Tom Thomson 1877 - 1917

Laing Galleries, Toronto

Private Collection, Pennsylvania

Fine Art Gallery of San Diego, Summer Show, 1972

Thomson's small oil on panel paintings, taken together, are generally acknowledged to be the summit of Canadian historical art, the apogee of Canada's golden age of nationalistic painting. His large icons like The West Wind and The Jack Pine, with their impressive scale, their dramatic and stagey impact, and their popularity in Canada and abroad, were what Harold Town called Thomson's 'studio machines, the heavy efforts near to his talent but far from his heart.' What these large works do not have, and their small progenitors most emphatically do, is the immediacy, intimacy, and intricacy – the compressed power – of first-hand observation, urgent improvisation, and what one might call a 'high ignition point.' In his oil sketches, Thomson was working at a feverish pitch of emotional excitement that he could not sustain over the length of time it took to execute a large canvas.

This recently discovered canvas on panel, Early Snow, Algonquin Park, has all the qualities that make these paintings such exceptional works. Although this painting has many of the hallmarks of Thomson's mature style, which led us initially to date it to the fall of 1916, subsequent research and comparison with other paintings has led us to consider it more as a herald of the future and to date it to the spring of 1914. Its similarity to other works done then, such as Larry Dickson's Shack (National Gallery of Canada) is very strong and its support, 'canvas on wood', is something Thomson abandoned for 'oil on composite wood-pulp board' or 'oil on wood' for virtually all his small sketches from 1915 onwards.

In this subtle work Thomson's winter scene is his inspiration for his treatment of light, form, and colour in a subject that he already knew by heart. But his approach is not at all expected. Here he takes a conventional scene and records it with a depth and complexity that is not apparent at first.

The dusky pink light flooding across the snow is the most prominent feature, then the simple division of the picture space into top and bottom, but with the weight of the upper right segment being hard to the right. The complication of the diagonal tree trunks, both the almost horizontal one knitting the upper and lower parts of the painting, and the tall leaning trees, which create an 'x' against the deeper forest provides further density and mystery to the aesthetic equation. The detailed articulation of everything, the mesh of near and far limbs and branches, comes close in some respect to Thomson's earlier Northern River, which David Milne described as being complicated 'beyond all reason.'

Because of his premature death, Thomson's paintings were few in number and consequently are extremely rare – they number little more than three hundred in total. What is even rarer is to find one that has not been recorded, exhibited, or otherwise known. This particular picture left Canada in 1958, having been acquired from the Laing Galleries by people who loved Algonquin Park and spent their summers there. For more than half a century it has been residing in Pittsburgh; it was shown once in an exhibition in San Diego, California. It bears the added benefit of an inscription by A.Y. Jackson, who was 'absolutely certain' the painting was Thomson's.

A late work like this represents Thomson when he was still evolving and changing. While at the summit of his powers, he was also visited by that divine discontent that great artists experience; he was on the cusp of change or new discovery. Like Harris, he was driven by the urge to find new ways of expressing his reactions to his subjects. And like Harris, he may have been groping toward some form of abstract expression. There are embryonic passages in Thomson's work that are certainly suggestive of this possibility, and it was something that was beginning to be in the air, perhaps in part because of the traumatic war in Europe that was raging and filling all minds with anxiety.