Literature
David Silcox and Harold Town, Tom Thomson: The Silence and the Storm, Toronto, 1977, page 49
David P. Silcox, Tom Thomson: Life and Work (online publication), Art Canada Institute, Toronto, 2016, pages 3, 7 and 9
Born in Claremont, Ontario, a small village northeast of Toronto, Tom Thomson and his family would move to nearby Leith when he was two months old, the town located less than ten kilometres from the city of Owen Sound. Thomson’s childhood was a happy and hectic one, the sixth of ten children, who were encouraged and entertained early, through activities including reading, music, hunting, fishing and drawing.
Throughout his life, Thomson would return regularly to Leith to visit his family and it likely would have been during one of these trips that he painted 1908’s “Road Near Leith”. The artist had settled in Toronto in the years previous (after stays in Owen Sound and Seattle) and was continuing a career in commercial art which would connect him with J.E.H. MacDonald and future members of the Group of Seven. During this early period in Toronto, Thomson is believed to have also been taking night classes with William Cruikshank at the Central Ontario School of Art and Industrial Design (now OCAD University), likely learning “useful techniques” from the British artist.
Painted at the start of the decade of Thomson’s artistic transformation, which would lead to some of the most celebrated and influential Canadian works of art of the twentieth century, “Road Near Leith” possesses traits which would be central to his tragically brief career as an artist. The painter’s masterful handling of light is most apparent, the gradated reds and oranges beaming from a central point at the end of the road, guiding the viewer through a darkened corridor of trees before arriving upon the most vivid of the composition’s pigmentation at the horizon. Thomson creates the land in dark and earthen shades, a perfect contrast to the transitioning sky, with the soft slate of the road cutting through the fields. As with many of Thomson’s early works, we are treated to a scene of apparent simplicity only to have it slowly reveal aspects of complexity before our eyes.
The composition provides the possibility of this street being that which would become “Tom Thomson Lane”, named for the famous son of Leith and one of only three main roads leading into the community. It is upon that street that we find Leith Church, where the Thomson family regularly attended services and the children sang in the choir (and where Tom is said to have sketched “caricatures of neighbours” in the hymn books, to the amusement of his sisters). Steps from the church on the street bearing his name, we find Leith Pioneer Cemetery, the final resting place of Tom Thomson.
