PROVENANCE
Estate of the Artist
Elizabeth Thomson Harkness, sister of the Artist, Annan and Owen Sound
Laing Galleries, Toronto
Mrs. George Dunbar, circa 1940
By descent to Dr. George D. Garland, Toronto, 1970
By descent to a Private Collection
Canadian Fine Art, Joyner / Waddington's, May 27, 2011, lot 80
The Collection of Torben V. Kristiansen, Vancouver

EXHIBITED
Galerie Eric Klinkhoff, Montreal, Collectors' Treasures: Annual Loan Exhibition, October 19 - November 2, 2019, catalogue #51
Galerie Eric Klinkhoff, Montreal, Tom Thomson: Annual Loan Exhibition, November 5 - 19, 2022, catalogue #23

Fall Woods, Algonquin Park is instantly recognizable as a particularly beautiful example of Tom Thomson’s genius. The fall woods at sunset were a happy theme for him, and the tapestry of colour in this painting reminds the viewer that he could be subtle as well as bold while he explored his particular kind of landscape. But there is majesty here too in the purple and blue sky, the gold of the birches bordered with red fall trees to either side, and the grey rocks of the shore with its dark green waters and hills beyond. Fall Woods is a bewitching work, a hymn to northern beauty.

In the fall of 1914, Thomson was joined in Algonquin Park first by A.Y. Jackson in mid-September and then in early October by Arthur Lismer and Frederick Varley and their respective families. The visit of these friends made an immense difference to Thomson. Anticipating their scrutiny brought out a new kind of work for him: the fall of 1914 was his breakthrough to more brilliant colour. His small panels lost their linearity and he introduced texture, building the work up by painting lighter parts over the dark ground, such as here, the birches at left and right. The gold of the birch foliage is also built up in layers, the brightest on top. His touch had become lighter and more spontaneous, and he sought out compositions that worked and used them again, like the composition he found when he painted a few steps from the water’s edge. He had hit upon it that spring and found it congenial to his painting, since it gave him a chance to paint the trees and lake in the same sketch. Paintings of trees beside the lake were now part of his vocabulary.

All in all, Thomson was a changed artist. As Jackson wrote to J.E.H. MacDonald, their friend and Thomson’s boss at Grip Ltd., “Tom is doing some exciting stuff.… He plasters on the paint and gets fine quality…”[1] Varley too had thoughts about the trip. He was a good friend of Thomson’s, and in the early spring of 1913, they had often walked and talked together on Centre Island in Toronto, where Varley had rented a house for his family. Like Thomson, he believed in nature’s greatness. In an undated letter he wrote to his sister Ethel about the joint enterprise in Algonquin Park, he said: “We are endeavouring to knock out of us all the pre-conceived ideas, emptying ourselves of everything except that nature is here in all its greatness, and we are here to gather it and understand it if only we will be … humble enough to go to it, willing to be taught … and then to put down vigorously and truthfully that which we have culled…”[2]

Now, Thomson was painting truthfully and vigorously the work that marked his change to a master of the medium.

Fall Woods, Algonquin Park was put on the market by Thomson’s oldest sister, Elizabeth Thomson Harkness (1864 – 1924), who managed Thomson’s estate for the family. She gave it to G. Blair Laing to sell and he sold it to Mrs. George Dunbar, who also owned another Thomson, View from a Height, Algonquin Park, which she had bought at Mellors, later Laing Galleries. She left both sketches to her nephew Dr. George David Garland in Toronto, a professor of physics at the University of Toronto who was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1984. He authored The Earth’s Shape and Gravity as well as compiling Glimpses of Algonquin: Thirty Personal Impressions from Earliest Times to the Present (1994), a Contribution to the Algonquin Park Centenary by the Friends of Algonquin Park.

Torben Kristiansen, an extremely canny dealer who avidly watched the market, bought Fall Woods, Algonquin Park at auction and must have felt pride at his own perspicacity as Thomson’s work became ever rarer. He would have loved the exciting interplay of delicate, rich colour in the painting, characteristic of Thomson.

We thank Joan Murray, former curator of Canadian art and chief curator (1972) at the Art Gallery of Ontario, for contributing the above essay. Murray helped to bring the paintings of Tom Thomson to world attention through a series of exhibitions and seven books, including a biography (the most recent is A Treasury of Tom Thomson). Murray is the author of the Tom Thomson Catalogue Raisonné.

This work is included in the Tom Thomson catalogue raisonné, researched and written by Murrary, as catalogue #1914.86: https://www.tomthomsoncatalogue.org/catalogue/entry.php?id=260.

1. A.Y. Jackson to J.E.H. MacDonald, October 5, 1914, quoted by Charles C. Hill, “Tom Thomson: Painter,” in Tom Thomson, ed. Dennis Reid and Charles C. Hill (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2002), 126.

2. F.H. Varley to Ethel, n.d., quoted in Christopher Varley, F.H. Varley (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1979), 9–10.

For the biography on Torben V. Kristiansen in PDF format, please click here.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars