Exhibited
Possibly “Nova Scotia Provincial Exhibition,” Halifax, 8‒16 September 1915, no. 90 as “The Little Maple” at $20
“Collector’s Canada: Selections from a Toronto Private Collection”, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; travelling to Musée du Québec, Quebec City; Vancouver Art Gallery; Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, 14 May 1988‒7 May 1989, no. 71
“Retrospective Exhibition Arthur Lismer (1885-1969)”, Galerie Walter Klinkhoff, Montreal, 6‒20 September 1997, no. 1
“Embracing Canada: Landscapes from Krieghoff to the Group of Seven”, Vancouver Art Gallery; travelling to the Glenbow Museum, Calgary; Art Gallery of Hamilton, 30 October 2015‒25 September 2016, reproduced page 96
Literature
Dr. James MacCallum fonds, Library and Archives of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Marjorie Lismer Bridges, “A Border of Beauty: Arthur Lismer’s Pen and Pencil”, Toronto, 1977, pages 15-18
Lois Darroch, “Bright Land: A Warm Look at Arthur Lismer”, Toronto, 1981, reproduced page 27
Dennis Reid, “Collector’s Canada: Selections from a Toronto Private Collection”, Toronto, 1988, no. 71, page 3, reproduced page 66
Charles C. Hill, ‘Tom Thomson Painter’, and Joan Murray, ‘Tom Thomson’s Letters’, in “Tom Thomson”, Toronto/Ottawa/Vancouver, 2002, pages 126-127, 298-300
In January 1914 Tom Thomson and A.Y. Jackson moved into a joint studio in the newly constructed Studio Building. As Jackson later reminisced, Thomson “was cheerful company and loved to talk of his life up north, while I would tell him of my experiences in Europe.” Enthused by Thomson’s stories, Jackson travelled to Algonquin Park for the first time in February 1914 (temperature 45 degrees below zero). Fellow artists J.E.H. MacDonald and J.W. Beatty arrived in March and Arthur Lismer in May. 1914 was the Algonquin year that bonded the artists in a new movement.
Algonquin Park was a revelation to Lismer, who wrote an account of his first visit. “I reached Canoe Lake … about ten o’clock in the evening, after a stuffy 9 hours in the train. I was met by Thomson who had brought down the wagon & we drove through the bush to where he was staying - imagine a glorious full moon coming over the tops of the spruce, big and yellow, shedding a mysterious light on everything - the air had a tang of freshness & cold that was wonderfully invigorating & refreshing after the stuffy train & the city I had left. One smelt the trees and the fragrance of the ground beneath, & the moonlight had colour you could see to paint…. This was the background and setting as it were to a wonderful chorus of sounds, the night chorus of nature’s orchestra - the wind in the pines, the shrill cry of the loons, the never ending piping of innumerable frogs and toads, rising and falling in rhythmic cadence, the low of the bittern, the hooting of owls.” After loading their supplies, they canoed through Smoke, Ragged, Wolf and Crown lakes. “The days that followed were full of enjoyment, of new experiences & discoveries. We made excursions in all directions into corners and little lakes where no one has been before, we made long excursions into the bush which, in early spring, is penetrable at places for the undergrowth is not so dense and tangled. … Down at the water’s edge grow the spruce, cedar, pine, with a few birch, then behind come the hardwoods, maple mostly… The contrast & beauty was intensified when the green came & it all seemed to happen in a night, the greys, purples & browns were the thousand million buds awaiting the sunshine & they all seemed to burst at once into glorious leafage - there were miles of birch lands, a glorious display of spring greens & silvery trunks reflecting perfectly in the lake. I can hardly describe Spring in the maple bush than one of the wonders of God’s creation, the tall sombre trunks purply grey & delicate branches interwoven in a marvellous intricacy of pattern, each little twig alive with dancing buds, some scarlet, some brown, & yellow.…”
Jackson spent the summer painting in the Rockies for the Canadian Northern Railway but
arranged to meet up with Thomson in the fall. From Winnipeg on his way back he wrote to
Dr. MacCallum: “A letter from the disappearing Thomson found me here. He is at Canoe
Lake stirring up his red paint for the fray so I am thinking of going by train from Port
Arthur to Parry Sound…. There are lots of maples round there so we ought to keep
ourselves busy and can get away from the war news.” In the first week of October they
were joined by Arthur Lismer, his wife Esther and daughter Marjorie, and Fred and
Maud Varley. Soon the reds of the maples had disappeared. On 6 October Thomson wrote
to Dr. MacCallum, “Jackson & myself have been making quite a few sketches lately. I will
send a bunch down with Lismer when he goes back. He & Varley are greatly taken with the
look of things here, just now the maples are about all stripped of leaves … but the birches
are very rich in color.” And on 11 October, Lismer wrote to MacCallum, “We have had a
glorious week of colour. The glory of it has somewhat departed now after the heavy rain of
yesterday & today which has left big, windy skies & promise of cold clear weather, a
pleasant change after the warm almost sultry weather we have had. The wind has stripped
the trees however & the maples are bare. … I am finding it far from easy to express the riot
of fall colour & still keep the landscape in a high key.”
The foliage and rich autumn colour, so different from Lismer’s experience in the spring, were a constant preoccupation of the artists. Red is the principal element of Jackson’s oil sketch “Red Maple” (McMichael Canadian Art Collection) and Lismer’s “Autumn in Algonquin Park”. In Jackson’s sketch, the few remaining red leaves are splayed in front of the dark rushing water while Lismer’s tree stands front and foremost, reflecting its autumnal glory in the water. Energized by the rapid brush strokes and dabs of pink and orange, the autumn foliage bursts out between the greens of the adjacent fir trees. Touches of the oncoming yellows flutter across the panel.
As the artists wrote, the red foliage disappeared quickly. Lismer’s sketch of Lowry Dickson’s cabin, “The Guide’s Home”(National Gallery of Canada, acc. no. 6520), possibly painted merely days later, is radically different. In contrast to the energetic richness of the earlier sketch, the birches are partially denuded of their foliage. The white trunks and yellow leaves are the dominant motifs, partially concealing the camouflaged hut, the ostensible subject of the study. Painted within such a confined time frame, the two sketches demonstrate the artist’s immediate and varying responses to the colours and forms of the Algonquin autumn.
We extend our thanks to Charles Hill, Canadian art historian, former Curator of Canadian Art at the National Gallery of Canada and author of “The Group of Seven – Art for a Nation”, for his assistance in researching this artwork and for contributing the preceding essay.
