Included in exhibitions for over a century and once part of the collection of the artist’s family for over fifty years, Tom Thomson’s Ragged Oaks makes its auction debut with Cowley Abbott this spring season. Canadian art historian and Tom Thomson scholar, Joan Murray, notes that 1916’s Ragged Oaks is a magical and vigorous quintessential Thomson painting in which balance is the key to beauty, from the oaks off-centre to the foliage and bush, to the colours used throughout.
In the Cowley Abbott spring catalogue, Murray describes the power of the composition where the two oak tree trunks are depicted in a location of spectacular beauty. The leaves tumbled on the ground and the brilliant orange foliage and bush to one side balanced by bright leaves on the other reveal a scene of sparkling vitality, with all the liveliness Thomson wished to record and which appear in his best works. From the background tapestry of distant trees to the scattered logs of the foreground, the painting practically hums with energy, but the energy is matched with the harmony of Thomson’s excited palette.
Tom Thomson Ragged Oaks, 1916
Murray describes Ragged Oaks as one of Thomson’s best sketches of 1916, the artist’s “golden year”, where he recorded varied configurations of the trees he countered; from Ragged Oaks through to those we see in the sketches for two of Thomson’s most well-known works, The Jack Pine and The West Wind.
The year is inscribed on the reverse of the panel, as well as, “Not For Sale”. Not surprising, given the quality and vivaciousness of Ragged Oaks. The painting was once owned by Fraser Thomson, Tom’s youngest brother. Fraser described the composition to a biographer in 1930: “A Cobalt blue sky with two ragged oak trees a little off centre with two patches of foliage in glowing color with foreground in green Brown purple manner with Blue + yellow, a real painting”.
The private collectors acquired the artwork from the Fraser Thomson’s family in 1971 and it was a treasured gem within their museum-quality collection. Ragged Oaks is featured in Cowley Abbott’s Auction of Artwork from an Important Private Collection on June 8th.
Rob Cowley Chats with Mona Mahmoud at CTV Morning Live Vancouver about the Upcoming Spring Auction Season at Cowley Abbott. They discuss the ten commandments of valuing artwork, along with artworks by Emily Carr, Lawren Harris, Tom Thomson and Andy Warhol, each being offered in the Cowley Abbott Spring Live Auction on June 8th, 2023.
William Kurelek was a skilled storyteller, whose work provides his insight related to a wide variety of personal subjects which often focused upon his life, heritage, and religion. Kurelek’s most celebrated compositions continue to be those which reflect his upbringing and memories of life on the farm. The painter’s work explored both the tender and the gruelling aspects of daily life on the Prairies, the scenes populating the 1964 Isaacs Gallery exhibition An Immigrant Farms in Canada, the first of several such shows which Kurelek would present.
William Kurelek “A Bolt Like That”
This painting, A Bolt Like That, painted in 1965, was not featured in these exhibitions, however it does appear in William Pettigrew’s 1967 National Film Board documentary, Kurelek. The captivating beauty of Kurelek’s expansive prairie landscape led the owner to purchase the painting from Toronto’s Isaacs Gallery soon after it was painted, A Bolt Like That remaining in their collection for close to sixty years, soon to make its auction debut with Cowley Abbott during the June 8th Live Auction of Important Canadian & International Artwork.
Rob Cowley & Lydia Abbott visit CTV Morning Live Winnipeg’s Rachel Lagacé to discuss the Art Market and the Cowley Abbott Spring Live Auction of Important Canadian Art on June 8th, 2023. Artworks by Lawren Harris, Tom Thomson, David Bowie and Andy Warhol are discussed during the segment.
The outbreak of war in 1914 proved devastating to Toronto’s graphic art industry where most of the future members of the future Group of Seven earned their livings. In the fall of 1916 Arthur Lismer left for Halifax to teach at the Victoria School of Art. The Halifax period proved to be productive, but he longed to return to Toronto and in fall 1919 he was appointed vice-principal of the Ontario College of Art. Teaching and administration proved to be demanding, leaving little time to paint. All of his works included in the first exhibition of the Group of Seven from 7 to 27 May 1920 had been previously exhibited.
However, even before the Group show had closed, Lismer, Lawren Harris and A.Y. Jackson left Toronto to paint around Mongoose Lake in Algoma with Dr. MacCallum. MacCallum then invited Lismer and Fred Varley to spend time at his cottage on Go Home Bay in Georgian Bay. Lismer had previously painted there in the fall of 1913 and spring 1915. On the latter occasion he painted the sketch for “A Westerly Gale, Georgian Bay” (sketch and canvas in the National Gallery of Canada, acc. nos. 4743 and 1368), a storm blown pine on a high foreground against open water and rocky islands, the precursor of “A September Gale”. Varley exhibited Georgian Bay canvases in the spring of 1917 resultant from a visit the previous year, and Maria Tippett has argued that his famous canvas, “Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay” (sketch and canvas in National Gallery of Canada, acc. nos. 4582 and 1814), resulted from this 1916 trip to the Bay. However, it is more likely that Lismer and Varley painted at Go Home Bay in the summer of 1920 and painted their respective canvases, “September Gale” and “Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay”, during the winter of 1920-1921. Both canvases are tributes to Tom Thomson’s “West Wind” (Art Gallery of Ontario, acc. no. 784) and were included in the Group of Seven exhibition in May 1921.
“A September Gale” was possibly the most ambitious painting Lismer had painted to date and was preceded by two oil sketches and one small canvas. Barry Lord has given the most complete discussion of the development of the final painting though the existence of the oil sketch being offered here was not known when he wrote in 1967.
Lord identified the oil sketch, dated 1920, now in the Vancouver Art Gallery, as the first study of the theme. The wind blown pine is rudimentarily sketched in and the wind blown clouds and sky dominate the composition. In the small canvas in the National Gallery, also dated 1920, the somewhat spindly tree takes centre stage, breaking the picture plane at the top, rising from behind the rocks rather than in the midst of them, reeds and a root are detailed lower right, and, as Lord writes, “Space is found for the two subsidiary tree forms to the left, although they remain quite flabby and inconclusive.”
In the oil sketch being presented here, the tree is rooted in the rocks, surrounded by broadly sketched foliage, compressed between the upper and lower edges of the panel and the rocks lower left, energizing the landscape. The foreground root has been eliminated, the light is more luminous and the channel between the islands enlarged. The lessons learned in this superb sketch will be incorporated in the final canvas of 1921 in which the tree retains the simplified design and the compression of the sketch. The space is opened at the left further enlarging the “flabby” subsidiary trees, and the islands at the right become more distant. In enlarging the sketch forms have become more sculptural, as seen in the clouds and waves, in the rocks lower left and in the reeds that now bend in the wind.
Arthur Lismer has written most evocatively of this painting. “[A]mong the outer islands and shoals stretching far out into the main channel … the rocky islands are more broken and rugged, and the trees take on forms and shapes that result from the constant buffeting of storm and ice. The little pines have taken tenacious hold in clefts and crannies of the broken rock wherever they could send down a clinging root into the rare pockets of soil….’September Gale’… is essentially a picture of movement; everything in it is alive with related action or rhythm … it is like a nature symphony with clashing chords and deep undertones of menace – orchestration with many instruments striving to achieve a powerful expression.”
We extend our thanks to Charles Hill, Canadian art historian, former Curator of Canadian Art at the National Gallery of Canada and author of “The Group of Seven‒Art for a Nation”, for his assistance in researching this artwork and for contributing the preceding essay.
