Catalogue entry

In the late autumn of 1911, Tom Thomson began to regard painting seriously. Besides sketching in nature in spots near Toronto such as Lake Scugog, he began to develop canvases in the studio based on sketches painted in nature. In this painting, for instance, the tree and the undergrowth in the foreground of the canvas, are related to a gouache sketch Thomson made of Logging Camp, 1910 (1910.02) (reproduced in Silcox and Town, p.202).

In these early paintings, dark-toned, with a heavy impasto, Thomson began to experiment with ideas that became part of his later vocabulary as an artist, such as the fallen tree and the tangled undergrowth. He also painted moose later, as in his sketch Moose at Night, Winter 1916 (1916-1917.01) (National Gallery of Canada). The hill in the background of the painting appears in somewhat similar shape in 1914 canvas, In Algonquin Park, Winter 1914–15 (1914-1915.07) (McMichael Canadian Collection, Kleinburg).

The subject of this painting points to Thomson’s background and artistic milieu: Canadian Victorian art, with its recollections of the somber browns of the Dutch Old Masters of the seventeenth century, and the Dutch-like masters of the nineteenth, which meant in Canada artists such as Homer Watson, Horatio Walker, or even Industrial Design, William Cruikshank. Yet the picture is transitional and important because it is, quite frankly, a simple subject drawn from a section of Canada which has a distinctively Canadian quality. In this choice of subject, Thomson and his friends, who would, in 1920, found the Group of Seven, were in the vanguard of their period.

The painting’s naturalistic subject indicates that at an early moment in his art, he looked attentively at life in the wild. In this idea, he may have been directed by the thought of his cousin, Dr. William Brodie, one of Canada’s important early naturalists, for whom Thomson collected specimens. From 1903 until his death in 1909, Brodie was director of the Biological Department of the Provincial Museum in Toronto. One of Brodie’s students and friends was the naturalist writer, Ernest Thompson Seton. Seton’s books about animals would certainly have been well known to Thomson – as they were to people all over the world. These engaging stories about life in the wild, illustrated by Seton’s sketches, were very popular. Possibly at this moment in his career, Thomson was considering entering the world of art as an animal painter. 

The careful signature indicates the work is an early one, possibly c. 1911-1912.

Bonhams destroyed the records of Robinson & Foster Auctions when it took over the firm so the work cannot be traced to the 1950s.