Who is Tom Thomson?

Thomas John Thomson (August 5, 1877 – July 8, 1917) was a Canadian artist active in the upfront 20th century. During his gruff career he produced as regards 400 oil sketches on small wood panels along with a propos 50 larger works upon canvas. His works consist roughly entirely of landscapes depicting trees, skies, lakes, and rivers. His paintings use spacious brush strokes and a campaigner application of paint to occupy the beauty and colour of the Ontario landscape. Thomson’s accidental death at 39 by drowning came hastily before the founding of the Group of Seven and is seen as a tragedy for Canadian art.

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Raised in rural Ontario, Thomson was born into a large relatives of farmers and displayed no hasty artistic talent. He worked several jobs past attending a thing college, eventually developing skills in penmanship and copperplate writing. At the tilt of the 20th century, he was employed in Seattle and Toronto as a pen player at several interchange photoengraving firms, including Grip Ltd. There he met those who eventually formed the Group of Seven, including J. E. H. MacDonald, Lawren Harris, Frederick Varley, Franklin Carmichael and Arthur Lismer. In May 1912, he visited Algonquin Park—a major public park and plant reservation in Central Ontario—for the first time. It was there that he acquired his first sketching equipment and, following MacDonald’s advice, began to capture nature scenes. He became enraptured with the area and repeatedly returned, typically spending his winters in Toronto and the blazing of the year in the Park. His outdated paintings were not outstanding technically, but showed a great grasp of composition and colour handling. His future paintings revise in composition and contain vivid colours and thickly applied paint. His later appear in has had a good influence on Canadian art—paintings such as The Jack Pine and The West Wind have taken a prominent place in the culture of Canada and are some of the country’s most iconic works.

Thomson developed a reputation during his lifetime as a veritable outdoorsman, talented in both fishing and canoeing, although his skills in the latter have been contested. The circumstances of his drowning upon Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park, linked in the broadcast of his image as a master canoeist, led to unsubstantiated but persistent rumours that he had been murdered or practicing suicide.

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Although he died past the formal inauguration of the Group of Seven, Thomson is often considered an unofficial member. His art is typically exhibited in the same way as the descend of the Group’s, nearly anything of which remains in Canada—mainly at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg and the Tom Thomson Art Gallery in Owen Sound.

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