The Jack Pine - Description

Description

The painting depicts a jack pine as a decorative and abstracted pattern, its shapes boldly simplified against the sunset. This stylization demonstrates Thomson's command of decorative effects, developed during his years as a graphic designer, and with the strong colour and value contrasts, creates the picture's symbolic resonance. The pine, its branches bowed and placed to the right of centre, extends nearly the full length of the canvas, and is cropped at the top. It rises from a rocky foreground; the hardy jack pine often takes root on shores hostile to other trees, its sparsely leaved branches forming eccentric shapes. It is silhouetted against water and sky, with the canvas bisected by the far shore.

The final canvas differs markedly from Thomson's spring 1916 sketch. He made the tree appear larger by lowering the hills on the far side of the lake. The weather had been stormy when Thomson made the sketch and the dark, rolling clouds were echoed in the heavy, swirling brushwork of the sky and the slate grey lake. In the final painting, Thomson has swapped the storm clouds for a clear twilight sky. The sky and lake are now highly stylized, painted in long horizontal brushstrokes that show, along with its nearly square format, the influence of Thomson's colleague Lawren Harris.

Thomson began with a vermilion red undertone, which he likely chose to avoid mixing the complementary colours red and green. The red was allowed to show through in parts of the tree, foreground landscape, and hills, making the colour " to vibrate".

Yet the focal point of the painting is not in the foreground, but at the distant shore—the patch of snow just below the centre of the canvas. Dennis Reid, who wrote a booklet on the painting for the National Gallery, points out an almost circular shape made by the foreground elements that encompass the focal point. The circle is formed from the large curving branches of the tree, the sloping left foreground, and the smaller tree at right. Reid writes that this near-circle "exists in space more like a ball, and as we peer through that ball to the opposite shore, for an instant we're inside our eye."

Thomson's background in design lent his composition an art-nouveau sensibility. One reviewer notes the effect in it and The West Wind: " two best-known canvases... are essentially Art Nouveau designs in the flat, the principal motif in each case being a tree drawn in great sinuous curves... Such pictures, are, however, saved from complete stylization by the use of uncompromisingly native subject-matter and of Canadian colours, the glowing colours of autumn."

According to A. Y. Jackson, Thomson was dissatisfied with the canvas, particularly the background and sky.