Tom Thomson: Artist of the North

by Wayne Larsen

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781554887729
Publisher:	Dundurn Press
Publication date:	01/18/2011
Series:	Quest Biography , #28
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Wayne Larsen is a Montreal artist, editor, and writer whose work has appeared in a wide variety of publications. Currently, he teaches graduate-level journalism at Concordia Universityand is the author of A.Y. Jackson: The Life of a Landscape Painter and James Wilson Morrice: Painter of Light and Shadow. He lives in Verdun, Quebec.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 9

Introduction 11

1 An Excavation at Canoe Lake 17

2 From Forests to Fields 25

3 A Young Man About Town 41

4 Shooting the Rapids 55

5 Storm Clouds on the Horizon 73

6 Bursts of Light and Colour 87

7 In the Northland 99

8 The Pageant of the North 113

9 An Overturned Canoe 129

10 Establishing the Icon 147

Chronology of Tom Thomson (1877-1917) 161

Bibliography 181

Index 183