PROVENANCE
Estate of the Artist
Laing Galleries, Toronto
R. Fraser Elliott, Montreal and Toronto
Important Canadian Art, Sotheby’s Canada in association with Ritchie’s, May 30, 2005, lot 53, cover lot
A.K. Prakash & Associates Inc., Toronto
Private Collection, Calgary, 2006
Loch Gallery, Toronto, 2012
Private Collection, Quebec, 2012

LITERATURE
Joan Murray, Tom Thomson: Trees, 1999, reproduced pages 102 – 103
Joan Murray, A Treasury of Tom Thomson, 2011, reproduced page 33
Ian A.C. Dejardin and Sarah Milroy, editors, Tom Thomson: North Star, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2023, reproduced page 198 and listed page 261

EXHIBITED
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Progress in Conservation, January 14 – February 13, 1972, catalogue #61.6.g
McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Tom Thomson: North Star, June 24, 2023 – January 14, 2024, traveling in 2024 – 2025 to the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton; Audain Art Museum, Whistler; and Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton

Tom Thomson’s Autumn, Algonquin Park is a subtle but fiery work, proof that Thomson had already discovered in 1914 the brilliance he showed in the sketches of his golden year of 1916, so much so that this work is sometimes mistaken for the later date. Softly glowing with an incandescent centre, in colours of brown, orange, red and yellow set off by an off-white sky, the sketch captures a moment glimpsed in the forest in Algonquin Park. It is a step ahead of his earlier sketches.

The sudden crystallization in Thomson’s work to greater artistry came about because his friends, artist-peers A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer and F. H. Varley (and Lismer and Varley’s attendant families), camped with him in Algonquin Park in the autumn of 1914. Already the painters in this group, sometimes called the Algonquin Park School, were working to create an informal organization that would convey Canadian landscape in a new and distinctive way. Thomson, for his part, was inspired to achieve something in an audacious new direction for him—using colour, sometimes flamboyant.

The stay of these friends must have seemed heaven-sent to Thomson because he had, for once, an admiring and knowledgeable audience. His paint handling became lighter and freer, and he began to use more texture in his work. In this sketch, he applied touches of orange and yellow to indicate brilliant forest undergrowth. He was “revelling in paint,” his friends said. “No longer handicapped by literal representation, he was transposing, eliminating, designing, experimenting, finding happy colour motives amid tangle and confusion,” as Jackson wrote later of Thomson’s work during the trip. (He added, grouchily, “He seemed to require no sleep.”)[1]

Jackson says that Thomson was “full of restless energy,” and the viewer can imagine that he found Thomson was ever on the alert for an eloquent vision of nature. The best of his works, and this sketch is amongst them, are filled with that energy and have a private, sequestered feeling, as though Thomson had discovered something for himself alone about the intricate growth in the forest. There is an ebullient quality to the brushwork, particularly in the touches of peach that shade into light green, which he applied to the undergrowth. They add vitality to the scene.

Lawen Harris gave the sketch his whole-hearted approval, marking it “1st class” on the back. It was verified by Thomson’s brother Fraser (1886 – 1967) and was in Ottawa in 1963, when John Henry Evans ARPS, CPA, a professional photographer and a member of the Royal Photographic Society, photographed it. (His initials JHE are penciled in the lower left corner of the verso, along with the date stamp May 15, 1963.)

Evans might have photographed the verso at the request of a gallery because the inscriptions and studio stamp on the back are so distinct. The sketch was known to the National Gallery in 1972, when it was declared authentic in the exhibition Progress in Conservation.

Autumn, Algonquin Park was the pride and joy of Canadian tax and corporate lawyer and philanthropist R. Fraser Elliott CM, QC (1921–2005), who owned it for many years and hung it in his office at Stikeman Elliott in Toronto. Elliott liked to show the work to visitors, causing curators to gnash their teeth over its eventual disposal because Elliott was a well-known patron of the arts. At his funeral in 2005, several curators sat together and discussed his generous gift-giving, wondering where his works might go, when the Art Galley of Ontario curator of drawings sang out, “The AGO has got his Old Master drawings.” This Thomson sketch went to auction in 2005 at Sotheby’s in Toronto, where it was the catalogue cover lot. More recently, it has been treasured by private collectors in Quebec and featured in the McMichael Canadian Art Collection’s mammoth 2023 Tom Thomson show, North Star.

It is one of the most beautiful of Thomson’s little paintings.

We thank Joan Murray, former curator of Canadian art and chief curator (1972) at the Art Gallery of Ontario, for contributing the above essay. Murray helped to bring the paintings of Tom Thomson to world attention through a series of exhibitions and seven books, including a biography (the most recent is A Treasury of Tom Thomson). Murray is the author of the Tom Thomson Catalogue Raisonné.

This work is included in the Tom Thomson catalogue raisonné, researched and written by Murray, as catalogue #1914.68: https://www.tomthomsoncatalogue.org/catalogue/entry.php?id=242.

1. A.Y. Jackson, foreword to Catalogue of Paintings by the Late Tom Thomson (Montreal: The Arts Club, 1919), n.p. Quoted in Charles C. Hill, “Tom Thomson: Painter,” in Tom Thomson, ed. Dennis Reid (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, in assoc. with Douglas & McIntyre, 2002), 127.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars