page_title: Artistic development of Tom Thomson
section_title: Creative peak (1916–17)
hierarchical_section_title: Artistic development of Tom Thomson / Developments / Painting career / Creative peak (1916–17)
context_page_description: Tom Thomson was a Canadian painter from the beginning of the 20th century. Beginning from humble roots, his development as a career painter was meteoric, only pursuing it seriously in the final years of his life. He became one of the foremost figures in Canadian art, leaving behind around 400 small oil sketches and around fifty larger works on canvas.
  Beginning his career in 1902 as a graphic designer, he only began to paint seriously in 1912 at the age of 35. His skills developed as he ventured through Algonquin Park, sketching scenes that interested him. His creative peak came from 1914 until his untimely death in 1917. His art style progressed from sombre, grey scenes into brilliantly coloured exposés, characterized by rapid and thickly applied brushstrokes. His later works presage the advances seen by the Abstract Expressionist movement.
context_section_description: In 1916, Thomson left for Algonquin Park earlier than any previous year, evidenced by the large number of snow studies he produced at this time. He produced many sketches which varied in composition, though they all had vivid colour and were applied thickly. Over the following winter, encouragement from Harris, MacDonald and MacCallum saw Thomson move into the most productive portion of his career, writing in a letter that he "got quite a lot done." It was during this time that he produced many of what became his most famous works, including The Jack Pine and The West Wind.
  In the last two years of his life especially, Thomson was particularly skilled in observing atmospheric phenomena, such as temperature, humidity, wind and light. Work from this period—such as The Rapids—demonstrate his adeptness at controlling colour and are painted with a particular "crispness and freshness." Other paintings—such as Path Behind Mowat Lodge and Tea Lake Dam—illustrate his bold and expressive brushstrokes. The scale of Thomson's later canvases foreshadow the Algoma canvases the members of the Group of Seven painted after the war. Art historians David Silcox and Harold Town have described this period of Thomson's art as moving in the direction of abstraction.
caption: Tea Lake Dam, Summer 1917. McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg
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