The original roots man: landscape, nationalism and dress

The landscape paintings of Canadian artist Tom Thomson have long been a part of the Canadian canon of art. The Group of Seven, Emily Carr and Tom Thomson have produced images of the Canadian wilderness that continue to capture the imagination of Canadians to this day. After nearly a hundred years since the passing of Tom Thomson in 1917, the mythology surrounding the artist continues to develop as he plays an important role within Canadian cultural memory and consciousness as a quintessential Canadian icon. Some scholars have argued that the Thomson myth has less to do with the art that he produced, and have more to do with the prevalent ideas and values that were projected onto his life after his mysterious death at Canoe Lake. In the summer of 2014, Canadian lifestyle brand Roots Canada Ltd. released the Tom Thomson collection, which sought to recognize the artist’s life and works, as the “Original Roots Man”. The narrative revolving around Tom Thomson, national identity and the wilderness may appear to truly represent Canadian life and reality given its repetition within discourses of mass culture and in the recent Roots collection. However, as this Major Research Paper (MRP) proposes, the Thomson myth speaks of larger themes having to do with how Canadians think about identity, gender, space and history and their place in it. This MRP explores the convergence of nationalism, antimodernism, the differentiation of space, and the commodification of heritage through Roots’ 2014 Tom Thomson Collection. Ultimately, this MRP argues that the Roots Tom Thomson Collection serves as an example of the commodification of heritage that provides a limited vision of Canada.

The original roots man: landscape, nationalism and dress

The landscape paintings of Canadian artist Tom Thomson have long been a part of the Canadian canon of art. The Group of Seven, Emily Carr and Tom Thomson have produced images of the Canadian wilderness that continue to capture the imagination of Canadians to this day. After nearly a hundred years since the passing of Tom Thomson in 1917, the mythology surrounding the artist continues to develop as he plays an important role within Canadian cultural memory and consciousness as a quintessential Canadian icon. Some scholars have argued that the Thomson myth has less to do with the art that he produced, and have more to do with the prevalent ideas and values that were projected onto his life after his mysterious death at Canoe Lake. In the summer of 2014, Canadian lifestyle brand Roots Canada Ltd. released the Tom Thomson collection, which sought to recognize the artist’s life and works, as the “Original Roots Man”. The narrative revolving around Tom Thomson, national identity and the wilderness may appear to truly represent Canadian life and reality given its repetition within discourses of mass culture and in the recent Roots collection. However, as this Major Research Paper (MRP) proposes, the Thomson myth speaks of larger themes having to do with how Canadians think about identity, gender, space and history and their place in it. This MRP explores the convergence of nationalism, antimodernism, the differentiation of space, and the commodification of heritage through Roots’ 2014 Tom Thomson Collection. Ultimately, this MRP argues that the Roots Tom Thomson Collection serves as an example of the commodification of heritage that provides a limited vision of Canada.

The Group of Seven

The Group of Seven was a group of Canadian landscape painters working in the early 1900s that developed a distinct style of painting tied to the evolution of Canada’s national identity. The group’s work focused on capturing the natural beauty of Canada’s vast wilderness through a self-proclaimed ‘‘Canadian’’ style that evolved following group expeditions into Canadian wildernesses. The original members of the group were Franklin Carmichael (1890–1945), Lawren Harris (1885–1970), A.Y. Jackson (1882–1972), Frank Johnston (1888–1949), Arthur Lismer (1885–1969), J.H. MacDonald (1873–1932), and Frederick Varley (1881–1969). The group’s members were based in Toronto, Ontario, and included fine artists, commercial artists and graphic designers who would meet at the Toronto Arts and Letters Club. Tom Thomson (1877–1917) was the group’s spiritual founder, even though he died three years prior to its official formation. Membership would expand in later years to include A.J. Casson (1898–1992), Edwin Holgate (1892–1977), and LeMoine Fitzgerald (1890–1956). Emily Carr (1871–1945) was also associated with the Group of Seven, but was never an official member. The Group of Seven disbanded in the 1930s.

Colonial Modernists

This chapter looks at a range of colonial fiction up to 1950 by writers native to Australia, New Zealand, India, the Caribbean, and Canada, which in some way develops and inflects modernist aspiration and practice. The old paradigm, that European models of literary modernism were disseminated to outposts of the British Empire, possibly via such cultural missionaries as E. M. Forster or D. H. Lawrence, and then belatedly imitated, or that artists from the colonies travelled to the metropolitan centre to discover and be transformed by the avant-garde, is evidently undermined by a cursory glance at colonial writing at the end of the nineteenth century. The colonial modernist fiction to 1950 discussed in this chapter is inflected by intimate experience of imperial power, as in the case of Mulk Raj Anand and Claude McKay, and by awareness of an alternative aesthetic and morality in the work of Emily Carr and Katherine Susannah Prichard.

Emily Carr and the legacy of Commonwealth modernism

This chapter discusses the importance of landscape painting in the formation of early twentieth-century Canadian national identity, in particular the Theosophical aspirations and quest for the genius loci of the Group of Seven painters in Ontario, and Emily Carr in British Columbia. Jeff Wall’s published texts that describe the influence of Carr on his peers’ work, and their desire to work outside of the problematic of colonialism, necessitates this examination. Historian Lorenzo Veracini’s discussions of the many narratives utilized by settler colonial societies to authenticate and rationalize their rights to indigenous land are introduced in relationship to the discursive framing of texts that supported and documented Lawren Harris and Carr’s paintings. The national and regional legacy of spiritually-infused landscape painting was antithetical to young artists and intellectuals like Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace, who came to maturity in the late 1960s, and who were committed to revealing man’s alienation from his industrial environment through Marxist-informed critiques of capitalism.