Tom Thomson—Painter of the North

Early Life

Born in Claremont, Ontario in 1877, Tom Thomson moved to Leith, Ontario as a small child. Growing up in such rural surroundings, he was an experienced hunter and fisher from a young age. In 1901, Thomson moved to Seattle, Washington to study at his brother’s business school. Soon after, he left school to join a photoengraving firm. It wasn’t creative work, but it did help to develop his design skills. By 1905, Thomson was living in Toronto, Ontario and working as a photoengraver. He joined the staff of Grip Ltd around 1907 where he worked with many future members of the Group of Seven.

Painting the North

In May of 1912, Thomson took his first extended canoe trip to Algonquin Park in northern Ontario with other artists from Grip. A few months later, he travelled down the Mississagi River, igniting a love of the North. His early north country sketches from this period are rather dark and somber. Fellow Grip staffer A.Y. Jackson introduced Thomson to a brighter color palette around this time.

Thomson’s first large canvas, A Northern Lake, from 1913, marks a major turning point in the artist’s career. The piece features free brushwork and thickly applied globs of color. It also displays a new compositional arrangement—the foreground and verticals of the trees both set off and unite the water, mountains, and sky beyond. This became a trademark of landscapes by Thomson and the Group of Seven.

In the fall on 1915, Thomson moved into a shack behind the Studio Building in Toronto, Ontario where many of the Group of Seven members worked on their canvases. He disliked the city, and to friends he seemed almost oblivious to it. He opted to live as if he was in the woods, and rarely left the shack during the day. In the summer of 1916, Thomson returned to Algonquin Park and in late May he took a job as a fire ranger. Sadly, he didn’t produce many sketches that season due to his work and he returned to Toronto that autumn.

Death

In April 1917, Thompson returned to Algonquin Park and was eager to get back to sketching both within the park as well as areas even farther north, but this was not to be. On July 8, 1917, Thomson set off from Mowat Lodge in Algonquin Park for a day of sketching around Canoe Lake and was last seen paddling around a bend. When he didn’t return to the lodge that evening, not much was thought of it. As an experienced outdoorsman, Thomson left with enough gear to camp out overnight and this was not at all out of the ordinary for the artist. However, the following day, July 9, his overturned canoe was found and a search party was formed. His body was found a week later, on July 16, 1917.

His tragic death just shy of his 40th birthday would lead to him obtaining near-mythic status as a romantic hero in Canadian art. Many of his friends and colleagues would go on to form the Group of Seven a few years later. Had Thomson not met this early demise, they most definitely would have been the Group of Eight, with Thomson as a central member.