A.Y. Jackson: A Love for the Land

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

Wayne Larsen sets the opening scene as if it were a painting by his
subject, A.Y. Jackson. It is early April, but the north shore of the St.
Lawrence River is still frozen solid and a horse is pulling a red sleigh
past an old house, its roof covered in snow. Young Alex Jackson (b.
1882) is 12. His father has suffered a ruinous business failure, and the
boy is looking for work, which he finds at the British Engraving
Company. He has soon earned enough to enroll in evening art classes
taught by William Brymmer, where Alex learns to mix colours and prepare
a canvas. Eagerly, he tells his mother “I’m going to be an
artist!”

By 1907, Alex is studying in Paris at the Academie Julian, and telling
fellow students that modern art is unknown in Canada. His instructor
favours still life, and dislikes the new Impressionist painters, but
Jackson finds painters to his taste in the Montmartre area of Paris and,
later, in Italy and other parts of France. He begins to live with fellow
painters as an itinerant artist.

By 1913, Alex is back in Canada, and learns from J.E.H. MacDonald that
Torontonian Lawren Harris wants to buy “The Edge of the Maple Wood,”
painted in Quebec in 1910, for $200. This moody springtime
canvas—Jackson’s first sale—which caught the attention of Toronto
artists, would eventually lead to the formation of the Group of Seven
and to a revolution in Canadian art. Jackson moves to Toronto and joins
the Arts and Letters Club, a focus for painters, musicians, writers, and
patrons of the arts. Members meet in a cavernous dining room reached
through a muddy alley that reminds Jackson of a gang’s secret hideout.
In Harris and his friends, Jackson finds kindred spirits.

Jackson, still unable to support himself without resorting to
commercial work, then meets Dr. James MacCallum, a great supporter of
Canadian artists who has a cottage on Georgian Bay. MacCallum offers to
pay Jackson’s expenses for one year: “All you’ll have to do is
paint.” Jackson settles into the Studio Building in Toronto and
develops sketches he made in Georgian Bay into large canvases,
remembering the post-Impressionist work he saw in Europe and the
brilliant colours of Vincent van Gogh.

In a relatively small book, Larsen covers a surprising amount of
territory. The biography is rich in detail, yet the narrative line
remains strong and unwinds like an adventure tale. His detailed
chronology in two columns is divided into “Jackson and His Times”
and “Canada and the World,” which serve to link the painter’s work
both to the larger contemporary art scene and to world events—a novel
and useful device. A.Y. Jackson: A Love for the Land is a fresh and
stimulating portrait of one of Canada’s great painters. Highly
recommended.