Vendu pour : 163 800 $

PROVENANCE
Mellors Fine Arts, Toronto
Laing Galleries, Toronto
The Right Honourable Malcolm MacDonald, Kent, England, British High Commissioner to Canada from 1941 to 1946
By descent to the present Private Collection, Toronto

BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Thomson to Dr. M.J. McRuer, postmarked October 17, 1912, McMichael Canadian Art Collection Archives
Dr. J.M. MacCallum, “Tom Thomson: Painter of the North”, Canadian Magazine 50, No. 5, March 1918, page 376
Albert H. Robson, Tom Thomson, 1937, page 6
Joan Murray, The Best of Tom Thomson, 1986, titled as Mississauga, reproduced page 10
Joan Murray, “The World of Tom Thomson,” Journal of Canadian Studies 26, No. 3, fall 1991, reproduced page 25
Joan Murray, Tom Thomson: The Last Spring, 1994, reproduced page 61
Joan Murray, Design for a Canadian Hero, 1998, reproduced page 48

Sometimes a work of art can be a revelation. Mississagi is a painting that shows Tom Thomson learning his discipline by working in the North to create an authentic image of the country. At the same time, this quiet landscape, in shades of grey, green, light blue and black, sets an example for the artists who were his peers, acting as a conduit of energy which would become full-blown in Canadian art with the Group of Seven.

Thomson made his first major canoe trip in Northern Ontario in the summer of 1912 with English artist William Broadhead (1889 - 1960), a fellow artist from Grip Ltd., the commercial art firm in Toronto. This adventure inspired Thomson, though with modest means and ambition, to create bold new work. “We started in at Bisco [Biscotasing, northwest of Sudbury] and took a long trip on the lakes around there up the Spanish River and over into the Mississauga [Mississagi] water,” Thomson wrote to a friend, Dr. McRuer, the following fall. “The Mississauga is considered the finest canoe trip in the world.” Thomson and Broadhead lost most of their sketches and photographs when their boat capsized in the “forty mile rapids near the end of the trip,” as Thomson wrote McRuer, but the few paintings that remained struck friends such as Dr. J.M. MacCallum, whom he met that autumn, with “their truthfulness, their feeling and their sympathy with the grim, fascinating northland.” They were, MacCallum wrote, “dark, muddy in colour, tight and not wanting in technical defects,” but worthy of purchase. He bought “some of the sketches fished up from the foot of the rapids.” Albert Robson, Thomson’s boss at Grip Ltd. and later at Rous & Mann Ltd. (another top commercial art firm in Toronto), also recalled the way in which these works caught the “real northern character” and showed an “intimate feeling of the country”.

Thomson’s sketches of this year, mostly ragged and rather severe distant shorelines, are recognized as the first awakenings of the Group of Seven, both philosophically, because of the way the imagery was obtained, and in subject matter. At this moment, Thomson was only four years away from the high point of his career as a painter.

Although it is difficult to identify the exact sketches Thomson painted in the Mississagi Forest Reserve in 1912, this sketch, from an early date, was almost certainly painted on this trip, or so we can believe from the inscription on the verso by MacCallum. Another early sketch was identified by Robson as having been painted on the trip - Drowned Land, in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. In both works, Thomson was attracted to a simple motif, which he rendered with textured brushwork and with great sensitivity to the raw northern landscape and its often-grey skies.

The Right Honourable Malcolm MacDonald was the British High Commissioner to Canada from 1941 to 1946. Among the other works he owned by Thomson are Spring, Algonquin Park (1914) and Canoe Lake, Algonquin Park (1916).

The inscription on the verso of this sketch is proof that MacCallum was asked to authenticate and date it in April 1937, perhaps at the request of art dealer Blair Laing, who had organized a Thomson show at Mellors Fine Arts in March of that year. Mississagi may have remained with Laing until about 1940, when it was purchased by MacDonald. Since MacDonald purchased another Thomson, the above-mentioned Canoe Lake, Algonquin Park, from Laing Galleries that year, he possibly purchased Mississagi around the same time.

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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