Tom Thomson

Tom Thomson, the great painter of Ontario north woods landscapes, was one of the driving and catalyzing forces behind the formation of the Group of Seven - an association not formally created and named until three years after Thomson's death. He was born in Claremont, Ontario, on August 5, 1877, and grew to be a man of many talents - fly fisherman, woodsman, musician, and a skillful commercial artist. He worked at the latter trade in Seattle and in Toronto until 1913, when he quit the city as well as his job and moved to Algonquin Park to paint. He lived from then on by the sale of his paintings, occasional part-time work as a fire ranger and fishing guide. In the next few years Thomson and a few of his friends - Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, and others - bred themselves that fine and attentive variety of landscape paintings which eventually came to be known under the name of the Group of Seven.

Thomson did not live to see the success of his vision. On July 8, 1917, his canoe was found capsized in Algonquin Park. His body was discovered eight days latter on the lakeshore, with a four-inch bruise across the temple. He was forty years old, engaged to be married, and at the height of his powers as a painter. The cause of death is now, as it was then, an unsolved mystery.

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