Tom Thomson

Tom Thomson (1877–1917) was one of the defining figures in Canadian landscape painting and the artist whose bold images of the Canadian wilderness helped prepare the way for the Group of Seven. Born Thomas John Thomson in Claremont, Ontario, and raised near Leith outside Owen Sound, he began his professional life in commercial design before turning seriously to painting in the early 1910s. During an extraordinarily brief mature career, Thomson produced several hundred small oil sketches painted directly from nature and a smaller number of major canvases, including Northern River, The Jack Pine and The West Wind, that have become canonical works of Canadian art. Although he died three years before the Group of Seven was formally established in 1920 and was therefore never a member, his friendships with its future members and the example of his work were fundamental to the group’s development. Thomson helped establish a new, modern visual language for the Canadian landscape - one that was immediate, experimental and independent of conventional European landscape traditions - and his paintings have remained central to Canadian cultural identity ever since.

Thomson was born on August 5, 1877, and grew up in rural Ontario in a large family. After an unsuccessful attempt to enter military service during the South African War and a period at business college, he moved to Seattle in 1901 and worked in commercial engraving and design before returning to Canada. By 1909 he was working in Toronto at the design firm Grip Ltd., where colleagues included J.E.H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer and Franklin Carmichael; A.Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris and others soon entered the same artistic circle. Thomson had little formal art-school training, but his experience in illustration, lettering and commercial design gave him a strong sense of composition and pattern. He first visited Algonquin Park in 1912 and returned regularly thereafter, working at different times as a guide and spending long periods sketching outdoors. The patron Dr. James MacCallum began supporting him financially in 1914, allowing Thomson to devote himself increasingly to painting. His practice typically involved rapid oil studies on small wood panels made in the landscape, which he sometimes developed into larger canvases during the winter in Toronto. His colour became increasingly intense and his forms increasingly simplified and rhythmic, drawing selectively on Post-Impressionism, Art Nouveau and contemporary illustration while developing into a highly individual response to the Ontario wilderness. Thomson drowned in Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park in July 1917 at the age of thirty-nine, though the circumstances surrounding his death have raised suspicions among some.

Thomson’s formal exhibition career was short, but his artistic impact was exceptional. He exhibited with the Ontario Society of Artists and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and the National Gallery of Canada began acquiring his work during his lifetime. His close artistic relationships with MacDonald, Lismer, Carmichael, Harris and Jackson placed him at the centre of the circle that became the Group of Seven in 1920; Lawren Harris later explicitly treated Thomson as a working member in spirit, even though the group itself did not yet exist before Thomson’s death. His major canvases and oil sketches entered the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario and, later, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, which holds one of the most important concentrations of work by Thomson and the Group of Seven. His reputation grew rapidly after his death through memorial exhibitions and the advocacy of his fellow artists, and by the mid-twentieth century works such as The Jack Pine and The West Wind had assumed an iconic status in Canadian art. Thomson's influence has extended well beyond landscape painting itself: successive generations of Canadian artists, writers, historians and filmmakers have returned to his work and life as central reference points in debates about landscape, nationalism, wilderness and Canadian identity.