Vendu pour : 526 500 $

PROVENANCE
Dr. J.M. MacCallum, Toronto, prior to 1917
James MacCallum, Toronto, prior to 1940
Laing Galleries, Toronto, 1945
Acquired from the above by a Private Collector, Ottawa, 1945
Private Collection, Toronto

BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Dennis Reid, editor, Tom Thomson, Art Gallery of Ontario / National Gallery of Canada, essays by Charles C. Hill and Robert Stacey, 2002, listed page 337, reproduced page 169

EXPOSITION
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Tom Thomson, June 7 - September 8, 2002, traveling in 2003 to the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Musée du Québec, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and the Winnipeg Art Gallery, catalogue #17

After working in commercial art firms in Toronto from 1908 or 1909 to 1913, Tom Thomson, encouraged by his friends, was anxious to make painting a full-time career. From 1913 to 1917 he did just that, traveling, often by canoe, to document the landscape of Algonquin Park in small oil sketches and returning to Toronto during the winter months to develop these works into full-scale paintings. Algonquin Park was a perfect subject for Thomson. In this area of Ontario, which had been designated a provincial park in 1893, he could not only record an area that was an unusual and mysterious subject for city dwellers, but also indulge in his favourite sport of fishing.

When living in Algonquin Park, Thomson usually camped or boarded on Canoe Lake at Camp Mowat (renamed in 1913 Mowat Lodge), formerly the boarding house of the Gilmour Lumber Company, operated by Shannon and Annie Fraser. This sketch was likely painted in the autumn of 1913 on Canoe Lake. It was once owned by Dr. J.M. MacCallum, Thomson’s friend and patron. Of the sketches of this early period, Thomson’s friend and peer A.Y. Jackson wrote that they “showed a great knowledge of the country and were very faithful and painstaking”. He added that they were “surprisingly somber” and that in them the country “seemed always to be viewed extensively. There were no gay little rapids or wood interiors or patterned rocks, but only the opposite shores of lakes, far hills or wide stretches of country.”

Jackson’s description of Thomson’s early work points out the unusual nature of Autumn, Algonquin Park: it is a harbinger of the sumptuous colour and techniques Thomson would use later in his work. Here, to record the autumn scene, Thomson applied paint with a fluid brush and layered rich colour. In the foreground he used dark brown and green, then applied shades of red to indicate the fallen leaves; he also picked out the brown and orange trunks of the trees with cream and recorded the tones of the hillside by using a layer of orange, brushed over with ochre. To the sky he applied different delicate colours ranging from palest green-blue to pink. The technique of layering paint to achieve a complex effect was to become a habit with him, culminating in his magnificent works of 1916 and 1917. In several other particulars, this painting is the forerunner of his mature work: the directness of conception, its light touch and, most importantly, its way of focusing directly on a close-up view, so typical of Thomson’s later work.

Autumn, Algonquin Park is considered to be one of the finest of Thomson’s works from his early period, and the curators of the 2002 Tom Thomson exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario included it in the show and accompanying publication.

We thank Joan Murray for contributing the above essay. This work will be included in Murray’s forthcoming catalogue raisonné on the artist’s work.

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