Tom Thomson, the brilliant, pioneering Canadian artist for whom the City of Owen

Sounds Art Gallery is named, was born near Claremont, Ontario, northeast of Toronto
on August 5, 1877, the sixth of ten children born to John Thomson and Margaret
Matheson.
It was in this quiet rolling country side, overlooking the shores of Georgian Bay that
Thomson grew up.
He was said to have been enthusiastic about sports, swimming, hunting and fishing.
He shared his familys sense of humour and love of music.
Indeed, Toms Victorian upbringing, gave him an immense appreciation for the arts.
Drawing, music, and design were valuable and honoured pursuits. Within this Scottish
family structure, however, there were also pressures to succeed, to find an occupation,
to marry, and to have a family.
in 1899 due to health reasons, Tom apprenticed as a machinist at Kennedys Foundry
in Owen Sound for 8 months. Still undecided on a career, he briefly attended business
school in Chatham. In 1901, he moved to Seattle, Washington to join his brother
George at his business college.
By 1905, he had returned Canada to work as a senior artist at Legg Brothers, a photoengraving firm in Toronto
In 1909 Thomson joined the staff of Grip Ltd., a prominent Toronto photo-engraving
house, and this proved to be a turning point in his life. The firms head designer,
artist-poet J.E.H. MacDonald, contributed much to Thomsons artistic development,
sharpening his sense of design. Fellow employees included Arthur Lismer, Fred
Varley, Franklin Carmichael and Franz Johnson all adventurous young painters who
often organized weekend painting trips to the countryside around Toronto. After
Toms death, these men, together with Lawren Harris and A.Y. Jackson, would go on
to form Canadas first national school of painting, the Group of Seven.
Curator Charles Hill comments that Thomsons surviving artwork prior to 1911
consists of drawings in ink, watercolour and coloured chalk, of womens heads very
much in the vein of the American illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, who had
established the Gibson girl look, as well as ink and watercolour landscapes done
around Leith, Owen Sound and Toronto
He also states The arrangements of some texts and designs has a similarity to the
patterning of stained glass and are most likely characteristic of the Arts and Craftsinfluenced commercial work he might have done.
In 1912, inspired by tales of Ontarios far north, Thomson traveled to the Mississagi
Forest Reserve near Sudbury, and to Algonquin Park, a site that was to inspire much
of his future artwork. It was during this same year that Thomson began to work for
the commercial art firm Rous and Mann.
He was joined there by Varley, Carmichael and Lismer.
When out painting on location, Thomson would use a small wooden sketch box, not
much bigger then a piece of letter-sized paper, to carry his oil paints, palette, and

brushes; his small painting boards were safely tucked away from each other in slots
fitted in the top. Sitting down in the canoe, on a log or rock, with the sketch box in
front of him, he would quickly capture the landscape around him.
In 1913 Thomson exhibited his first major canvas, A Northern Lake, at the Ontarios
Society of Artists exhibition. The Government of Ontario purchased the canvas for
$250 a considerable sum in 1913, considering Thomsons commercial artists weekly
salary was $35 in 1912.
From a letter Tom sent to Dr. MacCallum from Camp Mowat, on October 6, 1914,
Tom wrote: Jackson and myself have been making quite a few sketches lately and I
will send a bunch down with Lismer when he goes back. He & Varley are greatly
taken with the look of things here, just now the maples are about all stripped of leaves
but the birches are very rich in colour. We are all working away but the best I can do
does not do the place much justice in the way of beauty.
painting was not something Thomson learned easily, and the process was
accompanied by much self-doubt. Jackson recounted that in the fall of 1914 in
Algonquin Park Thomson threw his sketch box into the woods in frustration. Jackson
claimed that Thomson was so shy he could hardly be induced to show his sketches.
From 1914 to 1917 Thomson spent the spring and fall sketching, and acted as a guide
and fire Ranger during the summer in Algonquin Park. He became an expert canoeist
and woodsman.
Many of Thomsons paintings from Georgian Bay and Algonquin Park strike an
interesting balance; his imagery is at once innovative, but rooted in careful
observation. His artwork changed dramatically: from painting every detail in an
almost photographic manner in his earlier work, to capturing the true spirit of the
landscape around him. Within a six-year period, he had developed a strong personal
style of bold colour combinations, expressive brush strokes and unique images of the
Northern landscape.
The bold immediacy of Thomsons sketches was to define a new style of painting that
would be attributed as uniquely Canadian and would shape how generations of people
think about the Canadian landscape.
Thomson found beauty in the most uncommon scenes Jackson wrote: To most
people Thomsons country was a monotonous dreary waste, yet out of one little
stretch he found riches undreamed of. Not knowing all the conventional definitions of
beauty, he found it all beautiful: muskeg, burnt and drowned land, log chutes, beaver
dams, creeks, wild rivers and placid lakes, wild flowers, northern lights, the flight of
wild geese and the changing seasons from spring to summer to autumn. It was in the
solitude of Algonquins lakes and woods that he became himself.
Tom Thomson died sometime between July 8, when he was last seen, and July 16,
1917, when his body was found floating in Canoe Lake. The cause of death was
recorded as accidental drowning.

Tom would have celebrated his fortieth birthday on August 5. His watch had stopped
at 12:14. Dr. Howland was asked to examine the body before burial. He reported a
bruise about 10 cm across the right temple, air issuing from the lungs, and some
bleeding from the right ear. And though his death was officially recorded as accidental
due to drowning, his demise has become one of Canadas greatest mysteries.
Thomson did not simply depict the the literal appearance of the Algonquin landscape;
his interest was in showing its moods, weather and seasonal changes.
Thomson's technique captures the movement of clouds and the sensation of light and
shadow. The format is a recurrent theme in his work: the low horizon of land is
dwarfed by the more massive formations overhead, no matter what the time of day or
weather conditions. Thomson also favoured more initimate corners of the wilderness.
Many paintings, such as Autumn Garland, Snow In The Woods and Autumn Birches,
reveal the patterns and the subtle colour tones of a scene closely viewed.
Lismer called Tom Thomson "the voyageur, the discoverer...He felt nature - he adored
her - crept into her moods,....and his canvases lived in the Canadian mind."
An early inspiration for what became The Group of Seven, Tom Thomson was
probably the most influential and enduringly popular Canadian artist of the early part
of the twentieth century.
His father was something of a naturalist; a cousin, Dr. William Brodie, nine years
older than his father, was one of the finest naturalists of the day (from 1903 until his
death in 1909, he was director of the Biological Department of what is today the
Royal Ontario Museum). Thomson collected specimens with Dr. Brodie, who gave
him the rudiments of a naturalist's training. From Brodie, Thomson learned how to
combine keen observation of nature with a sense of reverence for its mystery.
In order to become a professional artist, he had to overcome numerous obstacles,
among them his lack of knowledge of the technical side of painting. This situation
began to change with his enrolment in 1906 in night school at the Central Ontario
School of Art and Industrial Design (the 19th century precursor to todays Ontario
College of Art and Design University), as well as through his contact, beginning in
1908, with a lively group of comrades at Grip Limited, a well-known commercial art
firm.
When Thomson joined Grip, the company was at a crucial stage of its development. It
had a good art director, A.H. Robson, and a painter, J.E.H. MacDonald, who was the
anchor of the design team. Thomson worked with MacDonald, and it was under his
tutelage and encouragement that Thomson's genius began to flower.
Thomson selected one of the sketches he'd done on the trip to Algonquin Park and
transformed it into a picture with greater depth in the foreground. This method of
working from an on-the-spot sketch to a finished studio painting became his common
practice. These two ways of working reveal contrasting sides of Thomsons artistic
personality: the sketch with its vivacity and on-the-spot reportage recalls the
spontaneity of the lyric poem; the canvas created in the studio is akin to an epic poem

with effects adapted from such styles of the day as art nouveau and postimpressionism.
By that time the artist was transposing, eliminating, and applying various types of
design to his work in order to evolve his conception of landscape painting. Eventually
this would become the basis for a style that would bring national prominence to the
Group of Seven, a movement that blended a growing Canadian consciousness with
the theme of landscape in paint.
His method was to capture transient moments of light and atmosphere by sketching
quickly in oil from nature, sometimes developing these sketches into full-blown
celebrations of the land.
Their focus on the Canadian landscape as the subject for their art reflected an
increasingly nationalistic sentiment within a deep-rooted love for the natural
environment of Canada. The Groups intention was to produce work in a style that
broke with European traditions in art. Their bright and bold use of paint and colour
seemed a suitable complement to the aggressive expansion that the country was
experiencing at the outset of the 1920s.
The Group of Sevens determination and their belief in Canadian culture were
immensely influential in the years following the 1920 exhibition, and that influence
prevails to this day. For many, they symbolize the concept of a distinctly Canadian
identity.
Despite his extremely brief period of workhe painted for less than six yearshe
sowed the seeds of perhaps the first real movement in art in this country, defined as it
was by a passionate connection to the northern wilderness and drawn by Thomson
with keen perception and an ingenuous style.
The Group of Sevens style has variously been described as post-impressionist or
expressionist, although in actuality their connection is less one of style than of
subject. Their work deals mainly with the wilderness and rural expanse of the north
and far north, with some notable and interesting exceptions depicting rural industry
and working class life.
At Grip, he came under the wing of the gifted J.E.H. MacDonald, one of the founders
of the Group of Seven, who introduced Thomson to current developments of design
and fine art in Europe such as Art Nouveau as well as the Arts and Crafts movement
in Britain and America, which clearly furthered his aesthetic refinement.

In addition, he drew inspiration without question from earlier

movements including the Post-Impressionist and even Romantic
schools. One significant influence was the work of Scandinavian
artists that two of his colleagues, Lawren Harris and MacDonald,
had seen at a show at the Albright Gallery in upstate New York
depicting northern wilderness in a way that confirmed their own
sensibilities.

Thomson would typically do smaller painted sketches on site that

would be taken back to his studio and developed into larger, more
finished works.
Nevertheless, from the standpoint of artistic truth, his less finished
oil sketches often capture essential qualities that have a more
enduring resonance than what could be termed his more
beautiful larger canvasses.