William Kurelek's London

UK TOUR DAY TWO (LONDON): William Kurelek was one of the most successful artists in the history of our country. He's famous for his quaint, Canadian scenes: lumberjacks, snowballs fights, city streets and prairie fields. But he also had a darker side: apocalyptic visions, battles with depression, suicide attempts and a long stint in England to get psychiatric help at a couple of hospitals in London — including about a dozen bouts of electroshock therapy. I wrote a whole big blogpost about his life a few months ago, before heading to the UK to leave dreams for him at some of the Kurelek-related spots in London.

The first dream I left for him was this one, which I dropped here on my first full day in London. This is 48 Barons Court Road, where Kurelek lived for a while in the 1950s. It's in West Kensington, just a few kilometers from the heart of the city, and it wasn't far from my hotel — I passed by almost every day on the way to catch the tube at what would have been Kurelek's local station. It opened all the way back in 1874:

It would have been Gandhi's tube station for a while, too. While studying law at University College in the late 1800s, he lived just a few doors down from Kurelek's place:

The next day, I headed to another Kurelek landmark. The Church of the Assumption is right in the middle of London, in Soho, just a few doors down from Carnaby Street. Kurelek was a regular visitor after he'd checked himself out of hospital — in the wake of his electroshock treatments. That's when he discovered God and converted to Catholicism. He joined a social club for young Catholics that was held at this church. He said it played an important role in his recovery — a welcoming home for a disturbed artist who was deeply uncomfortable in most social situations.

At the same time, he was working at Blue Ball Yard. It's just up the street from St James's Palace — the official residence of the Sovereign — and not far at all from Buckingham Palace. Today, it's home to luxury suites and a swanky restaurant — I felt totally out of place while I quickly dropped this dream and headed on my way. But Blue Ball Yard started out as a bunch of stables all the way back in the 1700s. And when Kurelek was living in London, it was home to a picture framing business. That's where he worked, making frames.

It proved to be a valuable experience for the artist. He went on to make custom frames for many of his own works, incorporating them into the design of his pieces. And when he returned to Toronto after London, the skills he'd learned here at Blue Ball Yard helped him pay the bills. When Kurelek got his big break with the famous Canadian art dealer Avrom Isaacs, Isaacs gave him a job making frames at a shop on Front Street until his paintings started making enough money on their own.

My final Kurelek-related stop came on my last night in London. As the sun was (quite literally) setting on The Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour, I headed to South London. I came here to the Maudsley Hospital:

This is where, 62 years earlier, William Kurelek had come on his very first day in London. In fact, this hospital was the reason he'd crossed the Atlantic. After a troubled childhood, battles with depression, and a long struggle with psychosomatic eye pain and blindness, he knew he needed help. And he didn't think he could get that help in Canada, where it was even harder to find support for psychological illnesses than it is today. Back then, mental health facilities were still brutal places — but Maudsley was on the cutting edge. The doctors here embraced bold new techniques like art therapy. Painting would play an important role in Kurelek's treatment. They gave him his own supplies and even a studio to work in. He painted some of his most famous work here, at this hospital, expressing his inner torments on canvas. The most famous of them all — "The Maze" — would even be used to teach psychology students.

Kurelek struggled with his demons for the rest of his life. But it was here, at Maudsley and at a second London hospital called Nertherne, that he began the process of confronting those demons head on, learning the personal and emotional skills that would eventually allow him to become of the most successful artists our country has ever known.

 

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Read more posts about The Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour and the connections between the history of Toronto and the United Kingdom here. 

Read my full post about Kurelek's life — "An Apocalypse in the Beaches — William Kurelek's Nightmare Visions" — here. 

This post is related to dream 37 An Apocalypse in the Beaches William Kurelek, 1968

A.Y. Jackson Paints For His Life

UK TOUR DAY SIXTEEN (LONDON): On my very last morning in London, I left this dream for A.Y. Jackson at the top of Earls Court Road — because this, it seems, is the spot where he once saved his own life by painting a portrait during the First World War.

This was back before Jackson was famous. In fact, none of the painters in the Group of Seven was famous yet. They weren't even called the Group of Seven yet. So while Jackson would eventually become known as one of the greatest painters in Canadian history, he started the war as an anonymous soldier crawling through the blood-soaked trenches of Flanders outside Ypres.

It didn't go well. Within a few months, Jackson was injured in the shoulder and hip during a German bombardment. And while he was recovering from his injuries, he received word from back home in Canada that his friend, Tom Thomson, had died mysteriously in Algonquin Park. Those sad and dangerous months took a toll on the painter. When another member of the Group of Seven — Fred Varley — saw what the war had done to Jackson, he was worried. "I'm sure if he had to go through the fight any more," he wrote in a letter back home, "he would be broken."

Things didn't look like they were going to get any better. While Jackson was away recovering, his unit was in turmoil; there was a mutiny gathering steam. And soon, they'd be back on the front lines outside Ypres, at the bloody Battle of Passchendaele, where most of them would die — along with hundreds of thousands of other men — in just a few short months.

But then suddenly, out of nowhere, Jackson was offered a way out.

It came at the best possible moment: while he was digging a latrine. An officer came to see him with a proposition. A Canadian newspaper baron turned British politician — Lord Beaverbrook — had started something called the Canadian War Records Office. The idea was to have artists document the Canadian war effort. They were looking for men who were already enlisted. And they'd heard that Jackson could paint. If he were able to land the gig, his days as a soldier in the trenches would be over.

That's how he ended up at 3 Earls Court, in a big art studio the War Records Office had taken over. There, waiting for him, he found paint and canvas and a war hero.

Corporal John Chipman Kerr had been awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest honour for military valour you can get in what was then the British Empire. He'd had a finger blown off by a grenade during the Battle of the Somme, but refused to have his wound treated until he'd rushed the enemy lines, taken 62 prisoners and captured their trench. The Canadian War Records Office wanted a portrait of him. That was Jackson's first assignment.

And that was a problem. Jackson was a landscape artist; he wasn't used to painting portraits. It had been years since he even tried. Worried, he hoped to talk his way out of it. But it didn't work. He would have to give it a go. 

"Hanging over me," he wrote later in his autobiography, "was the prospect of being returned to the infantry if I failed in this first assignment."

So he set down to work and painted for his life.

Things got off to rough start. He kept having to give up, to scrape the canvas clean, and begin all over again. It was slow work. And it probably didn't help that Corporal Kerr — excited to be on leave — kept suggesting they play hooky and head down to the pub instead. But in end, Jackson was able to produce a half-decent portrait. Not great, they say — the legs look weird — but good enough that he didn't get fired.

And so, thanks to not screwing up that portrait, A.Y. Jackson was able to spend the rest of his war travelling across the Western Front, painting the ravaged landscapes in his trademark Impressionist style. Most importantly, he lived long enough to see the end of the fighting, long enough to return home to Toronto, to rejoin the group of friends who were about to change the Canadian art world forever.

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The old Canadian War Records, 14 Clifford Street

A dream for Jackson outside the old War Records Office

Read more posts about The Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour and the connections between the history of Toronto and the United Kingdom here. 

I've already written a full post about the rest of Jackson's experiences during WWI here. And I've got a post about how England embraced the Group of Seven before Canada did here. 

This post is related to dream 27 The Longest Earthquake in the History of the World A.Y. Jackson, 1914

An Apocalypse in the Beaches — William Kurelek's Nightmare Visions

Toronto Toronto by William Kurelek (that's Jesus on the steps of Old City Hall)

He was, in a lot ways, something of a Canadian stereotype. He was born in a shack on the Prairies during the winter of 1927. He grew up working on his parents' farm, ploughing fields and tending cows. When he was older, he worked as a lumberjack in the towering forests of Québec and on the shores of Lake Superior. As a construction worker, he put curbs on the streets of Edmonton and built grain elevators in Thunder Bay. As a waiter, he served the rich and famous at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. And as a painter... Well, as a painter, he became one of the most successful artists in Canadian history, using scenes from his past to capture the spirit of the nation on canvasses that sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. His work hangs on the walls of some of the most important art galleries in the world — and in kitchens all across our country. His paintings are praised as being quintessentially Canadian. Books of his work have titles like A Prairie Boy's Summer, Lumberjack, The Last of the Arctic and O Toronto. He's been hailed as "Canada's Norman Rockwell."

But William Kurelek had a dark side, too. So dark, in fact, that by the end of his life, he was convinced the world was about end in a blaze of Biblical fury. It's one the reasons his biographer, Patricia Morley, calls Kurelek's life "one of the strangest stories ever told."

It all started when he was a child, growing up during the terrible years of the Great Depression and the Second World War. He was a sensitive and artistic boy, bullied at school and bullied at home. "There was a kind of rawness and jungle law indifferent to suffering in those Depression years," he remembers in his autobiography. He writes about "the chess game of harsh, real life" and his own "intense misery." As a young student who spoke only Ukrainian at first, he felt ostracized by his classmates. Meanwhile, he describes his father as an emotionally abusive tyrant. Young Kurelek lived in fear; terrified that his father's strap, spankings and verbal lashings were just the beginning of some even more terrible punishment.

It took a toll on the boy. "[I]t poisoned me internally," he said. He became painfully shy. Even years later, one of his closest friends said that Kurelek "literally couldn't look anybody in the face." Another described him as "so ill at ease he seemed like a programmed robot". He began to suffer from depression. He was haunted by nightmares and visions. "In them my family were in cahoots with my school enemies... and were plotting to mutilate me or kill me. They were operating a meat chopping machine in the preserves room downstairs into which the victims threw themselves in ectasy. [sic]"

By the end of high school, on top of everything else, his eyes had started to fail him. A blurry spot developed into periods of near blindness and excruciating pain; a particularly cruel trial for a teenager with a passion for art. He would draw with one eye closed — and then the other — as a way of rationing the pain. Soon, he was hooked on pills. And his mood swings got even bigger.

Kurelek in Toronto, 1949 (via)

But through it all, he kept pursing his dream: art. That's what first brought him to Toronto. He enrolled at the Ontario College of Art (which was on Nassau Street back then, in Kensington). At first, he had trouble settling in. "They say Toronto is a cold city to strangers and it was just like that," he remembered. "The quaintness of it turned into smelly grubiness as I pounded the sidewalks. All I could see now were the garbage cans, the drunks stepping out of taverns and vomiting, the livid night lights, the chipped bricks and cobbles with broken bottles on them, the beckoning lights of houses of ill-repute." But in time, he developed a fondness for the city. He found a circle of new friends at OCA. And exciting new influences, too.

It was while he was studying in Toronto that Kurelek discovered Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the Van Gogh biography, Lust for Life; he fashioned himself in their bohemian image. "I rebelled as I understood a proper artist was compelled to do — if he was worth his salt — against conventionality... I was proud of my poverty, of not having proper food, or enough of it, of wearing shabby clothes and not bathing or shaving... proud I chummed with communists and eccentrics, even that I suffered from periods of depression because I believed that out of all this I was destined to produce great art..."

"He was a little like a figure out of Dosteovski," one of his professors remembered, "cryptic and mysterious. He saw himself as an enigmatic figure, a dramatic figure." His sister called him "the first hippie."

Before long, his rebellious spirit had prompted him to drop out, following his education all the way down to Mexico — hitchhiking there and back, sleeping in ditches, under bridges and, on one night, in the bushes on Parliament Hill. He spent a few months living in a Gringo commune of outsiders, hoping to catch on with one of the great Mexican masters like Diego Rivera. But it didn't work. And the depression and the eye pain followed him south. Finally, he decided that psychotherapy was his best hope for recovery. And since in those days, it was even harder to get help for mental illness in Canada than it is today, Kurelek headed across the Atlantic.

The day after he got off the boat in England, he checked himself into the Maudsley Hospital in downtown London. Mental health facilities were still brutal places in the early 1950s, but Maudsley was on the cutting edge, embracing bold new techniques like art therapy. It was there that Kurelek realized his eye pain might be psychosomatic — a result of stress and depression — and it disappeared almost immediately.

He also made great progress as an artist. Painting became an important part of his treatment; he was even given his own studio to work in. At one point, he checked himself out for a trip to the Continent. In Brussels and Vienna, he was blown away by the detailed canvasses painted by Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel. They became his most important influences, joining other unsettling artists like Francis Bacon and Francisco Goya.

It was in those years — at Maudsley and at another London hospital called Netherne — that Kurelek painted some of his most striking work. But these pieces were far from the charming scenes of Canadiana that would one day make him famous. Instead, they were disturbing, tormented nightmares. The Maze — the most famous of them all — shows a skull lying on the Prairie. It's been cut open. Inside, there are chambers filled with horrors from the depths of Kurelek's mind. His father kicking him out into the snow. His half-naked body stuffed into a test tube. Crows tearing a lizard apart. The artist cutting himself open to study his own anatomy. Bullies beating him up as a child. The painting so perfectly illustrated his inner-torment that it became a case study for art therapists. His doctors would eventually ask him to give lectures to classrooms full of psychology students.

The Maze

 
But even as he progressed as an artist, Kurelek remained deeply depressed. "No matter how intensely I painted out my store of accumulated fears, hates, disillusionments..." he wrote, "there they were, always dangling along behind me like tin cans behind a wedding car." Convinced his doctors weren't paying him enough attention, he turned to self-harm. First, he started cutting himself. Then, he attempted suicide. He took an overdose of pills and slashed his arms and face with a razor. He was lucky to survive.

After that, he agreed to electroshock therapy. Over the course of the next few months, he had a grueling series of treatments — some of them without the usual muscle relaxant. During the first one, he sprained his back; it would bother him for the rest of his life. And as the treatments progressed, he began to lose his memories. At first, it was recent events; then more distant recollections began to fade.

"I was given fourteen convulsion treatments in all," he wrote, "and it was like being executed fourteen times over. There is an instinctive dread in a person of being annihilated... I could well imagine then something of what it was like going into the gas chamber in Nazi Germany, or to the torture chamber during those misguided religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries."

So that's when William Kurelek started to pray.

Up to that point, he'd been an atheist. But now, he found himself with a renewed interest in religion. Before long, he was attending a nearby church, converting to Catholicism, taking mass at the London Oratory, and joining a social group for Catholics in the heart of the city. He found solace and strength in his new-found faith. "[N]o doubt about it," he wrote. "I was in a quiet way a happier, more glad-to-be-living sort of person now." By the time he felt he was strong enough to return to Canada in the summer of 1959, he had a new passion: God.

From Kurelek's Passion Of Christ (via)

And he was extremely passionate about it. Obsessed, even. Twice, he made a pilgrimage to the miraculous shrine at Lourdes — and to the Holy Land, too. In his autobiography, he spends page after page laying out his "proof" for the existence of God. And he shares the story how his faith enabled him to resist masturbating, a battle he'd been losing for years. ("I made charts, I gave myself rewards, I went for brisk walks, I recited vows. I even tried tying a kerchief over my eyes when having a bath...") He said his new idol was a Communist double-agent who found God and then let himself get arrested by Soviet authorities in order to convert them too. And Kurelek looked back on an incident during his trip to Mexico with a new awe. He was convinced that while he was sleeping under a bridge in the desert, he had been visited and saved by a vision of Christ himself.

Now, as he returned to Toronto, Kurelek was certain that his tremendous talent was a God-given gift and that his own suffering was a Christ-like trial. In his autobiography, he openly wonders if he might be a saint.

Just a few months later, he was discovered. It happened that autumn, while he was living in the Annex. An actor friend of his happened to be appearing in a play with the wife of a man by the name of Avram Isaacs. Isaacs was one of the most influential gallery owners in the country; he threw his weight behind the early careers of groundbreaking Canadian artists like Michael Snow (the guy who did the geese inside the Eaton's Centre and the sports fans on the side of the SkyDome). Word got back to Isaacs that there was an artist in Toronto who "painted like Bosch." He found it hard to believe — and, besides, he was best-known for supporting abstract work — but he came to the Annex to see for himself. As the actor friend described it, "A skeptical Av Isaacs entered the house, took one sweeping glance around, and said, 'My God.'"

 
Kurelek's first show was held the very next spring. Isaacs displayed about 20 of Kurelek's pieces at his Greenwich Art Gallery on Bay Street. It was the beginning of a long and wildly successful partnership; Kurelek would go on to have countless shows at the new Isaacs Gallery on Yonge Street (just north of Bloor). People absolutely adored his paintings of Canadian scenes. There were Ukrainian weddings on the Prairies. Kids having snowballs fights. Lumberjacks alone in the woods. Soon, Kurelek was one of the most famous artists in the country. He was asked to publish books, to make endless prints of his work, to give lectures. His paintings were acquired by the National Gallery, the AGO, MOMA, the Smithsonian and even the Parliament Buildings, where years earlier he'd slept outside in the bushes on his way back from Mexico. He was embraced by pop culture, too: Van Halen used The Maze as the cover of one of their albums.

Hot Day in Kensington Market

But Kurelek never did fit in. One writer friend described the scene at that first show on Bay Street: "Bill looked terribly out of place at his own opening. He wouldn't hold a wine glass. The paintings stuck out like sore thumbs. Bill stuck out too. He had a reddish complexion and looked like a lumberjack; he looked as if he were in the wrong country, the wrong century, the wrong situation. It didn't look as if he had produced the work!"

And it was about more than just his social skills. Kurelek had a new mission that didn't fit in with the Toronto art scene of the 1960s. He didn't just want to become rich and famous, he wanted to save the world. And to save it for God.

Along with his Canadian scenes and his disturbing inner-nightmares, Kurelek had started painting what he called "religious propaganda." His most ambitious work was a series of 160 paintings illustrating the Passion of Christ. He started working on it that New Year's Eve; it took him three years to finish. (It was finally shown at the St. Vladimir Institute on Spadina near Harbord. Today, it's the centrepiece of the collection at the Niagara Falls Art Gallery.) And his Passion was only the beginning. Kurelek painted countless religious scenes, including an entire book called A Northern Nativity. It shows the birth of Christ as if it had happened in Canada: in an igloo, by a haystack on the Prairies, in a snow-swept cabin, at a soup kitchen, in a fishing boat.

When the CN Tower was being built, Kurelek even asked if he could pay to have a metal plaque installed on the spire: "O Supreme Builder of the Universe, help us not to make the mistake of the first tower which you confounded."

The offer was declined. As you might expect, not everyone liked this version of Kurelek. And it didn't help that much of his work was angry and moralizing. Determined to show people the error of their modern, secular ways, many of his religious paintings combined his Canadian scenes with the kind of horrifying visions he'd painted back in England. On one canvas, he shows a farmer-Satan harvesting souls on the Yonge Street Strip. On another, he paints buckets full of aborted fetuses along a snowy Highland Creek. He gained a reputation for being "a missionary in paint." One editor called him "a fire-breathing preacher in the old style". His biographer, Morley, agreed: "Kurelek could thunder like an Old Testament preacher or a modern Savonarola."

As far as Kurelek was concerned, he had to. The fate of the world was at stake. Even now, as a middle aged man with a successful career and a new family (he met his wife at the Catholic Information Centre at Bathurst and Bloor; they got married at Our Lady of Perpetual Help on St. Clair East), he still hadn't escaped his demons. He slid back into depression, and made another attempt on his life. His wife stumbled in on him just as he was slashing his wrists. He survived — and it was the last time he tried to kill himself — but it wasn't the end of his dark thoughts. They stayed with him for the rest of his life. And they got even darker. He became convinced the world was about to end.

Queen's Park's fallout shelter 1960 (via)

This, after all, was the 1960s. The Cold War was in full swing; even the most reasonable, secular thinkers thought the world might end. Schoolchildren were being taught to hide under their desks. The government was building bunkers. They even displayed a model fallout shelter on the lawn in front of Queen's Park, encouraging private citizens to build their own. In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis nearly proved them right.

Kurelek saw all of this through a devoutly religious lens. He was sure God was going to rain fire down upon the world as a form of punishment. A nuclear war, he told the press, was "pretty well inevitable." But that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. It would help cleanse the world of sin. "A large part of the human race will die," he admitted. "With the modern, largely urban way of life destroyed or drastically crippled..." But eventually, it would lead to a better world. "I foresee a new golden age of Faith after intense suffering has purged us of our materialistic pride."

The key, of course, would be to survive long enough to build that new, utopian, Christian world. So in the late 1960s, Kurelek began to build his own bomb shelter. He was living in the east end of Toronto by then, on Balsalm Avenue in the Beaches. It's the scene of one of his most famous paintings: in Balsalm Avenue After Heavy Snowfall, the neighbourhood has come alive to dig out after a big storm. Children play in the snow, neighbours wave to each other, some push a car up the street. It's exactly the kind of quaint Canadiana that Kurelek had become famous for. But all the while, the darkness lurked. Soon, he assumed, the street would be the scene of a much greater calamity.

At first, he planned on putting the bunker in his own basement studio. But the plans soon expanded; he wanted to build an elaborate shelter separated from the rest of the house. It would be fully equipped, with a TV, air conditioning and room for 30 people — a relatively comfortable place to wait for the apocalypse to pass.

By then, though, the bomb shelter fad had already started to fade. Kurelek was the first person in Toronto to apply for a permit in five years. When he tried to get permission to build, the City gave him trouble. His neighbours opposed the plan. His family wasn't too thrilled about it either. But whatever people said, Kurelek pressed on. When his priest tried to talk him out of it, he looked for a second opinion until he found one that confirmed his own. He was determined to be ready when the bomb dropped.

He defended his views in a letter to friends. "We must concentrate on being personally prepared at all times," he argued. "This is one reason (though not the only one) why I practice periodic fasts, why I try to do without sleep or with little, under various conditions. This is why I have taken up gardening, because once we do reach an uncontaminated area we will have to grow our own food. This is also why I believe our family vacations should now be camping rather than cottaging... We should deliberately learn to do without things we take for granted, e.g. stoves, insect repellants, a roof over one's head, regular sleep, vitamins and medicines, packaged foods."

This Is The Nemesis

In the end, though, it seems like the costs were just too much. It would take thousands of dollars to build his shelter. And even for an artist as successful as William Kurelek, that kind of money wasn't always easy to come by. He bartered and traded for some of the work. Eventually, he'd build part of his bunker on some land up north. But in Toronto, the only physical evidence of the plans for his fallout shelter would be the big, fireproof door to his basement studio.

His apocalyptic vision is, however, still on full display in his paintings. In This Is The Nemesis, he shows the city of Hamilton blown apart by a nuclear explosion, with another blast in the distance where Toronto used to stand. In many of his works, mushroom clouds bloom on the horizons of prairie fields. And in Harvest of Our Mere Humanism Years, a bomb dangles precariously from a thread, hanging like the sword of Damocles above Toronto's new City Hall.

It may, sadly, have been the long hours Kurelek spent painting those visions that killed him in the end. His basement studio was already a bunker of sorts. There were no windows. There was no ventilation. He worked with toxic spray paint that clogged the air — and his lungs. His doctor warned him to stop, but Kurelek was always stubborn about things like that. The paint, they say, may very well have caused the cancer that ate away at his liver.

The end of his life wasn't all bad: he was in pain, but he had his family and friends to comfort him. He'd recently returned from a trip to Ukraine, to the ancestral farmlands of his father, a voyage he had longed to make for years. But in those final days, he was still haunted by nightmares and visions. With just a few days left to live, he confided in his priest.

What he saw, he said, was Toronto in flames.

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In a few weeks, I'll be heading to London, England to visit a few sites related to the story of William Kurelek — and to leave copies of a new dream for him there as part of the Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour. I'll also be sharing many other stories about the historical connections between Toronto and London — while leaving more than a dozen different dreams in nearly a dozen different cities, towns and villages in England and Wales. You can learn more about the tour here and, if you like the idea, you can also lend me your crowd-funding support.

You can borrow Patricia Morley's biography, Kurelek, from the Toronto Public Library here. William Kurelek's autobiography, Someone With Me, is for sale here. And in the library here. Those two books were the source for the vast majority of the information in this post. Kurelek's book O Toronto is here and here. And Northern Nativity is here and here. There are lots of his other books available, too.

There's a brand new documentary about William Kurelek, called William Kurelek's Maze, which you can learn more about here.

Kurelek explains The Maze online here. Kurelek.ca has a gallery of his work here, a timeline of his life here, and information about his studio/bomb shelter here. Christian writer Michael O'Brien wrote an article — "The Passion of William Kurelek" — for IMAGE, which is available to read online here. A Jesuit by the name of John O'Brien writes about him here. There's a Globe & Mail article about a relatively recent Kurelek retrospective here. Brett Grainger tackles it for The Walrus here.

Patrick Metzger talks about a myth from Toronto's bomb shelter days on Torontoist here.

This post is related to dream 37 An Apocalypse in the Beaches William Kurelek, 1968

UK Tour Preview: How England Helped Save The Group Of Seven

The Group of Seven's A.Y. Jackson painted this painting right at the very end of the First World War. He'd spent the last few years on the front lines in Europe: first as a soldier crawling through the trenches in Flanders, then as an official war artist with the Canadian War Records Office (a department created by Lord Beaverbrook, a Canadian newspaper baron turned British Cabinet Minister). But when the war finally ended, Jackson's job wasn't quite over: he was sent to Halifax to capture the scenes of Canadian soldiers returning home. Arthur Lismer — one of the two British-born members of the Group of Seven — was already there. He was working for the War Records Office, too. Together, during the spring of 1919, they painted the warships as they came home. That's when Jackson made the sketches for this painting, Entrance To Halifax Harbour, which he probably finished back home at the Studio Building in Rosedale.

In those early days, the Group of Seven weren't famous yet (in fact, they weren't even called the Group of Seven yet). And Canadian critics hated them. They were too modern, too experimental. They were dismissed as "The Hot Mush School." "A horrible bunch of junk." "The figments of a drunkard’s dream." "Daubing by immature children." More than 30 years after Van Gogh painted Starry Night, Canada still wasn't ready for Impressionism.

But in England, it was a whole different story. After the end of the war, an exhibition was held in London. Some of the Canadian paintings created for the War Records Office were put on display at the majestic Burlington House, a couple of blocks from Piccadilly Circus. Jackson wasn't the only member of the Group of Seven with work hanging on the walls — Fred Varley (the other member of the Group who was raised in England) had also been painting on the Western Front. But there were more pieces by Jackson than by anyone else. And the show was a big success. Thousands of people came to see the exhibit on the first day alone — including the Prime Minster of Canada, Robert Borden. Jackson's paintings for the War Records Office would eventually end up in some of the most important collections in Canada, including the National Gallery, the War Museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Entrance To Halifax Harbour wasn't part of that exhibit. But just a few years later, the painting finally got its chance. In 1924, the English government put on a massive display of industry, engineering and artwork from all over the British Empire. The British Empire Exhibition was a VERY BIG deal: the biggest and most popular exhibition that had ever been held anywhere. Back in Canada, the job of picking the Canadian art to submit sparked a major battle between the old guard of conventional, established artists and the modernist up-and-comers like the Group of Seven. In the end, the modernists won the right to be included. And Entrance To Halifax Harbour was sent to London.

The reviews by Canadian critics were harsh. The Toronto Daily Star compared Jackson's work to "a spilt can of paint." But the English critics loved it. The Morning Post called the Group of Seven "the foundation of what may become one of the greatest schools of landscape painting." Only one piece of Canadian art was sold during the British Empire Exhibition — and it was Jackson's. Entrance To Halifax Harbour was bought by the Tate Gallery. It's still part of their collection today.

The show in London helped to establish the Group of Seven's reputation back home in Canada. Now that the British took them seriously, Canadian collectors started taking them seriously, too. The Group even used the reviews from the Empire Exhibition to promote their upcoming shows: they printed posters with the angry Canadian reviews side by side with the glowing British ones.

Even today, the Group of Seven are lauded by some British critics. A major exhibition of their work was mounted by a London gallery just a couple of years ago. According to the gallery's director, "[The Group of Seven] produced some of the most vibrant and beautiful landscapes of the twentieth century." He calls Tom Thomson "Canada's very own Van Gogh."

In a couple of months, I plan on heading to London myself. I'll be there to leave dreams from the Toronto Dreams Project at Toronto-related historical sites across the city. They'll include my dream for A.Y. Jackson, "The Longest Earthquake in the History of the World," which I launched as part of the AGO's First Thursday back in December. I'll visit Burlington House, where the War Records exhibition was held, along with other Jackson-related spots.

You can help me get there by contributing to my Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign (or by sharing it on Facebook or Twitter).

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You can read the full story of A.Y. Jackson and the First World War in one of my previous posts here.

Toronto in 1851 — a snapshot of the booming city at the dawn of a new age

In 1851, the year this painting was painted, Toronto was beginning to boom. It had been less than 60 years since the first British soldiers showed up to clear the ancient forest and make way for the new capital of Upper Canada, but the population was already skyrocketing. By the time of this painting, there were something like 30,000 people living in the city. The population had doubled over the last decade and would double again over the next. It was truly the dawning of a new age: in 1851 we started building our very first railroad. In fact, the City's own website uses this year as a defining line in the history of Toronto: between "A Provincial Centre" and "An Industrializing City."

There were big new public buildings opening all over town. Some of them are still there today. Near King and Jarvis, the gorgeous St. Lawrence Hall had just opened, the city's main venue for concerts, political meetings and other public events. In 1851, it hosted an important anti-slavery gathering: the North American Convention of Colored Freemen, which included a speech by Frederick Douglass. Today, it's a National Historic Site. A block away, a new building had just been built at the St. Lawrence Market: it served as Toronto's City Hall for the next 50 years and can still be seen in the facade of the current Market. Far to the west on Queen Street, near Parkdale, the new Provincial "Lunatic Asylum" had recently begun taking its very first patients. It lasted all the way to the 1970s before we tore the beautiful old building down. It was in 1851 that the first in a series of brick walls was designed for the grounds. The patients were used as free labour to build them. A section of the walls survives to this day, on the eastern edge of what's now the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

Meanwhile, the Province of Canada had just become a real democracy. Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine had recently won an overwhelming majority on an election platform demanding the British government allow Canadians to make our own laws. They called it Responsible Government. Some of the Tories who opposed them were so pissed off they attacked the Parliament Buildings in Montreal, burned them to the ground, and threatened further violence. As a result, the capital was moved to Toronto. As 1851 began, Baldwin and LaFontaine were hard at work in our Parliament Buildings down on Front Street (where the CBC building is now). Their government would become known as "The Great Ministry." In a few short years, they brought in public education, a public postal service, an independent judiciary, our jury system, and our appeals system; they brought democratic reform to municipal governments and made sure anyone — not just the upper class — had access to the courts and could be appointed to the civil service. They also extended the right to vote — it wasn't just for property owners anymore — though, at the same time, they restricted that right to men only.

Despite all this change, we still remained an overwhelmingly British city: in 1851, 97% of Torontonians had been born in the British Isles or traced their ancestry there. It would be a long time before that changed: fifty years later, in 1901, the figure was still 92%.

But now, more than ever before, we were a particularly Irish city. Ireland had just been devastated by the Great Famine. More than a million people died in just a few years; many others fled. Tens of thousands of Irish refugees flooded Toronto in the years leading up to 1851 — at one point during the terrible summer of 1847, there were more refugees in the city than non-refugees. Hundreds died of typhoid at the old General Hospital on the corner of King & John (where the TIFF Lightbox is now) and in the temporary fever sheds built out back. It was the beginning of a great wave of Irish immigration that changed the face of our city. Soon, we'd earn the nickname of the "Belfast of North America."

Toronto had always been a very Protestant town. In fact, for the first four decades of the city's history, Anglican ministers were the only ones allowed to perform marriage ceremonies. The Protestant Orange Order was immensely powerful — just like in Belfast — and they didn't hesitate to use that power against Catholics. Prejudice was rampant. In the few decades after 1851, as the city became home to ever-more Irish-Catholics, Toronto found itself dealing with some of the same sectarian violence that plagued Ireland. There would be dozens of riots between Protestants and Catholics before the end of the century.

But it was also a time of growing respect for diversity. Baldwin (an anglophone Protestant from Toronto) and LaFontaine (a francophone Catholic from Montreal) were helping to lay some of the early foundations of Canadian multiculturalism. They made Canada officially bilingual, opened Canadian ports to ships from all over the world, and challenged the exclusive privileges of the Protestant clergy. They took over King's College, an Anglican school in Toronto, severed its ties to the church, and turned it into the secular University of Toronto. Meanwhile, the city's first Catholic cathedral, St. Michael's, had just been consecrated at Church & Shuter. It would soon be joined by St. Michael's College, a Catholic school which would eventually also become part of U of T.

By the end of 1851, however, the era of Baldwin and LaFontaine was suddenly over. They had granted an amnesty to the rebels of 1837, allowing them to return from exile. For the first time in more than a decade, the old trouble-making former mayor, William Lyon Mackenzie, was back at home living in Toronto. He was joined by other returning rebels — unsurprisingly, they were more radical than the moderate liberals (like Baldwin and LaFontaine) who had refused to take up arms. It didn't take long for Mackenzie to get elected to parliament and to cause problems for the Great Ministry. Baldwin and LaFontaine were relatively young — in their 40s — but they were already exhausted from years of political struggle and plagued by a variety of illnesses. (Most famously, Baldwin had been suffering from severe depression since the death of his wife 15 years earlier.) When one of Mackenzie's bills to overturn one of Baldwin's new laws got unexpectedly strong support, Baldwin resigned. LaFontaine wasn't far behind.

And so, as 1851 turned into 1852, the Province of Canada was in the hands of a new generation of political leaders. In the wake of the Great Ministry, people like George Brown and John A. Macdonald would rise to prominence. The fight for Responsible Government was over. Now, it was time to start down the road to Confederation.

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Image: it was an artist born in Germany who painted this painting. Augustus Köller had been raised in Düsseldorf and now lived in Philadelphia. He made his living off watercolours and lithographs. His work took him to cities all over North America. For this painting, he seems to have taken a vantage point looking out over the city from the ancient shore of the prehistoric Lake Iroquois, just north of Davenport Road now. The land up on top of the hill had long belonged to the city's elite — it's where many had their country estates. In fact, up on that hill right next to where Casa Loma is now, Robert Baldwin's family built the first Spadina House.

A.Y. Jackson Goes To War — The Group of Seven on the Western Front

"What war?"

In the summer of 1914, A.Y. Jackson was far from home, high among the peaks of the Rocky Mountains. He was there to paint. This was back in the earliest days of the Group of Seven, years before they used that nickname. Jackson was still new to the group; the others had only recently convinced him to join their efforts to change the Canadian art world forever — and with it, the way Canadians saw their own country.

Even before they met him, the other artists admired Jackson. His style was deeply influenced by his studies in Paris, at the heart of the Impressionist revolution that had yet to reach Canada. The group saw Jackson’s work — particularly a painting called The Edge of the Maple Wood — as the example they wanted to follow. So they and one of their patrons offered him free room and board for a year if he was willing to move from Montreal to Toronto and do nothing but work on his art. They even had a brand new building to put him up in: the Studio Building in Rosedale. He accepted.

But in those early days, the group’s paintings were terribly controversial. Established critics dismissed them in much the same way Van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso had been dismissed. "The Hot Mush School," they called them. "A horrible bunch of junk." "The figments of a drunkard’s dream." "Daubing by immature children." "A spilt can of paint."

Luckily, not everyone agreed with those critics. Some people were thrilled with the way Jackson and the others were using vivid colours and Impressionist techniques to capture the spirit of the Canadian landscape. When the Canadian Northern Railroad built a new line through the Rockies, they commissioned Jackson to travel with their construction camps as they worked along the Fraser River. That’s how he made his first trip out West.

While he was in the Rockies, Jackson would leave the camps behind for days on end, hiking up in into the mountains with a guide. "We took many chances," Jackson remembered later in his autobiography, "sliding down snow slopes with just a stick for a brake, climbing over glaciers without ropes, and crossing rivers too swift to wade, by felling trees across them."

It was at the end of one of these "scrambles" that he heard the news. When he returned to camp, an engineer was waiting for him. "What do you think about the war?" he asked the painter. It was the first Jackson had heard of it.

Before long, he would be all too familiar with the First World War, fighting on the front lines. But for now, it seemed a long way away. As the military might of Europe shifted into gear, Jackson kept painting. Most people thought the war would be over soon; there didn’t seem to be any pressing need for the artist to join the fight. Instead of heading back to Toronto, where young men were lined up outside the Armouries on University Avenue waiting to enlist, Jackson headed straight from the Rockies to Algonquin Park. There was someone waiting for him there.

Thomson at Grip Ltd. (via)

Tom Thomson was one of the most promising young artists in Toronto. But Thomson found that hard to believe. He had a steady, paying gig at Grip Ltd., a downtown design firm where many of the Group of Seven artists worked. He was known as the most accomplished outdoorsman of them all; it was Thomson who first fell in love with Algonquin Park and introduced it to the others. But he lacked their confidence when it came to his art. He worried that if he quit his day job, he wouldn’t be able to make a living off his paintings. And so, as part of Jackson’s deal to get a free year in the Studio Building, the others also asked him to take Thomson under his wing. The two artists would share a studio on the top floor. And while Thomson taught Jackson about life in the bush, Jackson would teach Thomson about painting.

The two met in Algonquin that autumn for their very first sketching trip together. While Arthur Lismer and Fred Varley (two future members of the Group of Seven who had recently emigrated from England) stayed in a lodge with their families, Jackson and Thomson roughed it in the bush: living in a tent, travelling by canoe and working on birch panels small enough to be carried through the wilderness. That fall, they made sketches that would lead to some of their most famous work. Jackson’s The Red Maple was a result of that trip. And so was Thomson’s Northern River.

Meanwhile, six thousand kilometers away, young men were facing a very different reality. "There was a war on too," Jackson later wrote, but "in Algonquin we heard little about it and hoped it would soon be over."

Of course, it wouldn’t be. The war on the Western Front had kicked off with a big, fast, German drive into France and an Allied counteroffensive that pushed them far back. But now that quick, dramatic war of sweeping movement — the kind everyone had been expecting — was settling into a grueling stalemate. That September, in order to avoid being driven back any further, the Germans dug the very first trenches. The French soon followed suite. By the time the artists got back from Algonquin, it was already becoming clear that this would be a new, more horrifying kind of war. And not a short one. "When we reached Toronto," Jackson wrote, "we realized that we had been unduly optimistic, that the war was likely to be a long one, and that our relatively carefree days were over."

He tried to get back into the swing of things at the Studio Building, turning sketches like The Red Maple into full canvases. "But I could not settle down to serious work. The war made me restless." With his free year at the Studio Building coming to an end, Jackson decided to head back to Montreal and join the army.

As it turned out, it would still be a few months before he finally signed up. The news from Europe shifted again and it seemed, again, as if it might be a quick war. Jackson seized the opportunity to take another sketching trip, this time to one of his favourite spots in rural Québec.

But in April, the Germans successfully deployed a deadly new weapon for the very first time: chlorine gas. In Belgium, near the town of Ypres, a thick cloud of poison yellow smoke descended on trenches full of French, Moroccan and Algerian troops. They say six thousand people died in the first few minutes: suffocating, lungs burning, frothing at the mouth, cut to pieces by German guns. The Germans attacked and drove the Allies back to a spot near the village of St. Julien, where Canadians rushed to plug the hole in the line, holding urine-soaked handkerchiefs over their faces as feeble protection against the deadly fumes. Three-quarters of them would die, too, but they would hold the line and keep the Germans at bay. That was just the beginning of a long, bloody battle — the same one that would inspire another Canadian, John McCrae, to write "In Flanders Fields."

"At the railway station one morning I heard the first news of the Battle of St. Julien," Jackson wrote. "I knew then that all the wishful thinking about the war being of short duration was over."

Finally, he saw this recruitment poster:

 It "ended any doubts I had about enlisting," he said. A few months later, he was on his way to the front lines.

Still, while Jackson was willing to fight, he was far from being seized with a patriotic lust for battle. His letters made that perfectly clear. "I'm a Social Democrat," he wrote to his sister from the battlefields of Belgium, "and don’t believe in war." He scorned the wealthy, Empire-loving Canadians who glorified the war from the safety of home while the poor were forced to fight it. "I don't think I ever in my life took so little pride in being British,” he wrote in a second letter. “The rough neck and the out of work far outnumber the patriot. Volunteers by pressure... when you hear all the bosh talked and written about our precious honor, Christian ideals, etc. it just about makes you sick… people who entrust their national honor to men they would not allow to enter their houses in times of peace are not worth fighting for."

Before he'd even left for Europe, Jackson wrote, "I wish we could send all our politicians to the front." And later, he added that warmongering members of the clergy would benefit from the same treatment. "At the front we would see examples of self sacrifice and sublime courage by men the church would regard as outside the law. His faith in the church might weaken but his faith in humanity would be better stuff after it."

When Jackson had first signed up, Lawren Harris (another, wealthier artist in the group) had offered to buy him a commission as an officer (and all the preferential treatment that came with it). But Jackson refused, preferring to earn his rank through experience. "This Canadian army," he wrote, "would be a far finer machine to my mind if all class distinctions were done away with, and officers lived under exactly the same conditions as the men…"

It was early in 1916 that Jackson ended up in the trenches just outside Ypres, not far from the spot where the St. Battle of St. Julien had raged a year earlier. It was a bombed-out, blood-soaked mess. "The flag waving was over," he wrote. But he did see some haunting beauty in the desolation. "Flanders in early spring was beautiful, as was Ypres by moonlight and the weird ruined landscapes under the light of flares or rockets."

Troops near Ypres, WWI (via)

That summer, the Germans launched an attack against the high ground held by the Allies outside the town. Jackson was there "crawling along a trench in Sanctuary Wood, and an aeroplane circling overhead like a big hawk, signalling to the artillery who were trying to blow us up. It was a day of glorious sunshine and only man was vile, in general, individually they were magnificent."

Once the Germans had pushed the Allies off the high ground it was up to the Canadians to counter-attack — the first time our army had ever been given such a task. It was, according to the official British history of the war "an unqualified success." The Canadian forces developed new methods for fighting this new kind of brutal war — changing, for instance, the number of artillery barrages before they went over the top, so the Germans wouldn’t know when they were coming.

Now, nearly 100 years later, a museum stands on that spot, still run by the grandson of the farmer who owned the land. Nearby, a monument has been erected as a memorial to the Canadians who died there. Some of the craters and the trenches where they fought are still there, too, preserved by the museum. In Toronto, we remember the battle every year with a parade at Fort York. We call it "Sorrel Day."

Jackson survived the barrages, the attack and the counter-attack, but it was hard for anyone to last very long in that devastated place. A week later, during a German bombardment, he was wounded. It got him in the hip and the shoulder.

He was taken to a hospital in France and then to England to recover. That’s where got a letter delivering tragic news from Canada.

When Jackson had left Toronto to enlist, Tom Thomson had stayed behind to paint. He had a medical condition that kept him out of the army. But at that point, his free year in the Studio Building was over too, and without someone else to help make rent, he was forced moved into the shed out back instead. He spent the warmer months away on sketching trips in the northern bush, while he spent the snowy months holed up in the shack on the slopes of the Rosedale Valley, deeply immersed in his work. There, he would paint some of the most famous canvasses in Canadian history, works like The Jack Pine (now in the National Gallery) and The West Wind (now in the AGO).

All the while, he worried about the war. The shed, as rustic as it was, was still only a few blocks away from the intersection of Yonge and Bloor, where thousands of soldiers marched by on their way to war. The military was all over the city. And Thomson had friends on the other side of the Atlantic to worry about, too. "I can't get used to the idea of Jackson being in the machine," he wrote to another artist in the group, "and it is rotten that in this socalled civilized age that such things can exist…"

Jackson would survive to see the end of the war, but Thomson wouldn't be so lucky. During the summer of 1917, he took another trip to Algonquin. It would be his last. The accomplished outdoorsman disappeared on a canoe trip and was found eight days later, floating dead in Canoe Lake, fishing wire wrapped around his leg. At the time, he was still barely known outside the small group of artists in Toronto. But over the course of the next few decades, his fame grew — and so did the legend of his death. A century later, he's hailed as one of the most famous Canadian artists ever and his suspicious accident is one of our most infamous mysteries.

But for Jackson it was a very personal tragedy. "I could sit down and cry to think that while in all this turmoil over here... the peace and quietness of the north country should be the scene of such a tragedy," he wrote in a letter home. "Without Tom the north country seems a desolation of bush and rock. He was the guide, the interpreter, and we the guests partaking of the hospitality so generously given."

In his autobiography, Jackson remembered, "The thought of getting back to the north country with Thomson, and going father afield with him on painting trips after the war was over, had always buoyed me up when the going was rough. Now I would never go sketching with Tom Thomson again."

Canadians at Passchendaele, 1917

And things looked like they were about to get even worse. Jackson had recovered from his wounds just as the Allies were getting ready for a big offensive — and just as the men in his unit had gotten so sick of the conditions, they were ready to mutiny. Soon, they would be back on the front lines outside Ypres, at the muddy Battle of Passchendaele, where hundreds of thousands of men would die in just a few short months. Meanwhile, Jackson was reaching the end of his tether — he had been worn down by the war and friends worried he couldn't take much more of it.

But a few days after he learned about Thomson’s death, Jackson got some good news. He was digging a latrine when an officer interrupted him. The army had a new project and they wanted him to be a part of it.

The man behind the idea was Lord Beaverbrook — a Canadian businessman turned British politician and newspaper baron. He was determined to make sure that there would an historical record of the Canadian contribution to the war. And so, he used some of his own fortune to establish the Canadian War Records Office. Part of his plan was to hire artists to capture the Canadian experience of the war. Eventually, there would be almost 120 of them, producing nearly a thousand paintings by the time it was all over. Jackson was one of the very first who was asked to join the cause. He would paint more canvases for the War Records Office than any other artist.

Now, instead of a gun, his main companion was a sketchbook.

It was challenging work — and not just because he was trying to make art in the middle of a war zone. In the past, battles had tended to be fought by men standing in fields in straight lines; they wore brightly coloured uniforms; artists were commissioned to glorify their exploits. Now, they were hidden away in trenches being torn apart by distant machine guns or blown to pieces by a rain of artillery. The old style of war painting wasn't going to work. "What to paint was a problem for the war artist," Jackson wrote. "There was nothing to serve as a guide. War had gone underground, and there was little to see. The old heroics, the death and glory stuff, were gone for ever; there was no more 'Thin Red Line' or 'Scotland For Ever.'"

Instead, Jackson chose to paint landscapes, much as he did back home in Canada. But these places were more dead than alive, dreadful and haunting, ruined by the ravages of the most destructive war in human history. Individual soldiers were dwarfed by the scale of the devastation around them.

He would start in France, in the same region he had visited years earlier on a sketching trip as a student. "The country around Lens was exciting, in a way, for an artist," he wrote in his autobiography. "The permanent lines had long been established, and back of them was a swatch, about five miles wide, of seemingly empty country, cut up by old trench lines, gun pits, old shell holes, ruins of villages and farm houses. In the daytime there was not a sign of life. Of all the stuff I painted at Lens the canvas I liked best was 'Springtime in Picardy,' which showed a little peach tree blooming in the courtyard of a smashed-up farm house."

It’s on display at the AGO:

"I went with Augustus John one night to see a gas attack we made on the German lines. It was like a wonderful display of fireworks, with the clouds of gas and the German flares and rockets of all colours." He wrote notes to go with sketches that night: "Sudden bursts of flame ... coloured glow ... old house silhouette ... Bright green lights behind clouds shining through gas clouds ... Blow star a shower of orange." The painting that resulted, Gas Attack, Liévin, is at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa:

The War Museum also has A Copse, Evening, which one of Jackson’s biographers, Wayne Larsen, writes about in his book, The Life of a Landscape Painter:

"Just west of Liévin, Jackson sketched what would prove to be one of his most striking and memorable wartime images — A Copse, Evening. This eerie scene of dead tree trunks in a wasteland of shell craters and war debris shows a few tiny figures of soldiers making their way along a makeshift walkway of planks. Above them, diagonal searchlight beams slash the sky. The atmosphere is chilling enough, but Jackson's bitterly ironic title drives home the anti-war message — the copse itself is no more; all that's left are the skeletal remains of the shattered trees." 

Jackson's House of Ypres is also in Ottawa at the War Museum:

But Jackson wasn’t the only future member of the Group of Seven who enlisted. Lawren Harris and Fred Varley were also in Europe. Varley ended up working for the Canadian War Records Office, too, producing paintings that were even more disturbing than Jackson's.

"I tell you, Arthur," he wrote to Arthur Lismer (one of the British-born artists who had been in Algonquin with Jackson and Thomson), "your wildest nightmares pale before reality. You pass over swamps on rotting duckboards, past bleached bones of horses with their harness still on, past isolated rude crosses sticking up from the filth and the stink of decay is flung all over. There was a lovely wood there once with a stream running thro' it but now the trees are powdered up and mingle with the soil."

Varley’s piece, For What?, is also in the collection of the War Museum:

Meanwhile, back in Canada, Lismer was also working for the War Records Office. He was in Halifax, painting the war effort on the home front. And before too long, his subjects would include war ships returning home to Canada, full of soldiers on their way back to their friends and family. The war, after four long, agonizing years, was finally over.

By the spring of 1919, Jackson had joined Lismer in Halifax to paint the final stages of the return to peace. Another one of his most famous paintings came out of those days. Entrance to Halifax Harbour now belongs to the Tate Gallery in England. You can barely even tell it's a war painting at all; the only sign is a few camouflaged ships in the distance:

Now, with the war over and Thomson gone, Jackson's darkest days were behind him. He returned to Toronto, to the top floor of the Studio Building, and reunited with the other artists in the group. He had earned an international reputation thanks to his war paintings, and had been accepted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Art. It would take him a while to recover from the war, to regain his enthusiasm for the Canadian landscape. But soon, his momentum was back. A memorial exhibition of Thomson's work, which Jackson helped to organize, met with the usual disdain from the older critics. The fight within the art world would last for at least another decade. But the tide was finally turning.

Canada had a new sense of itself in the wake of the First World War, and for the first time since Confederation, people seemed ready to support artists who wanted to capture the unique spirit of their own country. Jackson and the others had attracted the attention of younger artists. They were selling their work to the National Gallery. Their war paintings had won glowing reviews from the British press. Soon, they would have their first group show together at the AGO. The year after they returned from the war, they decided to publicly declare themselves as a new movement with a new name. They were called the Group of Seven. And they were going to do exactly what they promised to do: change Canadian art forever.

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A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

You can get A.Y. Jackson's autobiography, A Painter's Country, from Amazon here or from the Toronto Public Library here. The biography by Warren Larsen, The Life of a Landscape Painter is here and here.

You can learn more about the trenches of the First World War here and here. The Canadian War Museum has more on Lord Beaverbrook and the Canadian War Records Office here. They've also got a great piece by Susan Butlin, "Landscape as Memorial: A.Y. Jackson and the Landscape of the Western Front" here, as a PDF. The CBC interviews Jackson as the Studio Building in a video here. You can find a bunch of his letters home from the war here.

There's a very interesting old piece about modernist art and the First World War here. And a blog talks about the Group of Seven and "the virtues of localism" here. There are lots of reviews of their early shows here. There's a website devoted to Tom Thomson here. And one that focuses on the mystery of his death here. The patron of the Group of Seven, Dr. John MacCallum, writes a tribute to Thomson here. And there's a kinda neat damaged photo of his canoe here. There's more about Grip Ltd. here.

This post is related to dream 27 The Longest Earthquake in the History of the World A.Y. Jackson, 1914