Our summer trip to Toronto included a stop at the wonderful McMichael Canadian Art Collection, which featured a great exhibition of First Nations, Inuit, and immigrant art plus a large permanent Group of Seven collection.
Of the landscapes that were on display, the colors and design of Tom Thomson’s landscapes grabbed me. But what has grabbed the public imagination even more than his paintings and sketches are the circumstances surrounding his death and burial(s) (yes, burials). There’s even a whole Wikipedia page on his death and the curious details around it.
Thomson died before the formation of the Group of Seven. Of all the artists from that time, Thomson seems the most singular, remote and unknowable. He preferred the outdoors over the city. He died young with his life and thoughts on art barely documented. All we have left are his paintings and the reminiscences of those who knew him.
So, interested in Thomson’s story, I picked up two books at the McMichael gift shop (art museum gift shops are the best): a novel, Canoe Lake by Roy MacGregor, and a play, Tom Thompson: On the Threshold of Magic by Barry Brodie.
In Canoe Lake, Eleanor, a young woman from Philadelphia, searches in rural Ontario for her birth mother. Her questions kick off memories in Russell, an old-timer in the village living in a residential hotel, and his friend and unrequited love Jenny, now a spinster recluse but who at one time was going to marry a visiting artist named Tom Thomson. Eleanor’s detective work digging up secrets some people want kept jostles against Russell’s memories of Jenny and Tom, and of course, those worlds will collide in Canoe Lake, the site of Thomson’s death.
It’s a terrific novel, very well done, with depth and great textures, and a sensitivity for its characters, especially the hapless Russell. Definitely worth a re-read.
In his Author’s Note, MacGregor reveals his long fascination with the facts and mysteries surrounding Thomson’s death and MacGregor’s own distant family connection to it. The novel drapes a fiction over the bones of his research, though you can feel MacGregor really savoring the conversations of Thomson’s friends as they examine his body recovered after six or seven days in Canoe Lake, and speculate on the unusual gash on his temple and the fishing line tangled – or wrapped? – around his ankle.
MacGregor returned to the subject later with a non-fiction account of the incident and the times, Northern Light: The Enduring Mystery of Tom Thomson and the Woman Who Loved Him. The Author’s Note is a précis, I think, for this fuller treatment.
Tom Thomson: On the Threshold of Magic by Barry Brodie is a poetic play with Thomson narrating his inner journey from young man to artist to his afterlife, with all the characters in trembling awe of his artistic vision. Over half of this slim book is in fact devoted to the play’s writing and initial staging, and the back-stage stuff is honestly the most interesting part.
NB: Thomson’s studio now sits on the McMichael grounds.
