David Silcox - Tom Thomson The Silence and the Storm

Contents

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Sunset 1915 | Oil on composite wood-pulp board, 21.6 26.7 cm

Approaching Snow Storm 1915 | Oil on wood, 21.6 26.6 cm

Moose at Night 1916 | Oil on wood, 20.9 26.9 cm

Tom Thomson

Copyright 2017 by DSLI Limited and the Estate of Harold Town.

Preface copyright 2017 by DSLI Limited.

All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

Originally published by McClelland & Stewart: 1977

Subsequently published by Firefly Books: 2001

First published by Collins in a revised and expanded edition: 2017

Front cover:

Byng Inlet, Georgian Bay 191415 | Oil on canvas, 71.5 76.3 cm

EPub Edition: October 2017 ISBN: 9781443442350

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

2 Bloor Street East, 20th Floor

Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4W 1A8

www.harpercollins.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information is available upon request.

ISBN: 978-1-44344-234-3

PP 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Split Rock Gap, Georgian Bay c. 191415

Oil on panel, 20.3 25.4 cm

T he original purpose of this book was to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Tom Thomsons birth in 1877 and the sixtieth anniversary of his early death in 1917. This expanded reissue has similar goals: the 140th anniversary of his birth and the one hundredth anniversary of his death this year. In 1977, a great deal had been written about how Thomson died, but very little about his art. Our purpose then, as it is now, was to celebrate what he lived forhis painting.

This volume was the first to focus on Thomsons art and to reproduce in colour 177 paintings, of which 148 were published in colour for the first time. More than eighty of Thomsons small oil sketches were reproduced close to their actual size. The appearance of all these images was a revelation to most people, including artists, curators, and collectors, because up until then they had been familiar with only a handful of Thomsons most popular works.

The book was immediately popular. The first edition in 1977, with print runs of 50,000 English and 5000 French, sold out in a month, and reprints were issued in 1982, 1989, and 2001; in total, more than 100,000 copies of Tom Thomson: The Silence and the Storm have gone out into the world. The stunning success of the exhibition Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, England, in 2011, which went on to thrill audiences in Norway and the Netherlands before coming to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario, showed how much interest there was in Thomson and his circle both abroad and at home. In the same year, the exquisite film West Wind: The Vision of Tom Thomson premiered to rave reviews and large audiences. My own book The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson in 2003 was another landmark. The large-format first edition sold out quickly and went into a compact edition and then a paperback edition. The paperback has now been reprinted.

In this revised and expanded edition of Tom Thomson: The Silence and the Storm, we have added paintings that we could not find or did not know about in 1977. Many of these images have not been published before. We were also able to locate the sketch for , one of the few canvases still in private hands. In addition, we have updated, edited, and rewritten much of the previous text, an opportunity that allowed us to correct several small errors. We have also added new chapters, which assess Thomsons small sketches in relation to his larger canvases; his position in regard to representation, abstraction, and photography; and his legacy.

Harold Towns introduction and most of his notes have been retained as they were in 1977. While keeping the landscape format of the book, we have redesigned the layout to accommodate the additional plates and the new chapters, and have rearranged the material at the back of the book.

Much has been added to our knowledge and appreciation of Thomson and his art since 1977. His position as the most-loved and most-influential painter in Canada, and the surge of new interest in his work by younger audiences, has spawned a stream of poems, plays (even a musical), films, novels, and references in songincluding Three Pistols by the Tragically Hip:

Well, Tom Thomson came paddling pastIm pretty sure it was him.

In 1977 we lamented the total lack of scholarly study of Thomson and his art, save for Joan Murrays 1971 retrospective exhibition and catalogue when she was a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Times have certainly changed. In the past decade or so, the academic and curatorial worlds have produced several major books based on extensive research which relate to Thomson and his friends in the Group of Seven. Ive included four of these volumes in the selected bibliography section. Tom Thomson (edited by Dennis Reid and Charles Hill), a catalogue for the 2002 National Gallery of Canada/Art Gallery of Ontario travelling retrospective exhibition, presents a comprehensive view of Thomson and his work, with contributions from a team of curators, conservators, and others. Beyond Wilderness, edited by John OBrian and Peter White, examines the artistic diversity that developed after the waning of the Group of Sevens strong grip on landscape painting in Canada. Essays by more than sixty artists, art historians, curators, and others trace the way later generations of artists consider the landscape in light of the radically changed technical, social, and political context they found around them.