Tom Thomson, The Tent

After last week, I thought I'd do a little series on the Group of Seven (which will be longer than seven weeks because the Group of Seven kept expanding past the original seven members - Fitzgerald wasn't an original member). And because I began with a painting of a house rather than a landscape - which the Group of Seven is famous for - I thought I'd try and find something unusual - a house or a building or at least a structure of some kind from each of them. It wasn't easy.

Tom Thomson, though not officially a member because he died before they formed, was in many eyes the man who inspired the formation of the Group of Seven.

And I'll tell you that for some of these painters, finding a painting that wasn't a landscape was tough. This is as close as I could get for Tom Thomson - famous not just for his art, but for his disappearance and death. He disappeared in the Northern Ontario wilderness while on a canoe trip and his body was found 8 days later. Suicide? Murder? Accident? No one really knows.

But this painting of a tent - probably a tent that Thomson spent a lot of time in while painting in the wilderness - is fabulous. I'm so happy I thought to do this, because, even though I've been to many galleries that contain many Thomson pieces, I'd never seen this one before.

The deep blue of the lake, the autumn colors of the trees and grass, and then the white of the tent - they make me feel as if I'm in Northern Ontario. I guarantee you that the day this painting was created was cold. And yet there he was, standing behind his easel, painting this amazing rendering of the place he loved.

Kate