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It was now getting well into September and sketching outdoors was chilly. Rody Courtice had joined us. She and I decided to climb up through the forest to a rocky open place where we could see the lake beyond the thickly wooded area. The sky was a dull grey backdrop and we were not inspired. After trying several sketchbook compositions with no enthusiasm we started to pack up and give up for the day. As Rody put her things together she found a tiny bottle of gin in her paintbox. We drank it, then Rody had an inspiration and said, "Let's build a still life, a Lawren Harris." We dragged a dead, bare small tree trunk and some branches onto the bare rock and propped them up with logs and rocks that were lying near us. We made quite an interesting composition and as a few snowflakes came drifting down we opened our paintboxes and set to work with shamefaced amusement and enthusiasm. We worked hard and fast and though cold we were rather pleased with ourselves; the day had not been entirely wasted. Both of us did large canvases from these bogus sketches and when I last spoke to Rody just before she died I said, "That was pretty disgraceful wasn't it?" She smiled and said, "And worse still we sold them."

Yvonne McKague Housser, North Shore of Lake Superior, 1934/1980

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Thomson's Sister

In 1928 Virginia Woolf imagined the plight of William Shakespeare's sister, Judith. The precocious young Shakespeare was extraordinarily gifted but remained at home. Miss Shakespeare was "as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world" as her brother "but she was not sent to school." She, much like her brother, had a knack for writing and an interest in theatre but her talents were suppressed and she was forced to marry before the age of seventeen. Judith ran away to London with dreams to be an actress on stage, but found herself impoverished and pregnant with a theatre-manager's child. She "killed herself one winter's night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle".

Fortunately the tragedy of Shakespeare's sister is a story of Woolf's imagination, but it is "more or less is, how the story would have run... if a woman in Shakespeare's day had Shakespeare's genius."  

But what if a woman of Tom Thomson's day had Tom Thomson's genius? 

The story of Margaret Thomson is not a fictional one. Margaret was born the 9th child of John and Margaret Thomson in 1884. Her older brother Tom was born in 1887, seven years earlier. The family lived in Leith, Ontario, near Owen Sound, and the children enjoyed a typical Victorian upbringing with appreciation for the outdoors and a cultivated interest in the arts.

Tom would go on to work at publishing houses doing graphic design and lettering in the early 20th century. It was there he would meet members of the soon-to-be Group of Seven and develop an interest in cultivating a "Canadian School" of painting... Algonquin Park... Jack Pine... West Wind... mysterious death in Canoe Lake... Canada's greatest painter

Tom Thomson, The Jack Pine, 1917, National Gallery of Canada

Those who know Canadian art know the story of Tom Thomson well, and for those of you who don't- I'm sorry but this isn't the place to learn about him.

Following her high school graduation, Margaret trained to be a kindergarten teacher, and began teaching in 1905 (at age 20). Though she had an interest in art, and was a hobbyist painter, societal constrictions around femininity and young, unmarried women, in particular, kept Thomson from painting ventures in Algonquin Park with her brother Tom. She continued painting throughout her life and married William Tweedale, 12 years her junior, in 1920.

Margaret Thomson Tweedale, Untitled Bayscape,  Private Collection

Thomson's sister lived to be 95 years old and in her lifetime completed over 500 canvases. At present, her work has only been collected by one major institution in Canada, the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, which owns two of her paintings.   

My interest in Margaret Thomson is not as a feminist recovery project. I do not wish to draw attention to her, so that we can add a footnote to Dennis Reid's A Brief History of Canadian Painting that says "TOM THOMSON HAD A SISTER, AND SHE PAINTED TOO", nor do I want her featured in A.K. Prakash's Independent Spirit: Early Canadian Women Artists placing her alongside Laura Muntz Lyall and Charlotte Schreiber within a canon of women artists in Canada. 

What I hope to do is draw attention to the fact that in the early 20th century, Canada did not foster an environment in which female landscape painters could flourish, if not exist. Exceptions of course include Emily Carr, Helen McNicoll and Elizabeth McGillivary Knowles, though they all studied and developed skills their abroad (Tom Thomson was basically a self-taught painter in the bush of Algonquin Park).  

I admit that the paintings of Margaret Thomson Tweedale pale in comparison to those of her brother. She did not have the sense of line, colour or composition which enlivens her brothers paintings, even one hundred years on. At best her paintings come across as amateurish, at worst, I won't say, but they are a physical manifestation of the problem which Virginia Woolf identified in A Room of One's Own, the paintings of a woman with Tom Thomson's promise, upbringing and passions, unfortunately though in Tom Thomson's time. 

Margaret Thomson Tweedale, Untitled, Private Collection. 

Today the paintings of Margaret Thomson Tweedale can be had for a couple hundred dollars while those of her brother are some of the most valued in the country, at times demanding well over a million dollars at auction. 

In closing I would like to share a quote from Joyce Wieland, who had the pleasure of meeting with Ms. Thomson Tweedale sometime in the 1970s, while she was doing research for her feature film The Far Shore, a fictionalized account of the life of Tom Thomson. Wieland is likely Canada's most celebrated feminist artist and so it is appropriate that I learned of Thomson's sister through her impassioned words: 

"Tom Thomson's sister, by the way, had done 500 canvases in her life. And no one knows about this. And we visited her, she is a very old woman, and she told us about what her brother Tom had taught her in painting and how he wanted her to come in the bush and paint with him and how it was impossible because of the family situation, she could not run away with Tom, her beloved older brother right, she had to just stay home.

But she did this very great body of work, and her brothers did great bodies of work too, they were, you know, big painters. Who will ever know about her? Mrs. Tweedale, who will ever know about Mrs. Tweedale living out in Mississauga? I don't know."

-Joyce Wieland, A Union Maid: Side B: 5 Artists in Conversation, 1973

Written by John Murray, all images are reproduced without permission of copyright holders, though they are only used for educational purposes.