Interpretation
Tom Thomson had little to say about The Jack Pine or his painting in general. The Jack Pine, a stylized landscape with few elements – painted by a man who died the year he painted it, a man who would become an icon in his country — has encouraged various readings of Thomson's artistic motivations. Dennis Reid observes the limitations of received views of such popular artworks: "The Jack Pine, is, after all, like all successful works of art a living thing that grows or declines, unfolds or closes up, according to the nature and the quality of the attention it receives. In that sense, there are as many meanings as there are viewers."
Blodwen Davies was the first biographer of Thomson, and a Theosophist. Emphasizing the "spirit" of the painting, she wrote in 1935, "the spirit of the canvas leaps out to meet the spectator in a way no reproduction can fully convey. There is no fumbling, no hesitancy here... brush was sure. Heavily laden with paint it swept over the canvas in broad, exultant strokes in which the very spirit of Tom Thomson still speaks aloud." Another Theosophist, Fred Housser, described the painting in 1926 as "a devotional meditative study. A single tree stands spreading the tracery of its limbs and branches like the pulsating veins of Mother Nature... could believe that this tree was to the nature-worshipper Thomson what the symbol of the cross was to a mediaeval mystic."
Thomson was an important influence on the Group of Seven, with members such as Lawren Harris advocating his work. In a review of the Art Gallery of Toronto's Inaugural Exhibition of 1926, Harris dismissed much of the American art shown there, writing that most of it "represented the average of the academies... no one of these canvasses approaches Thomson's The West Wind or Jack Pine in devotion and greatness of spirit." Those two paintings, he wrote, "contain the lasting qualities of the best old masters. The devotional mood of The Jack Pine is the same as in Giovanni Bellini's Madonna and Child".
Arthur Lismer, also part of the Group of Seven, commented on Thomson's painting. Writing in 1930, he stated that The Jack Pine was a work of "significant form... The artist thinks of big things first – and the design in this picture is the biggest thing in it. It is like a symphony of music. All the instruments are playing a part, and none is out of harmony with the whole... the theme of a painting is a movement in space. The upright lines of the tree trunk give it serenity; the horizontal lines of the shore supplement this and give it strength; the rounded masses of the hills repeat the circular rhythm of the foliage masses, giving movement and powerful rhythm to the whole composition."
Peter Mellen, author of The Group of Seven (1970), wrote of the work's "perfect serenity. It is evening – the sky and lake are perfectly calm and are painted in broad, flat horizontal strokes. Even the soft mauves, pinks, and greens contribute to this effect. Countering the strong horizontals are the drooping red tendrils of the bare pine branches, the vertical lines of the trees, and the curves of the hills... achieves pure poetry in painting, by combining an intuitive feeling for nature with an almost classical control of technique." A year later, Jean Boggs proposed that Thomson was influenced by the European Symbolists: "against the dying light and sky the scraggly forms of The Jack Pine are most dramatic, its branches struggling to life but dominated by dark-green, tattered, bat-like forms as if the tree were a symbol – beautiful, oriental, but a symbol nevertheless of Thomson's wish for his own death on this spot." Others considered the painting evidence that Thomson was, or might have become, an increasingly abstract or Expressionist artist.
Read more about this topic: The Jack Pine