Arrested Development

In 1927, Alexander Young Jackson, avid for fresh landscapes to paint, wrote the minister of the interior requesting that he and Dr. Frederick Banting, his friend and sketching partner, be allowed passage to Canada’s far north aboard the SS Boethic. The Boethic made an annual run from Nova Scotia to deliver supplies and personnel to remote RCMP posts. There was no other way to reach the Arctic.

Their voyage is described in Wayne Larsen’s A.Y. Jackson: The Life of a Landscape Painter as well as in Jackson’s lively 1958 memoir, A Painter’s Country.

Jackson told the Regina Leader-Post that he hoped to find “new art values in the far north” because the “ordinary pastoral painting, as practised now, is a dead letter.”

After he returned with hundreds of sketches of icebergs, barren hills and Inuit villages, he gave an interview to the Toronto Star in which he criticized the timidity of the artists of his home town. Montreal artists “have no great Canadianism,” he said. “They do what other people do. They go to the Riviera and Paris, but they don’t lead expeditions of discovery in their own land.” The Toronto-based Group of Seven, of which he was a member, could not exist in Montreal, he opined. Furthermore, “there is nobody in Montreal who could write an intelligent article pertaining to our work.”

The Montreal Standard retorted in an editorial that Montrealers do not lack culture; they simply fail “to understand the message of Mr. Jackson and the Other Six. The ‘Group of Seven’ has painted some of the greatest riddles in the world … Is it a Headcheese or Sunset behind the Old Mill?”

Headcheese? One of the enduring mysteries of art is how it alters our vision decade by decade, generation to generation. How could the paintings of the Group of Seven, now so familiar, inoffensive, even banal in their ubiquity on everything from tea trays and coffee mugs to Christmas cards, have been considered difficult, bizarre, inexplicable as late as 1972, which was 14 years after Jackson left Montreal and joined J.E.H. MacDonald, Lawren Harris and the others to start a national art movement?

The year Jackson first visited the Arctic, René Magritte moved from Brussels to Paris and began to paint his erotic images in dreamlike settings. Picasso was painting pudgy women in white shifts being chased by a Minotaur. In the 1920s in France, Surrealism was the reigning style, the European artists having already worked their way through collage, Constructivism, Cubism and Dada. It is a safe bet that no Paris newspaper compared their art to charcuterie. Why was Canadian taste so arrière-garde?

Wayne Larsen never asks this question. Editor-in-chief of the Westmount Examiner and a former editor for Reader’s Digest, he assembles the known facts of Jackson’s life competently enough, but he has no interest in the deeper issues or larger context.

It is hard to say why Canadians were so culturally backward in the early 20th century, but the colonial mentality must have had something to do with it. Ernest Hemingway, who lived in Toronto for a time, left us a biting description of Canadians in the 1920s: “They don’t believe in Literature. / They think Art has been exaggerated. / … A few of them are very rich. / But when they are rich they buy more horses / Than motor cars.”

The public was unfamiliar with the best art since art galleries were scarce and leading-edge art was absent from those that existed. When not buying horses, the rich bought the works of Dutch artists of the Hague School, which looked safe and expensive.

Eric Brown, the first director of the National Gallery of Canada, had a brother in England, Sir Arnesby Brown, a landscape painter who belonged to the Royal Academy. Jackson noted in his memoirs that Eric Brown acquired for the gallery the conventional academic pictures Arnesby recommended at a time when he could have picked up Cézannes, Van Goghs and Picassos for a few hundred dollars.

Jackson was born in Montreal in 1882, the third of six children of Henry and Georgina Jackson. Henry was a frustrated violinist, a square peg in a circular hole, who tried and failed at a string of businesses. One step ahead of irate creditors, he eventually abandoned his wife and kids and fled to Chicago.

Young Alec quit school at 13 and worked as an office boy to help support the destitute family. Larsen traces his dogged pursuit of an art education through a series of night school courses, then at the Académie Julian in Paris. That was followed by travels to Rome, Florence, Venice and sketching trips around France, then a second European trip—financed by commercial work in Montreal— two years later. But Montrealers rejected Jackson’s plein-air pictures (he never could paint portraits). Discouraged, he was on the verge of moving to the United States when he met a handful of likeminded artists in Toronto.

He enlisted in the Canadian army in World War One and was wounded in France before Lord Beaverbrook appointed him a war artist. Entrance to Halifax Harbour, dating from this period, proved to be one of his most important works. In 1924, it was sent to the controversial Wembley Exhibition in England over the objections of the stodgy Royal Canadian Academy and was bought by the Tate Gallery.

Jackson sketched and painted for the rest of his life in every part of the country and Larsen follows him relentlessly from the cosy, snow-covered villages of Quebec to Great Bear Lake, Pincher Creek and the Skeena River Valley.

Having outlived all the original members of the Group of Seven, he became a grand old man giving speeches, collecting prizes and honorary degrees. He even acquired a good three-piece suit. He died in 1974, aged 91.

What emerges is a portrait of the artist as a man of grit and perseverance, hard working, humorous and down to earth. He found a vivid Post-Impressionist style by the age of 35, and never wavered from it. Unlikely as this now seems, he was a man free of sexual urges. The Montreal artist and teacher Anne Savage, a member of the Beaver Hall Group of progressive painters, seems to have been the only woman to whom he was attracted, but there is no evidence that they were ever intimate. She refused his offer of marriage.

Given the enormous prices that his paintings command today, Jackson’s nearly lifelong poverty may come as a surprise for readers. If he ever had a dealer, Larsen does not tell us about it. Invited to spend time at the home of Vincent Massey, Jackson was mortified that the chambermaid would see he had only one pair of pyjamas. He never owned a car and was 73 before he bought his first piece of property—a studio/home in Manotick, Ontario, where he lived for only a few years.

In 1912, before Jackson had met the Toronto artists with whom his name is forever linked, he exhibited some landscapes he had painted in Normandy at the spring show of the Art Association of Montreal. It was the only time his work hung in the same show as that of Florence Carlyle, a painter of the previous generation from Woodstock, Ontario. She is chiefly remembered for her canvas The Tiff, now in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s red room of academic Canadian art, which shows a seated courting couple—modelled by Carlyle’s brother and sister—turned away from each other.

An independent art historian, Susan Butlin has pieced together Carlyle’s little-known life story in The Practice of Her Profession: Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism.

Carlyle struggled much as Jackson did two decades later to obtain an art education in Canada. In 1890, on the advice of her friend the painter Paul Peel of London, Ontario, she ended up in the same place as Jackson: the Académie Julian in Paris. Butlin provides an excellent description of Parisian art schools at the time, which drew thousands of young painters not only from Canada but also from the U.S., Australia and the rest of Europe. The art academies were cheap and democratic, had no admissions requirements and offered something that you could not find in Canada: nude models.

Aspiring models auditioned at the start of the week, Butlin tells us, striking interesting poses, and the students voted on which one they wanted. They spent Monday to Thursday drawing the model of the week, as well as still-life arrangements their teachers set up and received their critiques on Fridays from eminent artists who stopped by.

Competition was keen. At the end of the year, students submitted their best work to the salon and if it was accepted and well displayed (not “skied,” but at eye level), it was as good as getting an A. Varnishing day, when the finish was applied to each work about to be hung, was a time of peak excitement and left us the term vernissage, meaning an exhibition.

When Carlyle’s portrait of an aged Dutch woman was accepted by the salon in 1893, Carlyle, whose family called her Bird, cabled home. Her father was interrupted while addressing a meeting at the Woodstock town hall by the artist’s brother Russell waving her telegram: “It’s from Bird—her picture is in the Saloon.”

Friendships with other women artists, some of whom she met in Paris, sustained Carlyle all her life. Back in Canada, she joined and exhibited with various artists’ groups, but there were lean years when she could barely eke out a living by her brush.

Carlyle painted in a gauzy academic style that was rapidly becoming obsolete. Her subjects were mainly those deemed appropriate for women— brides, pretty girls, mothers with infants, women washing or hanging out laundry, flowers. Many of her pictures were anecdotal and some vaguely religious in the Victorian manner. Her style was well suited to commercial work, however, and her most successful period financially came after she won a $5,000 contract from the Osborne Company in New York to produce twelve pictures of pretty young women to be used on calendars. She lived and worked happily in New York from 1903 to 1908, after which she returned to Woodstock, painting in the barn behind her parents’ house.

Following the death of her mother four years later, Carlyle moved to England to live with her close friend Judith Hastings in a Sussex cottage. When World War One broke out, the two women volunteered as nurses in a convalescent hospital and later worked in the canteen of a munitions factory. Carlyle had less time to paint during the war years, but she managed to finish a commissioned portrait of the energetic Lady Drummond, assistant commissioner in London of the Canadian Red Cross, despite Lady Drummond having not one uninterrupted hour in which to pose. It netted the artist $400 and now hangs in the Canadian War Museum.

Florence Carlyle died in England of abdominal cancer in 1923, aged 58.

Susan Butlin, evidently influenced by the currently fashionable theories of art and gender devised by British cultural historian Griselda Pollock, is more interested in the fact that Carlyle was female than the fact that she was an artist. But it is as an artist that Carlyle must be judged. Emily Carr, only seven years younger than Carlyle, was able to engage with modernism, whereas Carlyle’s style remained Victorian.

Carlyle’s struggle to sell her work cannot be entirely explained by anti-woman prejudice, as Butlin would have us believe. Being an artist, these two books show, is a demanding and difficult calling for both men and women. And if Carlyle never married because marriage was irreconcilable with her painting career, neither did A.Y. Jackson.