Tom Thomson (1877–1917), Petawawa Gorges, 1916, oil on wood panel, 21.4 × 26.5 cm, Purchased with funds donated by Major F.A. Tilston, V.C., McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid

Canadian art transformed in the early 20th century from a European-focused practice where most of the country’s successful artists trained and often made their careers in Paris, to one steeped in Canadian nationalisms, with landscape painting taking centre-stage until the rise of Abstraction in the 1950s. Then, as now, “Canada” was defined differently in every region, from East to West, but certainly the most dominant nationalism was that of the Group of Seven, whose vision of the wild Canadian landscape shaped what Canadians were presented as “Modern” art for generations.

But one painter did more to cement Canada’s wilderness as the default subject of Canadian painting than any other. Tom Thomson, though he never achieved wide public acclaim in his short lifetime, created hundreds of oil sketches on his trips to Georgian Bay and Algonquin Park between 1913 and 1917. Intended by the artist as precursors to larger, more finished, paintings, it is the sketches that have continued to fire the imagination of the public in the ten decades since his untimely death. His oil sketches, in their vitality, originality and freshness, brought something startlingly new to Canadian art. Indeed, Ian Dejardin, co-curator with Sarah Milroy, of the monumental exhibition Tom Thomson: North Star, argues that Thomson’s oil sketches are Canada’s preeminent contribution to international Modernism. Quite simply, Thomson stands as one of the defining figures of art in the 20th century, not just for Canada, but for the world.

Tom Thomson: North Star, organized and circulated by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, includes over a hundred of Thomson’s oil sketches, focusing on his remarkable four-year period of productivity from 1914-17. It is a legacy unmatched in Canadian art, and it begs the question of what might have been.