One of the first highway signs you see upon exiting Pearson International Airport asserts: Algonquin Park, 250 km. I have always found this to be an odd marker for those only recently landed in Toronto. The notion that the traveler, discombobulated from the simulated and controlled environments of plane and airport terminal, would have as a priority a trek through Ontario’s oldest and largest provincial park seems a bit far-fetched, almost presumptuous, yet Ontario’s highway planners are savvy in placing this tantalizing promise in stark juxtaposition to the geography of throughways, byways, cloverleafs, overpasses, on-ramps, off-ramps and their interstitial triangles of spindly grasses and weeds: what is Toronto, then, but an interference? Canada through a glass darkly, the perennial urban deception forestalling the rendezvous with the historical metaphysic of True North: being and landscape, being as landscape and vice versa, at long last face to face. And indeed this national mythos common to most and liberally commodified (Great White North, The Idea of North, We the North, etc.) is a compelling invitation for both citizens and visitors alike, an echo of that which impelled colonial explorers, voyageurs, and later settlers ever northward across the expanse of the Canadian Shield through the ventricles of lakes and capillaries rivers into its dense pelt of forest.
One and a half times larger than Prince Edward Island and initially established in 1893 as a wildlife sanctuary, Algonquin Park (along with Banff) has become synecdoche: a paradigm in perceived sensations of a Provincial or National Park whose existential frisson is located in the siren call of the loon. Should one accept the call to this wilderness, (alas not entirely ‘untouched’ due to its history of logging and the presence of its sinuous railway lines), one would join a long line of those for whom the park was and is a haven, including some of Canada’s most well-known artists of the early 20th century. Tom Thomson, one such artist and adventurer, lived and worked in the park during his short, but prolific career, and it is his life’s work that is so exceptionally curated in the McMichael Gallery’s North Star exposition and its accompanying exposition catalog, published by Goose Lane Editions.
Having had the great fortune to see this exhibit both at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in 2023 and again at the Audain Art Museum, where North Star was exhibited until October 14th, 2024, I came away with a new appreciation for the work of Tom Thomson and his contribution to the creation of the Canadian school of painting and a greater artistic and cultural identity for Canadians as distinct from its European forbears. While his career extended over a relatively short period of time, before his mysterious death in 1917, he was nonetheless prolific and produced nearly 500 oil sketches and more than 40 larger works. North Star features more than 150 of Thomson’s sketches and larger works that span 1913-1917.
Sarah Milroy, executive director and chief curator at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection has endeavoured to set a different course for the exposition catalog for North Star, setting it apart from a great number of previously published works about the life and work of Tom Thomson; bringing together the written contributions of Executive Director Ian A.C. Dejardin, artists, Zachari Logan, Sandra Meigs, and Ben Reeves; Group of Seven historian Douglas Hunter, and an Indigenous perspective and reflection from Algonquin historian, Christine Luckasavitch, Milroy succeeds in the exploration of man as myth, of Thomson’s artistic practice and technique, of his subject matter, and of the place to which he returned time and again.
In her introduction, Milroy proposes that “Thomson’s paintings long ago achieved the status of national treasures, a status that one can argue has come to obscure their radicality.” and poses the question, “Can we even really see these paintings anymore?” (emphasis in original). But it is Dejardin and Hunter, in their contributions to the exposition catalog, who will show that Thomson’s paintings are also obscured by the patina of mystery that has clung to the artist these long years, for the taciturn and reserved artist in death provided a blank form on which was imposed a mythology, “[p]art Hawkeye, part Chingachgook, part Green Man, part patron saint of Canadian painting … No stone, real or imaginary, fact or fantasy, has been left unturned in excavating a life story from the sparse documents surviving.” Dejardin goes on to point out that “The gulf between who Thomson actually might have been and what Canada wants him to have been is by now pretty well unbridgeable.” Once past the imagined identity, Dejardin, pulling from biographers Harold Town and Blodwen Davies, illustrates that for which the artist should be more celebrated and known, his remarkable three-year peak in which he painted hundreds of sketches and for his contribution to the elemental precursor to the Group of Seven (Algonquin School).
Douglas Hunter takes on some of the lore surrounding Thomson, in particular the false rumour of an indigenous ancestry. In this undertaking, his exploration of the colonial fetishism that existed in the early 20th century is as fascinating as it is grotesque. At a time when Indigenous populations across North America had been reduced to as low as 375,000 people (Canadian Encyclopaedia), the adoption of a romantic idea of pseudo-Indigeneity was an act of anti-modernity and its accompanying industrialisation, mechanisation, and urbanisation. Hunter writes that “men were encouraged to venture into the wilds as sportsmen, as an antidote to urban industrialized environments that were considered both emasculating and unhealthy.” The romanticisation of the “Indian” culminates in experiences for adults and children alike through outdoor adventures and summer camp experiences replete with feathered headdress, war paint, and whooping. And Thomson’s legend fits well into this landscape. He is honoured by stone cairn and totem pole on the edge of Canoe Lake, remembered for his rugged nature, his love for the wild, his natural ability as a canoeist and guide, serving as an emblem of a different kind of life lived far away from the dirty, noisy streets of The Big Smoke.
North Star generally succeeds in translating Thomson’s work to the page. While lacking some of the more electric, almost neon hues, high quality images effectively convey the texture of each brush stroke. The curation of the show and of the images in the exposition catalog are exemplary of Thomson’s various periods and choices of subject matter. Covering a wide array of Thomson’s subject matter, themes include Skies, Snow and Ice, Georgian Bay, the Petawawa Gorges, Wildflowers, and the Northern Lights, among others. Flipping through North Star’s pages is to travel through Thomson’s paintings on a tour that is up close and personal, and where no paddle is needed.
Flipping through North Star’s pages is to travel through Thomson’s paintings on a tour that is up close and personal, and where no paddle is needed.
In response to Milroy’s ponderances, “Can we even really see these paintings anymore?”, the North Star exposition goes a long way to rehabilitate Thomson’s image, revealing those mythologies imposed in the years after his death and returning the focus to the painter’s extensive contribution to the early 20th century development of a distinctly Canadian school of art. Where the truth of Thomson’s life may be as ambiguous as the ever changing skies over the very Ontario lakes and bays he painted, what is clear is the enormity of the legacy left by this visionary man of the woods.
North Star will be exhibited next at The Beaverbrook Art Gallery from November 15th, 2024 to March 23rd, 2025.
Sarah Milroy is Executive Director and Chief Curator at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. A highly respected art writer and exhibition curator, she has contributed to more than a dozen books on art, including Generations: The Sobey Family & Canadian Art, A Like Vision: The Group of Seven & Tom Thomson, and From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia.
Ian A.C. Dejardin is an art historian and executive director of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions (July 25, 2023)
Hardcover 11″ x 10″ | 272 pages
ISBN: 9781773103204
Christina Barber is a writer and educator who lives in Vancouver. An avid reader, she shares her passion for Canadian history and literature through her reviews on Instagram @cb_reads_reviews. She has most recently been committed to writing and staging formally innovative single and multi-act plays.
- Christina Barberhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/christinab/
- Christina Barberhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/christinab/
- Christina Barberhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/christinab/
- Christina Barberhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/christinab/
- Christina Barberhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/christinab/
- Christina Barberhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/christinab/
