, donate to the Patriotic Fund, increase productivity, support the Canadian Red Cross (the wife of whose founder perished on the
Lusitania
) and, of course, enlist. At first Jackson disparaged such patriotic appeals. “The Canadian spirit which one hears so much about won't stand very close inspection,” he predicted to Lismer at the beginning of February. He found it inconsistent and richly ironic that in peacetime, newspapers force-fed Canadians a constant diet of American news and entertainment—“divorce scandals, stock comic pages”—but now suddenly they began urging Canadians to “be British” and fight for their heritage.
6
But news of the Canadian heroism at Kitchener's Wood and St. Julien forced him to reconsider. Nantel, who had joined the 14th Royal Montreal Battalion at the age of forty-one, was captured by the Germans at the Second Battle of Ypres. Jackson learned of the battle, and of the poison gas attacks, one morning in late April. “I knew then that all the wishful thinking about the war being of short duration was over.”
7
By the middle of June he had enlisted in the 60th Canadian Infantry Battalion (Victoria Rifles of Canada). He was not alone: 35,000 other Canadians joined up in the weeks after the Second Battle of Ypres, virtually doubling the number of Canadians under arms.
8

Jackson's height was recorded as five foot six inches, and he was given the regimental number 457316. Lawren Harris, in a characteristic gesture of generosity, urged Jackson to apply for an officer's commission, offering to defray all expenses. “But I knew nothing about soldiering,” Jackson later wrote, “and decided to start at the bottom as a private in the infantry.”
9

Jackson went with the thousand other men of the “Silent Sixtieth,” as the battalion was known, to Camp Valcartier, twenty kilometres northwest of Quebec City. Here, on a twelve-thousand-acre site, he and his fellow recruits began learning the art of handling guns.

ALTHOUGH TWO-THIRDS of those who enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the first months of the war were British immigrants, the three English-born members of the “young school”—MacDonald, Lismer and Varley, all with wives and young children to support—remained in or near Toronto. In the spring of 1913 MacDonald had moved with his wife and twelve-year-old son, Thoreau, to Thornhill, twenty kilometres north of downtown Toronto. For the best part of a year they rented a red-brick house before moving in the spring of 1914 to a clapboard farmhouse with a stable and four acres of land. MacDonald paid $6,500 for the property, promptly christened Four Elms. From here he commuted down Yonge Street, on the Toronto and York Radial Railway, to work at the Studio Building.

There was increasingly little commercial work for MacDonald. One of his few sources of income was the $500 first prize in a contest to design a colour poster for the Patriotic Fund, which offered financial support to the wives and families of Canadian soldiers overseas. For
Canada and the Call,
he depicted a white-robed figure of Britannia holding a Union flag and resting her hand on the shoulder of a
coverall-clad ploughboy as the pair gazed at a troop of Canadian soldiers marching determinedly past. Behind them, in a delicate spray reminiscent of A.Y. Jackson's
The Red Maple,
were the crimson leaves of a maple sapling.

Even with the prize money, MacDonald, forced to meet hefty mortgage payments on Four Elms, was suffering financially. “The hard times are hitting Jimmie pretty badly,” Frank Carmichael wrote to Ada Went, “perhaps worse than any of the rest of us.” (Carmichael too was having financial woes: on the eve of his marriage, he was preparing to move to Bolton and take work decorating hearses for the local undertaker.) Compounding MacDonald's problem was the fact that his wife, Joan, suffered health problems: she was, according to Carmichael, “invalided most of the time.”
10
Her parents soon moved into the farmhouse to help MacDonald care for her.
11

Although the National Gallery made a timely purchase of
Snow-Bound,
MacDonald's earnings nonetheless dropped so drastically in 1915 (he would earn only $624 for the entire year)
12
that in the spring he and Joan took in lodgers: Arthur Lismer and his wife and daughter. The Lismers were likewise in dire financial straits. Lismer had even abandoned his space in the Studio Building and—much to the dismay of Thomson, who hated to see his private sanctum invaded—moved his painting gear temporarily into the shack.
13
He moved his family into Four Elms and, with the help of MacDonald and his son, tried to ease their mutual plight by growing vegetables both for their own dinner plates and for ready cash.

The asperities of the war had forced MacDonald into the kind of self-sufficiency practised by the man after whom he named his son. MacDonald had always admired Henry David Thoreau. According to his old boss at Grip Limited, Albert H. Robson, his favourite authors were Thoreau and Walt Whitman.
14
What he admired in
Walden,
first published in 1854, seems to have been the same thing that Lismer esteemed in one of his own idols, Edward Carpenter: a critique of a society in which wealth and material possessions caused a deterioration of the human spirit. Thoreau was distressed by such “improvements” to nineteenth-century life as the telegraph, the railroad and the “quack vials” of modern medicine. He wished human beings to become a harmonious part of nature rather than, as many believed themselves to be by the middle of the nineteenth century, a distinct and domineering force. It was an appealing philosophy for many of the Algonquin Park painters and one that might have provided some consolation for the frail MacDonald as he leaned on his hoe in the garden at Four Elms.

Four Elms included on its west side a garden planted with sunflowers, asters and chrysanthemums, beyond which lay an apple orchard and an old stable. MacDonald's first winter in the house had seen him painting the view of his snow-laden spruce trees; in the summer of 1915 he made sketches of his new garden. Reaching for the brightest pigments in his paintbox, he depicted large sunflowers drooping amid the dazzling colour of the purple asters and blood-red chrysanthemums. Lack of funds meant he worked on pieces of fibreboard—used by bookbinders—rather than wooden panels or canvas.

Around the same time, MacDonald painted a work of a different sort, a poster designed for the war effort but apparently never printed. Already he had done a stark image of warfare for the December issue of the
Canadian Magazine,
the original of which he exhibited at the 1915
OSA
exhibition. Satirically entitled
Forward with God,
it portrayed a sword-wielding Kaiser Wilhelm astride a white horse being led by a skeleton across a field sewn with corpses and skulls. His poster
Belgium
was equally graphic: a menacing-looking black bird perched on a bare tree above a hooded woman with her head sorrowfully bowed. If these figures were inspired by Symbolist images such as those in Carlos Schwabe's classic
The Gravedigger's Death,
in the background MacDonald offered a vivid portrayal of no man's land: pools of stagnant water, the spectral silhouettes of trees, a ruinous purple sky. Both it and
Forward with God
were what a friend of MacDonald, the painter Estelle Kerr, called his “suggestive war-paintings.”
15
Although MacDonald might have done these works on commission, there is no mistaking his revulsion at the abominations of modern warfare that had plunged the world into destruction.

TOM THOMSON WAS likewise troubled by the Great War in the summer of 1915. He was deeply distressed to learn in July that Jackson had enlisted. “I can't get used to the idea of Jackson being in the machine,” he wrote to MacDonald the week after Jackson was sent to Valcartier, “and it is rotten that in this so-called civilized age such things can exist.”
16

Thomson's comments reveal a horror at the war consistent with his reading of Norman Angell. But two rangers working in Algonquin Park in 1915 claimed that he tried to volunteer for service. Bud Callighen, with whom Thomson transported tourists by canoe from Joe Lake Station to Smoke Lake, told a visitor that in the spring of 1915 Thomson “was lamenting the fact that he could not enlist in the Army” and vowing to “get over yet” despite the fact that, as Callighen put it, “certain persons interested in Tom objected to his abandoning his art career to go overseas.”
17
The truth of this story, related three decades after the fact, is impossible to confirm. It is plausible that Dr. MacCallum—who clearly regarded Thomson as the most adept and promising of the Canadian School—should have tried to talk his protege out of enlistment. Less plausible is the fact that a thirty-eight-year-old man who wished to serve overseas would have bowed to such pressure.

A different version was provided by the park ranger Mark Robinson. He later claimed that Thomson did attempt to enlist in the Canadian Expeditionary Force at a station in Kearney but “was turned down and felt very keenly about it.” He then apparently tried again in Toronto, with the same result, and finally “went to some outside point in the country” (possibly Owen Sound, where the 147th Grey Overseas Battalion was recruiting in 1915) only to be rejected for a third time.
18
One of his sisters, visiting from Saskatchewan, likewise believed he had made at least one unsuccessful attempt to enlist.
19

It is possible that, despite his abhorrence of the “machine” of war, Thomson volunteered for service in 1915 only to be rejected, possibly because of “a foot not properly arched” or the broken toe from that long-ago football game (the reason he was supposedly turned down for service in the Boer War). Certainly fit and able men were sometimes declined for no apparent reason. Frank Carmichael was declined on minor medical grounds, and a future Victoria Cross winner, G.B. McKean of the Royal Montreal Regiment, was rejected for service three times before he was able to enlist in January 1915. At most recruiting offices, the failure rate for medical reasons was as high as 70 per cent. Potential recruits could be turned away because of bad teeth, poor eyesight, a lack of height or a chest of inadequate circumference.
20