Tom Thomson was a Canadian painter. He was best known for his thickly painted landscapes of the Canadian wilderness.
Background
Tom Thomson was born on August 5, 1877, in Claremont, Ontario, Canada not far from Toronto. He was brought up at Leith on the shores of Georgian Bay. He was the son of John and Margaret Thomson and grew up in Leith, Ontario, near Owen Sound in the Municipality of Meaford. He had five bothers and four sisters.
Education
Thomson was largely self-taught. In terms of his development as a painter, Thomson's experience up to this point was primarily that of an amateur. 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 today’s 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.
Career
In 1901 Tom Thomason joined his brother George in Seattle, Washington, where George had helped establish the Acme Business College. Tom signed up there for a course in penmanship. After six months, he went to work for a photo-engraving firm. Perhaps predictably, the peripatetic Thomson soon accepted a higher-paying position with the Seattle Engraving Company. In all he spent three years in Seattle, during which time he seems to have initiated his study of commercial art and pursued, in desultory fashion, pen-drawings and water-colours. One of his earliest known works, Self-portrait: after a day in Tacoma, is from this period.
Tom went back to Ontario to continue the commercial-design work he found to his liking. For the next five years he worked for a variety of photo-engraving companies, including Legg Brothers of Toronto, possibly Reid Press of Hamilton, and, as of 1907 or 1908, Grip Limited in Toronto. As well, he began to use oil-paints in a tentative way. Through his friends at work, through exhibitions, and through the Arts and Letters Club, Thomson gradually carne to the attention of those men who, in 1920, would form the Group of Seven, Canada’s first national school of art.
In May 1913 Thomson gave up his commercial design job and left to spend a season in Algonquin Park, sketching, guiding fishing parties, and perhaps fire-ranging. When he returned to Toronto in November, he brought with him at least 30 landscape sketches, including Lake, shore and sky, which he gave to A. Y. Jackson. James Metcalfe MacCallum, a prominent ophthalmologist, quietly became Thomson’s patron and promoter, and a supporter of the wilderness theme. Orchestrated by MacCallum, by January 1914 Thomson and Jackson were sharing a studio in the Studio Building, which MacCallum and Harris had just constructed in the Rosedale ravine.
During the winter of 1914 – 1915 Thomson shared space in the Studio Building with Frank Carmichael. Here he painted up sketches he had produced over the summer. One of the resulting canvases was Northern river, a large piece that Thomson showed at the annual show of the OSA in March – April 1915 at the Toronto Public Reference Library.
In 1915 Thomson returned to Algonquin Park, staying at Mowat Lodge on Canoe Lake. The sketches that Thomson produced in 1915 were more accomplished than his previous work, especially in the development of colour, where he used hues closest to the primaries. In November 1915, before returning to Toronto, Thomson went to Owen Sound to see his sister Minnie Harkness and her family.
On July 8, 1917 Thomson set off in his canoe filled with fishing equipment and supplies. The canoe was seen floating upside down that afternoon. The artist’s body was found six days later, floating in the lake with fishing line wrapped around his legs. It remains unknown as to whether his drowning was an accident, suicide, or murder.
Views
Quotations:
"... the best I can do does not do the place much justice in the way of beauty."