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Algonquin Algonquin is Canada’s oldest national park, established in 1893, north of Toronto and east of Georgian Bay. Its network of lakes, hills, streams and rapids, and its accessibility from Toronto and Ottawa by rail quickly established it as a resort for city-dwellers. But its landscape was also defined by the logging industry, which had briefly boomed in the 1890s (and still continues in a controlled fashion to this day). However, Mowat Lodge, where Thomson often stayed, in the vicinity of the Canoe Lake train station, was something of a ghost town, inhabited by only a handful of people, having once been the thriving hub of a major logging concern. The scars of logging were still everywhere and contributed much to the Park’s appearance and atmosphere. Thomson first visited the park in 1912. He was already thirty-four, had only very recently taken up landscape painting, and was effectively still a ‘Sunday painter’. J.E.H. MacDonald had been the head of his section at Grip; MacDonald had already held an exhibition of his own work, and in 1912 ‘took the plunge’ of leaving paid work to go freelance and hopefully become a full-time artist. His example (and active
Fig. 49 Tom Thomson Winter in the Woods (detail) 1916 Oil on wood 21.4 x 26.5 cm National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, bequest of Dr J.M. MacCallum, Toronto, 1944 (4655)
encouragement) no doubt made Thomson think, perhaps for the first time, that he could do something similar. The lakes and woods of Algonquin very quickly absorbed him, and he chose to spend more and more of his time there. In Thomson’s short period of artistic activity he was surprisingly prolific, particularly since he seems to have been just as interested in spending his time exploring by canoe – he managed some remarkable voyages – and in fishing, at which he was considered expert. A pattern emerged for the few years left to him: Thomson would head for Algonquin as soon as spring allowed, spend the summer exploring, camping, fishing and painting there, leave as the autumn weather closed in, and spend the winter back in Toronto working up a few of his sketches into finished canvases. In 1914, he briefly shared a studio with Jackson, then with Carmichael; but a shortage of funds eventually led to him adapting a wooden shack nearby for his purposes. When in Toronto, he lived and worked in what can be imagined as extremely primitive, not to mention freezing, conditions (the shack now stands as a kind