Sold for: $1,696,500

PROVENANCE
A gift from the Artist to Fred Martin, Toronto
By descent to the present Private Collection, Ontario

LITERATURE
Hector Charlesworth, Saturday Night, March 20, 1915
Peter Donovan, Saturday Night, April 8, 1916
F.B. Housser, A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven, 1926, page 99
William T. Little, The Tom Thomson Mystery, 1970, pages 34 and 35

Canoe Lake is one of those most charming artefacts in Canadian art: an oil sketch that Tom Thomson gave away to a friend. In this case the friend was Fred Martin, a Torontonian who met Thomson after coming to Algonquin Park for his health in 1914 and again in 1915. Martin was part of a circle at Canoe Lake that included Shannon and Annie Fraser, fishing guides like Larry Dickson, as well as the lumber company foreman Hugh Trainor and his daughter Winnie. Martin was, in fact, the second guest welcomed by the Frasers to Mowat Lodge, the tourist hotel opened in 1914, where Thomson himself stayed when not sleeping under canvas.

These Canoe Lake residents were people in whose company the naturally retiring Thomson felt at ease. Another member of the coterie, Robert Little, reported that the “generous and open-hearted” Thomson used to give his paintings to them “for the asking or to pay for some minor obligation.” The reason for Thomson’s gift of Canoe Lake is not recorded, but Little recalled that Martin had been part of a team that helped Larry Dickson build a new log cabin, a rustic shanty that Thomson would later depict in The Artist’s Hut.

As his inscription on verso of the panel testifies, Thomson gave Canoe Lake to Martin in April of 1915. That year he had come north from Toronto in the middle of March, at a time when his career as a painter was finally beginning to blossom. His large canvas Northern River shown in March at the annual exhibition of the Ontario Society of Artists, was praised in Saturday Night as “fine, vigorous and colourful,” while another critic declared it to be “the most striking canvas in the gallery.” The National Gallery of Canada purchased it for $500, giving Thomson not only a measure of financial security but also, no doubt, some much-needed confidence in his abilities.

Besides being his place of friendship and refuge, Canoe Lake was also one of Thomson’s favourite subjects. His enthusiasm for the area resulted in a number of his artist friends joining him at the lake the previous autumn, including A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer and F.H. Varley, all of whom followed his example of painting en plein air in the bush or along the shore. As Little put it, the “woods seemed full of artists.” So unmistakeably did Canoe Lake and its environs become the proving ground for these young Canadian landscapists that, almost a decade before they joined forces in 1920 as the Group of Seven, the Toronto press knew them as the Algonquin School. Their audacious use of colour, freely applied (one critic joked that they seemed “to mix their paint on a big flat rock and throw it on with a scoop-shovel”) also earned them another nickname: the Hot Mush School.

This work, which would have been painted on the spot, shows one of Canoe Lake’s islands, probably Little Wapomeo, which was only a short distance from where Thomson pitched his tent and cooked his meals in a reflector oven. He depicts a tangle of vegetation and sawlogs in the foreground, and beyond them the island’s pine trees standing in sharp relief under the magnificent streaks of a sunset sky. His confidence in his handling of his paints is evident in his robust brush-strokes as well as in the striking mix of burnt orange and dark salmon with soothing blue-greens and even flashes of purple, all thickly applied.

Painted in the energetic style that Thomson and his friends believed was the only way to depict the raw beauty of Canada’s northern woods, Canoe Lake brilliantly captures the effects of a sunset on the landscape that Thomson had come to know and love so deeply. Poignantly, he was last seen alive near this spot in July 1917, with his canoe later found floating adrift off Little Wapomeo Island.

We thank Ross King, author of Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven, for contributing the above essay.

This work will be included in Joan Murray’s forthcoming catalogue raisonné on the artist’s work.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars