Rarely Seen Thomson Paintings in Calgary

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Tom Thomson, "Winter Scene," circa 1917

oil on board, 7.75" x 5.25" (courtesy Masters Gallery, Calgary)

A show that opens today at Masters Gallery in Calgary gives art lovers a rare opportunity to view two dozen little-seen paintings by Tom Thomson, an iconic artist who continues to fascinate Canadians 100 years after his death in Ontario’s Algonquin Park.

Gallery owner Ryan Green says one of the show’s highlights is an oil sketch Thomson did in 1917 on a slat he pulled from a shipping crate when he ran out of his regular panels. Titled Winter Scene, it shows a snowy creek and trees with a hill in the distance. “It’s a really beautiful painting,” says Green. Another work done at the same time on a board from the crate is now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The works in the show, mostly owned by Calgarians, depict scenes in and around Algonquin Park, where Thomson loved to paint. “Thomson’s creativity was unstoppable,” says Green. “He was so sincere about making art. He had to do it … He loved what he was doing.”

Like most of Thomson’s oeuvre, the paintings in the show are modest in size – but not in value. Green notes the sales record for a Thomson sketch, as the artist’s small plein air paintings on wooden panels are known, is $2.8 million. That’s what Early Spring, Canoe Lake, a work from 1917, the year of Thomson’s death, fetched at auction in 2009.

On average, Green says, the sketches from the last few years of Thomson’s life have sold for about $1.5 million. And the value of Thomson’s canvases? “Who knows,” says Green, pointing to the relatively small supply of canvases in private hands and the unprecedented $11.2 million paid in 2016 for a Lawren Harris painting, Mountain Forms, the most expensive Canadian work ever sold at auction.

When he died at age 39, Thomson left behind about 50 canvases and more than 300 sketches. Almost all the canvases, and many of the sketches, are now in public collections at institutions like the National Gallery of Canada, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Green says his best “guesstimate” is that about 75 works from Thomson’s so-called high period of 1914 to 1917 remain in private hands. Of these, he figures about half – “more than most people realize” – are owned by Calgarians, often purchased through Masters.

Despite the centenary of Thomson’s death this year, most public attention of late has been going to Harris, including a major show at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2016, The Idea of North, and Higher States: Lawren Harris and His American Contemporaries, a show organized by the McMichael that’s on view at Calgary’s Glenbow Museum until Jan. 7.

Green says the Thomson anniversary was overshadowed this year by Canada 150 exhibitions and predicts the artist will get more institutional attention in 2020, the centenary of the Group of Seven founding. Thomson hung out with the Group of Seven painters but was never a member. “It’s his trailblazing that was the catalyst for the group,” says Green.

The Masters Gallery show continues until Dec. 2. The opening reception on Nov. 25 features a talk by David Silcox, an art historian and former managing director of Sotheby’s Canada. A new edition of Silcox’s classic book about Thomson, The Silence and the Storm, was released this year.