Lot #116: "Tom Thomson" - Wood Framed - Double Matted - Under Glass

Early Painting CareerIn terms of his development as a painter, Thomsons experience up to this point was primarily that of an amateur. In order to become a professional artist, he had to overcome numerous obstacles, such as his lack of knowledge of the technical side of painting. In 1906, he enrolled in night school at the Central Ontario School of Art and Industrial Design the precursor to todays Ontario College of Art and Design University.Beginning around 1908, Thomson became involved with a lively group of comrades at Grip Limited, a well-known commercial art firm. When Thomson joined Grip, the company was at a crucial stage of its development. It had a good art director, A.H. Robson, and a painter, J.E.H. MacDonald, who was the anchor of the design team. Thomson worked with MacDonald, and it was under his tutelage and encouragement that Thomsons genius began to blossom. He submitted his work at the firm to MacDonald and showed the sketches he painted on weekends to MacDonald and others at the firm. MacDonald and men such as Robson, a member of the Toronto Art Students League (see Artists Organizations), praised the truth to nature in Thomsons work.In 1912, Thomson embarked on a camping trip to the Mississagi Forest Reserve north of Lake Huron. Upon his return, he was told by his friends at Grip that his sketches made during this trip expressed a real sense of the character of the northern landscape. The next year he returned to Rous & Mann Limited (the firm to which Robson, and then all of Thomsons colleagues from Grip, moved in 1912). He brought with him works that he had painted that year on a fishing trip to Algonquin Park. These sketches of 1912 showed a tremendous advance and marked his real start as an artist. They depict wilderness as a great world that seems unsullied by human civilization. They portray the natural world in a way that is poetic but still informed by direct experience.