Ideas - The mysterious death of a great Canadian painter

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

Tom Thomson is one of the most mythologized Canadian painters of his time — and ours. Over 100 years ago, the artist died suddenly on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park, when he was at the peak of his powers. IDEAS producer Sean Foley delves into what we think we know about Tom Thomson and examines the tales that have evolved over the past century. *This episode originally aired Nov. 9, 2018.Guests in this episode:Gregory Klages, historian and author of The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson: Separating Fact from Fiction.Sherrill Grace, Professor Emerita at the University of British Columbia and the author of Inventing Tom Thomson Ian Dejardin, art historian and the former executive director of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.Pete Telford, chairman of the Friends of Leith Church, Leith, Ontario.

1942, Europe. Soldiers find a boy surviving alone in the woods. They make him a member of Hitler's army. But what no one would know for decades, he was Jewish. Could a story so unbelievable be true? I'm Dan Goldberg. I'm from CBC's personally, Toy Soldier. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Six decades of thought-provoking and award-winning documentaries, interviews and discussions that crack open an idea to see how it's played out over place and time. And we'd

like to know your story. So if you've ever been touched by an episode of Ideas in a way that changed the way you look at the world or that affected your life in some deep way, we'd love to know about it. To get in touch, email us at ideas at cbc.ca with a brief outline of your story. That's ideas at cbc.ca. This episode of Ideas first aired in 2018. It does feel sort of like, you know, a firework goes off and he suddenly starts painting like this. I'm Nala Ayad and this is Ideas about Tom Thompson. Judy Garland used to say, you know, whenever I'm depressed, I slap on some lipstick and go out and sing over the rainbow. You know, it's all very well. You have to be able to do it like Judy Garland.

With Tom Thompson, there's this complete joy in being able to manipulate paint in this way. And that's why, you know, I mean, I know we shouldn't be getting onto it, but that's why any talk of suicide is nonsense. This was a man just erupting with joy at painting. Ian Desjardins first saw Tom Thompson's art at the library of the Royal Academy in London. Today, he's the executive director of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection,

home to nearly 100 of Thomson's paintings. We know that Tom Thomson died suddenly on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park in July 1917. Beyond that, pretty much everything else is conjecture or fodder for the imagination. His paintings are well-known and well-loved. Some of them are Canadian icons, printed on teacups and throw pillows. But how much of what we've told ourselves about Thompson is actually true? And for that matter, what do we really mean by true? All sorts of aspects of his life and death and artwork became good hooks or interesting things for

us to talk about and speculate on. To riff on an idea that made people go, oh, I never thought of it that way before. Well, that's interesting, that's intriguing, and there's nothing to contradict the idea. So it could be true. Historian Gregory Cloghous is the author of The Many Deaths of Tom Thompson. Not only do we tend to put a gloss on Thompson's story, we also see ourselves reflected in it. He kept himself isolated, didn't he, and cut off. And he seemed to be escaping from not just urban temptations or urban noise, but possibly

from other things. So people then say, oh, well then, maybe he was escaping from some of the things I'd like to escape from. University of British Columbia professor, Cheryl Grace, in conversation with ideas contributor, Sean Foley. Sean's two-part documentary isn't a fact checking exercise, it's an expedition.

Think of it as a voyage into our fascination with Tom Thompson. His mortality and ours. His brilliance and our hunger for beauty. Sean Foley's documentary is called Tom Thompson 100 years from now. This is what they called the coffin door. It was built into the church so that after a funeral, which would, you know, the body would be up here on display during the funeral service and then they could just wheel the coffin straight out into the cemetery. Oh man. There. That moment. There. That's when my mind took a picture and kept it.

Pete Telford, who is chairman of the Friends of Leith Church, turned the old key in the lever lock and opened the coffin door. And suddenly the austerity of the church became a small frame around the cemetery beyond. Wow. So we can walk right out the tunnel. Victorian gray opened onto green and blue and brown, and circumscribed angular human artifice gave way to a world of motion, undulations, the subtle sway of great trees over the sunburnt grass. And I thought, what a sight. What a sight for the pallbearers, the family, the witnesses present. I imagined the Thompsons standing shocked and grieving behind the casket as it was moved through the doorway and out into

the open air. Whatever comfort the preacher could lend, whatever words failed him, the door down and to the left of the pulpit would open a portal for the body, a final door to pass through, and for the living, a return to the contours of the land and the moment. I imagine all this, it seems, in error. You can leave that open. Okay, sure. Yeah. I don't know how much you know about the actual burial of Tom and the service.

The church service for Tom's funeral was held in Owen Sound because the family by then had moved into the city and they had a private family funeral and then they loaded the coffin on a wagon and brought it out here and buried it. Now whether they went in the church or not, I don't know. So a stirring image, a casket travelling out the coffin door, but not something we can say happened with any certainty. I'm realizing this tendency to speculate is reflexive when it comes to Tom Thompson. It happens before we even notice we're spinning our own tail. So this is the stone and it was natural to bury him here. This is where he grew up. This is where his

grandfather and his brother are. It was a low-key affair. Like nobody knew who Tom Thompson was. He wasn't famous. People around here who knew the Thompson family knew that they had an artist in the family, but they didn't know what his stuff looked like and 1917 men were dying all the time and being buried all the time so it was like locally just another burial the crowd didn't turn out it was not a big deal and we thought we wanted to have one to make up for that hundred years hundred years later, not too late still, and so we had a 150 people here. I think everybody from around here loves to say, oh yeah, Tom Thompson came from here.

They like him for his art because he was local. The mystery of his burial is minor compared to the mystery of his death and those mysteries will go on and on. I feel a bit like some of the mystery making. It's a way for people to try to make sense of something that may be hard to come to terms with. We can never explain things fully, so having things like that to latch onto makes it maybe more comfortable for people. I don't know. Good point. But at the same time, there's a helpful version of that and an unhelpful version of that and I've... Well, the arguing is not helpful, except that it does draw people to pay attention if they'll listen or if they'll read or if they'll think about it. But just, you know, being belligerent

about it and saying, yes, he's buried here or no, he's not buried here or yes he drowned or somebody murdered him or he committed suicide or whatever the prevailing thought was. Or even the kind of person he was or was thought to be. Yeah, sure, sure. Yeah, because he's a man of mystery. But he was a human being and I think I find some of the speculation around how he behaved sometimes doesn't keep that in mind. True, true enough.

See, I'm spinning my own tale again. That reflex, it betrays my bias to undo stories about Thompson, to loosen the bootlaces of legend and let the blood circulate. Interesting stuff on here. This is a product of people who come from wherever to see the grave, and they leave something. I've talked to a number of people over the years who have come directly from

Canoe Lake to here. They'll look at the the grave marker in Canoe Lake, they'll get in their car and they'll drive here and they will often bring something like some of these stones might be from Algonquin Park, I don't know. For a long time we got a lot of coins placed on the grave. I don't know why, but that's what people had in their pockets, I guess, when they came here. The paint brushes are a great idea. The fishing lures, kind of a nice touch. Some of the other stuff, totally unexplainable, you know, I don't know. A little more than a century after his death, Tom Thompson has become a chimera,

a creature of the imagination, a beauty we yearn for. But he was just a man. It appears he spent most of his 39 years on earth searching for purpose, courting a passion, and in consummating that passion, finding freedom. That's a mission we recognize. It's grist for the mills of TV psychologists, self-help authors, and TED Talkers. It's natural. And it's exciting to think that in the last few years of his life, Tom Thompson might have hit upon a dream. I see evidence of that in the paint he daubed and swirled and smooshed

on the little wooden panels he brought with him in his canoe to the places that captured his imagination and spoke some mysterious word to him. And it will always baffle me to think Tom died right when it seemed he'd finally discovered his own way of life. It is interesting the compulsion people have to commemorate. Yeah, well, be associated with the great man, I guess. But who was also so, I guess, seemed to have a sensitivity and varying levels of confidence in his abilities and all those things that maybe we would identify with as well. Yeah, for sure. Thompson's death has inspired myriad responses. A canonizing impulse, a genuine desire for the truth, sensationalist theorizing, and

even a gory bit of grave digging. That gory bit came in the 1950s, courtesy of William Little, a reform school superintendent who later became a judge and three of his friends. They decided to exhume Thompson's body, or what they thought was Thompson's body, one October weekend. There had been persistent rumors that the body had never been moved from its initial resting place in 1917, the Little Cemetery in the woods near Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park.

The Thompson family wanted him buried at the churchyard in Leith, Ontario near Owen Sound. The undertaker they sent to retrieve Tom's body worked alone at night and somehow appeared with a sealed casket on the train station platform the next morning. What have you got? A body. Who Whose body? Thompson. You've got Tom's body? By what authority? I've instructions from the family, the brother. I suppose they want to have a proper burial. Well don't you consult the authorities about something like that? I have all the instructions I need and I know my business as well as

you do. Probably better. We'll see about that. You just wait right here. I'm not waiting for anything. Judge Little's investigations became part of a CBC TV special in the late 60s called Was Tom Thompson Murdered? I think that Thompson met some person and was struck by a paddle or some object that

left him unconscious and left whoever wielded that paddle in the awkward position of having a body that may or may not have been dead and therefore what to do. And then he published a book, The Tom Thompson Mystery. It was a best seller and a first taste of the Thompson mystique for many. At times, William Little's version comes across like a twisted Hardy Boys tale. I explained what had been exposed

at the bottom of the pit. Gibby jumped down head first to explore the opening. He thrust his hand into the aperture and pulled out a bone which appeared to be a foot bone of a human body. At last, we found the grave and body of Tom Thompson, shouted Frank. We've really hit it, exclaimed Jack. Gibby rejoined. This is it, fellows. I was speechless. And that's the book that first got Gregory Clagas thinking about Tom Thompson as an ideal

case study in Canadian history. He looked at the secondary accounts of Thompson's life, the biographies, how others told his story, and then compared them with whatever primary sources he could find. He wrote a book of his own. It was decidedly different from Judge William Little's potboiler. My name is Dr. Gregory Klaugus. I am the author of The Many Deaths of Tom Thompson, Separating Fact from Fiction, as well as the research director for Death on a Painted Lake, The Tom Thompson Tragedy,

which is a website of documents, information, images related to Tom Thompson's life and death. Little really does lay out what seems like a pretty convincing, intriguing, provocative thesis that Thompson was likely murdered. And that was my point of entry as well. And I thought, well, there's all these sorts of strings, things not talked about, theories about a drunken fight that led to Thompson's death, that perhaps he had been married or had impregnated a woman, that he got in a fight

about the war. There were just so many factors to keep in mind that I thought this is better than any contemporary crime TV show. This would be really exciting for people to get their teeth into and to think about how to study history. There's something that seems kind of at least ethically suspect about going in kind of exhuming a body seemingly on a whim

some October night with your buddies. How did you come to terms with that ethical aspect of Thompson's death and the aftermath? Matthew Feeney To speak about William Little's and his friends' ethical decisions, I mean, that's a fascinating case. They have a long history in the park. They had been campers there as boys. They leased cottages on Canoe Lake and Algonquin Park. And so they took it upon themselves

to explore, to say, well, let's just go and see if we can discover something. And of course, they didn't know exactly where the body had been buried initially, so they sunk three holes trying to find something. And on the third hole, they discovered remains. I think that question of ethics is a really important one. And it's a troublesome one in this case. What I talk about in the Many Deaths of Tom Thompson, there's a recording by one of the other men involved in the case, Frank Brout.

And it was made before the OPP analyzed the remains and publicly stated what their findings were about the remains. At that time, Brout is saying, well, we figured that it was okay to do this without asking for approval from the park. They didn't seek out anybody's approval at all. They just went over and started digging because if there was no body there, we weren't doing anything wrong or illegal. And if there was a body there, I think the assumption was, well, we'll be forgiven for

this transgression because clearly we've changed history, if you will, or discovered some sort of public lie. But even they had their doubts about what they were doing, the sort of the legitimacy or the ethics about what they were doing. And in the end, the OPP said itPP said it doesn't look like it's Thompson. That's right. Within about a month of analyzing the remains, Dr. Noble Sharp, who was the head of the Attorney General's laboratory, which would be today the equivalent, the Center for Forensic Sciences,

Noble Sharp came up to Algonquin Park with an OPP officer. They exhumed the remains. Sharp brought them back to Toronto and had them analyzed. They were an X-ray technician analyzed them, an anthropologist, Sharp himself. And based on all of these people's findings, they announced that they were not Tom Thompson's remains. And in fact, they weren't even the remains of a European heritage male. Yes, I think they identified the remains as possibly indigenous in origin, right?

But that's not the end of that. That confusion, even about where Thompson is buried, seems to have been perpetuated to some degree. Would you say that's correct? Absolutely. I think one of the things that I suggest in the many deaths of Tom Thompson is the, I'll call them the conspiracy theories, the murder theory, the suicide theory. Those have come to actually displace what was believed and announced in 1917 and held sway for decades after that. The idea that Thompson was murdered or committed suicide has come to be, I would

say the party line, but the dominant understanding, the one that most people who know about the case have read. Those are the arguments that are most frequently made, that somehow anthropologists and X-ray technicians and doctors and the people who examine the corpse all got it wrong. BELL RINGS BELL RINGS In 2018, Judge William Little's son John Little published his own book, Who Killed Tom Thompson?

The Truth About the Murder of One of the 20th Century's Most Famous Artists. It's based on a decade of research. In the book, John Little reminisces about his father's obsession and doggedly pursues the case himself. He enlists two retired police detectives to look at the evidence, and the murder plot deepens. Esteemed Canadian author and journalist Roy McGregor wrote about John Little's book in the Globe and Mail when it came out. McGregor is widely regarded as an authority on Tom Thompson and has written two books about him, the compelling 1980 novel called Shorelines, also known as Canoe Lake, and the non-fiction bestseller Northern Light, The Enduring Mystery of Tom Thompson and the Woman Who Loved Him,

The Enduring Mystery of Tom Thompson and the Woman Who Loved Him, published in 2010. In both books, McGregor explores the possibility that Tom Thompson fathered a child, was being pressured to marry, got in a drunken argument with one or two canoe lake denizens, nailed his head on a fire grate, and was disposed of. Roy McGregor spoke to CBC radio in 2010. I believe absolutely and categorically we now know where he lies. He lies where he should lie in a grave at Canoe Lake, an unmarked grave. Very, very few people know exactly where it is. So he's up there, he's well hidden, he's left alone and it's where he would want to be. The other mystery, exactly how it happened, I go into tremendous detail in the book of what I think happened, but we don't know for sure what happened. The Mystery of the Book of MacGregor

Gregory Clagas has examined MacGregor's work. It's hard for me to be able to see if he makes a claim about this or that. Is this something evidence-based or is this projection? And if it's not clearly pointed to or identified, it makes things very difficult. And I think what has happened then with a lot of those stories about Thompson's life and death is it has moved our measure, our understanding of who this person was into really the realm of how people have speculated who he was and how he was in the world instead of what we actually know about him. If this is how we approach him as a human being, we then approach his work through

that lens. But if those stories are all myths, if those stories are groundless speculation, projecting them onto his work is misleading us, is leading us down a garden path that can't be fruitful or seems to be fruitful when it's just leading us further and further away from the truth. There's the rub. The truth. Unless and until some missing link is unearthed, the truth is that we don't know. We simply don't know just how Tom Thompson died or why. We don't really even know if he was a monastic vessel for nature or a drunken albeit virile bum or both. Nearly any familiar detail of the Thompson story can be peeled apart and injected with doubt.

So then I come back to the paintings, right? These are as direct as possible communication with the person. And he, you know, the very nature of visual art is he doesn't have to explain himself. He doesn't have to articulate a philosophy. He simply responds to a scene and leaves his response for us to see.

["The Last Supper"] What do you say to people who might say the myth is more valuable in a way? Mythology has its place. Mythology of course has value. But myth can also direct us down unfruitful paths or influence our understanding of the past in ways that misrepresents the past. We can say today, oh, he's myth, which dismisses the very fact that he existed as a human being. The family member, the Thompson family members, for a hundred years have said, we do not want the remains exhumed to confirm where he is buried or how he died, because he's our family member and we laid him to rest and we want him to rest in peace. To talk about this guy as fist fighting alcoholic or someone who was being pressured to marry a woman

who didn't have the guts to own up and say no or someone who? Impregnated a woman and didn't want to own up to being a father Sounds that human being short Writers or authors who have written through that trope of myth and storytelling have had some concerns about my work. And I think of one of the phrases that came to mind, you know, they said, a stick in the mud, that I've taken a lot of the fun out of the storytelling about Thompson's death. If you wanted to sit around a campfire and speculate about how Tom Thompson died, it's easier to do if you don't know the facts, like the idea of Thompson being in a fight

the night before he died. If as a reader you recognize that came along 50, 60 years after the fact, it's pretty doubtful, that removes it from the storytelling allure. I've really tried to spread this information out there. So whether it be doing public talks or on social media and the like. And I guess I can be seen as pretty dogmatic about that, which isn't always well received. Music Historian Gregory Cloggis is the author of The Many Deaths of Tom Thompson.

You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio across Canada, on SiriusXM across North America, and anywhere in the world via podcast. I'm Sarah Trelevin and for over a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy.

And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now. I'm Nala Ayad, and this is part one of Sean Foley's documentary, Tom Thompson, 100 Years From Now. A lot of liberties have been taken with the life

and mysterious death of Tom Thompson, one of Canada's greatest visual artists. Mystery is a pop culture fixation, but mystery can have a sacred role too, as a spiritual resource. We continue with Sean Foley's documentary on Tom Thompson. Okay, my favorite Tom Thompson image is called Northern River. And I love this particular painting. I could sit or stand in front of it

and just look at it and look at it and look at it. You are standing on the shore. You're encouraged to enter into what looks like the bay or in slightly small inlet of a river because it opens out into the distance and it can go to the left, to the viewer's left or right. And yet it's screened. You can't quite see everything you might enter into and those trees look, they're like a

warning particularly the one that runs at a diagonal across the viewer's immediate line of entry into the painting. So you know, it's as if that painting is saying, at least to me, okay, you can get into the water here, but it's not simple. It's not easy to get into the water there. And you'll have to discover things, and you'll have to be willing to discover things. And some of those things you discover might not be, you know, ideal or pretty. It's not a pretty painting, but it's a very inviting painting to my eye. That's Cheryl Grace, Professor Emerita at the University of British Columbia. She's

the author of Inventing Tom Thompson. It's an extensive study of various biographies and fictions about the man who painted Northern River and The Jack Pine and the West Wind as well as hundreds of beautiful oil sketches on small boards in a very short period of time There seem to be elements about Thompson about his work and about his life There seem to be elements about Thompson, about his work and about his life that have a particular appeal that very, very few other Canadian artists or other artists, period, have and therefore other people start to invest themselves in what they perceive to be Tom Thompson, his work or his life. And so they invest a lot of their own emotion and time and energy, research, writing, careers.

I mean, when you're writing a biography of somebody else, to some degree, it's your version of that person because you can never find that person. And it's something in me says you shouldn't try or you should never claim that you found that person. Hopefully, important things about that person will always escape a biographer. And even the most nosy biographer will hopefully not be able to grasp that something. That's my view anyway, that the minute we start writing about somebody or performing something about somebody else's life, we are already creating a fiction, a story about that person which matters to us.

And if the person's dead, the person doesn't give a damn, do they? And even if they're alive, they probably just roll their eyes. I imagine Tom Thompson's eyes rolling and rolling. That's actually kind of grim. There's just enough material on the record about Thompson's life to put a thread through a bunch of pieces, but just enough space between those pieces to fill with all manner of speculation or invention. But invention can give us valuable insight.

Some imaginative treatments of Tom Thompson are now rather obscure, especially compared to the best-selling versions of the story, but they're still valuable in the way that they point to the mystery and beauty of Thompson's life and work. When you look at some of the inventions that we have and that we continue to have, certain painters, filmmakers, poets, novelists, perhaps in a different way, haven't invented. They've had to invent through what matters to them. And I think in this instance, if we can just think of Robert Croach's meditation on Tom

Thompson, he's aware of the story, he's aware of the nasty death, but what does he latch onto, what matters to him, inimically, is his art. Tom Thompson, I love you. Therefore I apologize for what I must say. But I must say, damn your jackpines, they're beautiful. I love your bent trees and I love your ice and spring, candled into its green rot. And I love the way you drowned, all alone, with your canoe, and are not even knowing the time of day.

And the grave mystery of your genius interrupted is our story. It's a way of his saying, I think, gee, I wish I could do that in words. You've done it, damn you. It's something I have to aim for. And then on the other hand, look what it cost you, Charlie. You had to dive down into the hell that artists dive into and you didn't make it back up.

In many ways, I think Bob dealt with that in everything he wrote. In many ways, I think Bob dealt with that in everything he wrote. That diving down into dangerous waters and struggling to make it back to the surface so that you could tell the story or write the poem. About your pine trees, this evening one of them moved across my wall, daring the light, daring the bright and lovers leap across the impassable gap. The uncertain principle of time and space, straight down he dove, and he would seize unearthly shades, and he would seize the drowned land, the picture from the pool, the pool's picture, and the gods cried, Tom, Tom, you asshole, let go! And you had found their secret, and would not ever let go, they cry.

Robert Croach's Meditation on Tom Thompson from his 1975 collection, The Stone Hammer Poems. It's a meditation on the ineffable, Tom's artistic skill, on what we can't know and can't say about his life and death. It's myth-making, but in a way that evokes the ancient and mystical, the eternal. There's something else that emerges from Robert Croch's poem, the specter of a man coming to grips with his limitations. Thompson has often been drawn as uber masculine, the man of the wilds with a testosterone-fueled

approach to painting. But he encountered something bigger and more powerful than himself in Algonquin Park. Whether it was the inherent majesty and danger of nature, or the drives of the lumber industry. There's another force that undermines the andro-centric aspect of Tom Thompson's life and death, and that force is the late Canadian artist Joyce Whelan. Well... I don't know how long he's been standing there.

Um... I didn't want to interrupt you. So polite? Well, um... I wanted to hear it through. The Far Shore, from 1976, is Joyce Whelan's most conventional film. It was a romance produced for theatrical release. It didn't really catch on. In the 40 plus years since, though, it's proven to be a valuable document.

But Tom Thompson is not the protagonist of the far shore. The film's main character is a Quebecois woman named Eulalie. Her marriage to Ross, a wealthy Toronto engineer, is devoid of understanding and of passion. He's autocratic, waspy. He never dares to be sincere. So when Eulalie meets a painter named Tom MacLeod, a very thinly veiled Tom Thompson character, everything changes. Thank you. Thank you.

In the sensitive, quiet, non-conformist Tom MacLeod, Yulali finds a soulmate and an escape from the stifling trappings of upper-crust Toronto society in the early 20th century. Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Yulali, Y Eventually, she and Tom find themselves alone on a northern lake. Cheryl Grace examines Joyce Wheelan's The Far Shore in her book, Inventing Tom Thompson. Tom and Eulalie are making love in the water and the camera does not sit over Tom's shoulder, or for that matter, over Yulily's shoulder. I think we go back and forth and I think the camera comes in long shot and then comes right in close with the couple sideways. So that-

Right level with the water. Yeah, that's right. Right level with the surface of the water, and it's the movement of the water that tells you what they're doing, and they are looking at each other. And so the tendency of the camera in the hands of a male director is to shoot the scene looking at the woman as the object of desire and objectifying her in that way. So dozens and dozens and dozens of films with sex scenes in them tend to work that way.

And this one doesn't. Well, and Yulali also pretty much dictates the terms of the encounter. She does. She sort of first goes in the tent and indicates that he would be welcome in there. And then all of a sudden, he gets thrown out of the tent and she goes out into the water.

["The Star-Spangled Banner"] It's a beautiful scene, but it's a fugitive love. At that very moment, Ross and his Rosedale crony, Clooney, are scouring the shoreline in their canoe. The contrast between these men and Tom is stark. We'll find them. You don't know this country. Well, trust me, once I get the lay of the land. The lay of the land?

You bloody fool! Look at it! That's the lay of the land! Over there, and over there, and over there! They're here somewhere. Gotta be. We'll find them. Oh, for God's sake, shut up you bloody bloody fool Ross never say that again they are misogynist I mean they don't they don't like a

woman as an individual they simply want her as a trophy and they want her to shut up and do what they say and just sit there and be quiet so that's a very deep-seated not only hatred of women, but of course also then hatred of that symbolic woman nature because they're going to mine it for what they can get. They're almost caricatures, those two men of Toronto businessmen or Rosedale businessmen, uneducated, crass, materialistic, etc., etc., whereas Tom is, if you like, a true man as

far as Willand is concerned. And interestingly enough, your masculinist, misogynist, Rosedale creeps need this guy. They need his help in order to find the mother load of silver that they're after. So, you know, Weeland manages to paint a pretty negative picture of them while at the same time having to kill off her heroes because the story in the story, Thompson dies, right? And in the story he could well have been murdered. She chooses murder. The troubling aspect is that Eulalie seems to die as well. We don't really know what happens to her. We just see her hat floating on the surface of the water and something under the water. So you can speculate endlessly on what those images at the end of the film might signify. But the point is, Weyland had

to have him die, right? I just thought it would be nice if they had canoed the other way. I know. Well, I know. They just kind of somehow kept going. I just thought it would be nice if they had canoed the other way. I know, well I know. They just kind of, somehow kept going. Yes I know, off into the sunset. That would have been an American ending. We have to have a Canadian ending, and the Canadian ending, the natural, nature wins,

as Outwood has told us, right? She wins. This is true, and a consummation was able to occur, which was nice. To recrushé tous ses amours. Tom MacLeod, Joyce Whelan's invention of Tom Thompson, is not domineering. There's strength and skill, courage, but no bloodlust. He's a quiet man who's comfortable on his own, and he can dance a jig when the fiddle strikes up. You can trust him. In 1977, a year after The Far Shore was released, the late visual artist Harold Town shared his thoughts on Thompson's art and method in a best-selling coffee table book with David Silcox called The Silence and the Storm.

It was just reissued for the centenary of Tom Thompson's death. Harold Towne's riffs on Thompson are fascinating. They conjure the image of an ornery artist in a pitched battle, wielding his brush as if it were his manhood itself. The silence in the storm, in all its sumptuous glory, remains a go-to for Thomson fans. But the far shore gives us a Thomson who is all heart. Loving him is well worth the risk. And the torch that Joyce Whelan carried for him

still imparts a warm glow. In 2017, the McMichael Canadian Collection brought Wheeland and Thompson face-to-face on its gallery walls and in a beautiful and provocative book. The myths and tales we value most, the ones we put first, end up being the ones that purport to tell the story to the rest of the world, to every neophyte who comes under the spell of Tom Thompson. While it may require more effort, it's good to keep the true breadth and depth of the Tom Thompson mythos in mind, and to examine it with a discerning heart.

It's a mythos that drives auction prices into the stratosphere, which really means the paintings are priceless. And it's a mythos that reaches clear across oceans. My name is Ian Dejardin, pronounced in Scottish manner. I'm the executive director of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. And I'm British. Yes, indeed. We heard.

Yeah, that's great though. That's great. If you wouldn't mind just describing to me how you came to Tom Thompson's work. Well, it happened a long time ago actually, back in the 1980s. I was working in the Royal Academy in those days in London and I was based in the library and I just came across a book as simple as that. I was intrigued because it was Thompson's work particularly, but Group of Seven too, was so immediate and although it was using techniques that were

recognisably say post-impressionist, you know bright colours, dabs of paint, very painterly, it nonetheless didn't look like any landscape I'd ever seen. And so this was the assumption that this was Canada, this was somehow different. It could not be Britain, it could not be Russia, it could not be Norway. This is what Canada looked like. And of course that's an intriguing idea to follow through. I have, I've seen what Lauren Harris and Tom Thompson were painting. I went to Bing Inlet, which Tom Thompson painted. You know, and what you come out of it is thinking, well, it doesn't look like a Tom Thompson painting. He translated it into his own language. And yet I can see, as I say, I've talked to

many, many Canadians who say, you know, you must look at those landscapes, that they look exactly like that. They don't. We've learned to look at them in that way. we project onto the landscapes. That's evidence of success. My goodness, if you're an artist who can actually change the way you look at things, there are very few that have done that. Ian Desjardins has a particular gift for expressing just why we've struggled to make peace with Thompson's death.

Maybe it's his transatlantic point of view, which affords him a wide angle look at the story. The reality of it all seems to have struck him after screening a Tom Thompson film at his previous post, the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London a few years ago. I had to get up and thank the producers, and I'm afraid I absolutely blobbed. It was very embarrassing, and it was that dratted canoe floating upside down. It was the last image in the film.

And I'm sorry, just, you know, even now, I haven't got to grips with it at all. And I don't think Canada has really. And I think that's why people, why there is such an industry of kind of looking at, trying to find reasons for it. There is no reason for it. It doesn't really matter.

I mean, he paddled out on July the 8th and didn't come back and then nothing can bring him back. But even now, I think Canada's still struggling to come to terms with that because, not only because he was so brilliant, but also there's something about his image which feeds into that so well. I mean, that man looked good in a toque. I'm just saying. You know I've never seen a photo of Tom Thompson, which didn't look like it'd been posed by the young Gary Cooper. He just seems to have, his life seems to have been photographed in an almost filmic way. They look like stills from a film. You know he was just very photogenic, he's very silent, you don't have his voice ever, he wasn't recorded, so you have a silent, beautiful, brilliant genius, and you can never

get closer to him than that. The more I allow this unknowing sort of void to be, the more I seem to be getting from the paintings. Is there something unique about a painting that can do that to a person? Well, I think it's partly a response to a brilliant technician at work, which is immediate. So when something is as immediate as that, you feel you're close to the artist. But I think when you also have all of these kind of myths surrounding and growing and new books being written every year, you have this kind of richness,

a sort of swirling cloud of thought, a thought world surrounding a person who is absolutely silent and gone, and yet the work still speaks. So it's a very rich mixture and I think the two feed on each other, you know, so that you no longer just look with eyes, you're looking with a whole kind of mindset at him, and that's very special to him. It occurs to me all the time, standing in front of a little sketch or even a finished painting by Tom Thompson, you feel you're behind the eyes.

So there is that personal identification with him too. And I think that's again, part of this drive to create a personality, to create something out of very little that we have. I've never lived anywhere but Ontario. I'm steeped in the wind, the sky, the color, and the legend of Tom Thompson. And I still feel a restlessness deep in my bones. I'm reminded of a moment from my conversation with Cheryl Grace. The moment where I ask the unanswerable question I can't help but repeat to everyone I seek

out. Help but repeat to everyone I seek out." There seems to be a discomfort or dissatisfaction in us simply not knowing certain things about Tom Thompson. And I wonder, why can't we just live with that? Why can't we say… Oh, because we're human beings. Yeah. But is there a cost to not being able to just say, okay, it's a mystery, that we can still

get people coming out to see the plaque on the cairn and visit the McMichael and have the mystery draw them in, but we can't seem to make peace with not knowing. You know, now more than ever, more than we did maybe 50 years ago even. Well, I wasn't kidding when I sort of blurted out its human nature. Look what we did have done, continue to do, with Franklin. It's the same human desire for answers and the same, I would say, fundamental human fear of the unknown. Northrop Frye nailed it on the head when he called it our garrison mentality,

on the head when he called it our garrison mentality, our need to sort of hold ourselves safe both psychologically and physically in a walled-in environment. And what we're walling out is all those forces of nature that we can't control. And that has mythic and mythologizing power. And ironically, I don't sense any of that in Thompson's painting. I mean, even in something like Northern River, which does convey a certain foreboding, when you actually experience the work, what you receive is not something, in my estimation, that comes from a person who's fearful in that situation. You know, I think that's a beautiful irony, isn't it? And certainly if I go to the McMichael,

which I do every chance I get, it's not fear that I feel, it's a sense of beauty, of harmony, of yes, of a certain sense of exhilaration. Everybody's going to have a different response. It's so subjective, so personal, but yeah, it's ironic that he, Thompson, the man, you know, is mythologized over and over again in this way when his actual paintings seem to be telling a different story but then they can't, we can't know what there's that story is because he never talked about it. He, and then he's

gone. So we don't know what he thought he was doing in those paintings but for me I think he, I think he was painting what he saw and things that he loved, that he appreciated, that he enjoyed. You've been listening to the first episode of our two-part series, Tom Thompson, 100 Years From Now, produced by Sean Foley. In episode two, Sean turns from the death of Tom Thompson to his life and to ours. Special thanks to Anne Penman in Vancouver, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, and to the Friends of Leith Church. Music by the Algonquin Ensemble from their 2017 album, Sonic Palette.

Technical production by Danielle Duval and Arunde Williams. Web production by Liz Naj and Lisa Ayuso. The executive producer is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.