The Influence of Tom Thompson, Emily Carr and the Group of Seven
My earliest “art” memories are of a pair of late nineteenth century oils on canvas, portraits with grey-brown backgrounds, that graced the wall of our home, along with a couple of reproductions by the same artist; and I also recall several reproductions of work by Emily Carr and the Group of Seven.
Emily Carr and the Group of Seven. By the age of nine I came to feel a kinship with them; in fact, sometime before I turned ten, I felt a calling: that to become an artist would be a part of my destiny. Were the above artists, famous for their celebration of the Canadian wilderness, responsible, at least in part, for my childhood epiphany? Quite likely.
And what about those 1890 oils of a man and his wife – just how do they fit into this story? It turns out that those portraits are of my great grandparents Reuben Booth Belden and Claire Peel Belden, and were painted by Claire Belden’s brother, Paul Peel (1860-1892). Was I influenced by kinsman Peel? Of course I was, growing up as I did imbibing the mythology surrounding this talented painter who, after a dozen years of art education in London, Philadelphia and in Paris, achieved recognition; yes, and then, after a brief illness, died, in Paris, age thirty one. I admired his undeniable skill and, of course, there was the gravitational pull of family relationship, but his academic style and the sentimental subject matter for which he is best known, did not resonant with me at all.
The man who commissioned those two portraits - Peel’s brother-in-law - warrants a few words. Reuben Booth Belden, an American living in Toronto, and in partnership with his brother, published Picturesque Canada; The Country As It Was And Is. This two-volume book is regarded as the most important - and controversial - guide and tribute to Canada in the post-Confederation period. George Monro Grant was the editor, and the important illustration component of this highly ambitious project was under the supervision of Lucius O’Brien (1832 – 1899) who himself produced many of the 540 wood engravings – an astonishing number - and commissioned other artists, such as F.M. Bell-Smith (1846 – 1923). The latter was an advocate of a uniquely Canadian school of art with an orientation to Canada’s wilderness landscape. The following quote from Bell-Smith’s Wikipedia page is germane: “Later artists, including Tom Thompson, Emily Carr, and the Group of Seven, contributed to this focus on Canada’s natural environment in art.”
At the end of the nineteenth and first few years of the twentieth century Bell-Smith and O’Brien would have been at the height of their fame, (as also, of course, was Peel). And it was as well the embryonic period for Thompson, Carr, and the Group of Seven, all of whom must surely have been influenced, at least to some extent, by the wilderness landscape tradition as espoused by Bell-Smith and O’Brien. And obviously they were attracted to the extraordinary developments that had been taking place in Europe, especially in France, pioneered by painters such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Monet, Munch, and Cezanne - developments that were destined to eclipse the work of academicians such as my kinsman. (Last month my wife spotted a photograph of Paul Gauguin in 1888 smoking a pipe and seated in front of Pension Glouanec in Pont-Aven, France; she paired that with an 1881 photograph of Paul Peel seated in front of the same establishment: perhaps the two artists met?)
It’s time in this reflection on the Group of Seven and Emily Carr, to tweak the focus… and fast-forward to the summer of 1964 when I was twenty years old and working for a mining exploration company in B.C.’s forested and glacier-flanked mountains. We were helicopter-supported and typically the chopper would drop my partner and me off at a creek’s fork and return three days later and fly us into a neighbouring watershed. Our job consisted of taking sediment samples from the creek and its tributaries, with the hope that somewhere upstream there would be a significant orebody. (Another kind of watershed: The moment, a week or two after returning to Vancouver following that summer of wilderness adventure, that I boarded a Greyhound bus for San Francisco - and the San Francisco Art Institute, essentially the same school that Emily Carr attended from 1890 to 1893.)
So it is, looking back, and I try to identify the high grade deposits of my artistic heritage. Certainly, and as suggested above, one of the most important, if not the most important, of those “orebodies” was the Group of Seven, Emily Carr and Tom Thompson. The celebration of the forests, lakes, rivers, glaciers and mountains of Canada is the distinguishing aspect of the Group of Seven and Emily Carr. It was something I found very appealing about these artists, and from an early age I adopted the wilderness as my artistic focus.
Which came first - art or mountains? Mountains came first, or more accurately, nature: nature subsumed into mountains, and specifically those mountains that are to the City of Vancouver as canals are to Venice. My parents nurtured in me a fascination for mountains and nature. In particular my father, a life-long member of the British Columbia Mountaineering Club, opened up to me that great vista of range fading into range, leading north to the ice-fringed summits of Garibaldi, Mamquam and Tantalus. I was a captive audience listening to my father’s accounts of his youthful hiking exploits. Nearby Mount Seymour always remained one of his favourite areas and he would take me up there, summer and winter. Sometimes we’d overnight in the cabin he and his teenage pals had built in the mid 1930’s. Other times we’d camp up higher and under the stars on the rocky summit or beside (the swimmable) Mystery Lake. I would fall asleep to the incense of heather and rock and a waning fire.
In 1960 I joined the BC Mountaineering Club and began “learning the ropes”, which included attending the Club’s Lake O’Hara summer camp in the Rockies. What a revelation for a sixteen year old: a two week introduction to the wonders and challenges of alpinism! A flashback to two particular experiences: the buzzing sensation, edged with fear, of an electrical storm on the summit of Mount Odaray; and climbing Mount Victoria after spending the night at the stone climbers’ hut at the glacier-rimmed col between Mts. Victoria and Lefroy. By seventeen I was climbing for the better part of a week with a friend in Garibaldi Park. At eighteen I, along with three friends, spent a summer exploring a largely unvisited area in northwest British Columbia; there were glaciers to traverse, collapsing cornices to dodge, and the challenge of unclimbed summits.
So it is that mountains, in all their beauty and danger, became a source of imagery and inspiration; from the age of nine, wilderness and art came together and fused. When I was a child I would leverage family outings and car camping trips as opportunities to sit down by a creek or lake and sketch. I’d sketch Siwash Rock, or Vancouver Island’s Little Qualicum Falls, or the sub-alpine tarns of the North Shore mountains. Week-long holiday visits to my maternal grandparents’ home on the barnacled seashore to the north of Parksville, was always a wonderful time, and provided an uninterrupted opportunity to paint. My grandfather was supportive of my painterly interests, having himself gone to art school in Birmingham: he named his two-employee firm Vancouver Art Metal Works. (For a number of years my father ran the company which is now known as Dynamic Structures.) When I worked in oils I would often paint on pressed-wood panels, and there were a few instances in which I would use the mahogany lids of my paternal grandfather’s empty cigar boxes, aware of the Group of Seven’s fondness for these cigar box lids as substrates for their plein air oils.
I can still visualize the Group of Seven and Carr reproductions that used to hang on the walls of our home and also my school. There was J.E.H. Macdonald’s Northern River, as well as one of his Lake O’Hara oil sketches, Larches, Mount Shaffer, and his 1922 Mist Fantasy, Sand River, Algoma. There was Tom Thompson’s 1916-1917 iconic West Wind. I remember, too, Harris’ powerful 1924 Above Lake Superior with its tree snags and snow, and Emily Carr’s 1912 Totem Poles, Kitsegula.
As an artist whose work is rooted in the British Columbia landscape, I felt a close kinship with Carr. I liked her depictions of first nations’ villages and totem poles, but it was her signature treatment of the coastal forest, of towering firs and cedars, that particularly impressed me. The issue of first nations’ art and culture segues neatly into a related source of influence.
When I was nine I became friends with fellow classmate, Keith Borden. He and I would explore the nearby woods, and in our early teens, the North Shore Mountains; Keith had a passion for natural history and could identify many of the forest plants. My precocious friend also became a collector of my art: Over a period of six years he bought some eighty of my sketches. Keith’s parents were clearly supportive of his passion for collecting plants, amphibians - and art. In fact, it was his mother - she taught early childhood education at UBC – who through her encouragement played a significant role in triggering my sense of having a ‘calling’ to be an artist. Keith’s father, Charles Borden, was an archaeologist; occasionally I’d witness my friend’s basement filled with saw-horse tables loaded with stone tools and arrowheads. Borden is regarded as the father of archaeology in B.C. Some scholars have tagged Emily Carr with ‘’cultural appropriation’’ – this issue could have been profitably debated by my friend’s erudite father. Exposure to the Borden family was enriching, but somewhat tangential as regards Carr and the Group of Seven.
I was further exposed to these important Canadian painters through school art classes - and also thanks to my parents’ taking my art education seriously. My mother enrolled me in Saturday morning classes at the Vancouver Art Gallery and also at the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art and Design). In the 1950`s the public schools used to offer a plein air program called ‘Painting in the Park’ and for three or four summers mother enrolled me in this outdoors’ painting program: I particularly enjoyed sketching the sinuous vine maples and the cedars with their sweeping boughs. I should also mention my good fortune in being one of about twenty students chosen from several local high schools to participate in a special art education class at the University of B.C. It was led by a (landscape) painter who over the years would mentor and encourage me and to whom I owe a debt of gratitude, Gordon Smith.
So it is that there are a number of “mineral deposits” in my artistic watershed, family heritage included: Tom Thompson, Emily Carr and the Group of Seven remain for me a mineable resource and an inspiration. The then director of Ontario’s Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Joan Murray, very briefly referenced this influence on my work in her book The Best of the Group of Seven.
Earlier I spoke of boarding a bus for San Francisco – for me it was indeed a highly significant ‘watershed’ moment. Maybe it is appropriate, then, as the end of these ramblings approaches, to quote the following line from a review of a group exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor a few decades ago by Abby Wasserman in the San Francisco Chronicle: “Shives has some of the power and poetry of landscapes by the late Lauren Harris of Canada’s famous Group of Seven.”
I’ll close these musings and recollections with an anecdote from a seventy year old Alpine Club of Canada Journal. At the risk of seeming to be a bit off-topic, here is that anecdote from a bygone era: A regular attendee of the ACC’s summer camps at Lake O’Hara was an Anglican clergyman who, so it is recorded, was in the habit after successfully summiting a peak, of leading his climbing companions in the intoning of that august fourth century Latin hymn of joy and thanksgiving, the Te Deum.
Lake O’Hara is in Yoho National Park - it was arguably J.E.H. MacDonald’s favourite painting location. Yoho is a Cree word meaning ‘awe’. Like all artists I can reflect on the numerous influences orebodies that have enriched my art, and foremost among my early influences were Tom Thompson, Emily Carr and the Group of Seven. But the orebody of inestimable value, in the splendor of the watershed’s uplands, is favoured with thanksgiving and awe.
Arnold Shives
September 20, 2017
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