Tom Thomson: Artist of the North

by Wayne Larsen

Tom Thomson (1877-1917) occupies a prominent position in Canada's national culture and has become a celebrated icon for his magnificent landscapes as well as for his brief life and mysterious death. The shy, enigmatic artist and woodsman's innovative painting style produced such seminal Canadian images as The Jack Pine and The West Wind, while his untimely drowning nearly a century ago is still a popular subject of fierce debate.

Originally a commercial artist, Thomson fell in love with the forests and lakes of Ontario's Algonquin Park and devoted himself to rendering the north country's changing seasons in a series of colourful sketches and canvases. Dividing his time between his beloved wilderness and a shack behind the Studio Building near downtown Toronto, Thomson was a major inspiration to his painter friends who, not long after his death, went on to change the course of Canadian art as the influential - and equally controversial - Group of Seven.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Biography

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 18, 2011

Reviews

[Nick]

I read this book on a stormy Sunday in February 2017, watching through the window during breaks at the quiet, clean white town below. Picture (painting) perfect.

This biography, though it is a quick read, is not as perfect as the Toronto under 10 cms of snow. Funny how it is, that I got to read this one right after the Chaplin biography. I felt there are similar issues with both books, and so I gave them similar rating.

I generally have a problem with summary biographies that are hurriedly written, for the sake of the business ... If you are in a hurry, you'll never capture the essence of the person. I did learn interesting things about Thompson, while reading this book, but I felt again left with this feeling of incomplete, superficial knowledge.

I guess we never know everything about anything or anybody, so I shouldn't mind having part of info as opposed to having the entire story ...

[Neil Mudde]

I have been entrigued by the life of Tom Thomson for many years, as a member of the group of seven Canadian Artist's having died at such an early age, creates a mystique about his life, and certainly about his death, since he was an experienced canoe ist, and had travelled the lakes for many years.
This book really does not give any more insight into the personality of who Tom Thomson was, there were a few anecdotes included in this book, about his family, his circumstances as a young man, loved the part when a painting of his is sold to an Ottawa gallery, having had run ins with the local presbyterian minister on occassion, after he sold the painting he told a friend of his, to make sure to let the minister know that by the way he painted that specific painting on a Sunday, which would have been equal to blasphemy....

[Gregory Klages]

This book is intended for high-school age readers, which makes its shortcomings doubly disappointing. In my estimation, it is one of the worst Thomson biographies; an under-researched & overwrought attempt to tell Thomson's story. Fictional dialogue and speculation are offered as facts. Popular myths are retold as facts, choices made all the worse by the myths generally being at least identified by other authors as unverified tales. The brevity of the author's actual research on the topic is evidenced by his extremely short bibliography.