Gift from Class of 1944 offers a glimpse into Canadian art history
Members of the Class of 1944 gathered on campus earlier this month to mark 70 years as McMaster alumni. Their class gift, a painting by Canadian artist George Thomson titled 'Clean Air,' still hangs in Wallingford Hall for students to enjoy.
George Thomson was the eldest of 10 children.
He was the responsible one — the founder of a business school where three of his siblings went to study; the lawyer turned professional artist; and, when his brother Tom Thomson was reported missing on Canoe Lake in 1917, the one who assisted in the search and represented his family in the tragic aftermath.
Thanks to a gift of the Class of 1944, George Thomson’s painting of a northern Ontario landscape, Clean Air, has quietly graced the Common Room of Wallingford Hall for decades, bringing pleasure to many McMaster students.
It seems fitting that students should now gather — for conversation, music making, and the study of many disciplines — beneath a painting by a man who embraced all of these things in his lifetime. So too is it fitting that the Class of 1944, whose years on campus coincided with those of of the Second World War, should choose a gift that is both serene and distinctly Canadian.
The 70th anniversary of the Class of 1944 was among several significant anniversaries to be recognized at McMaster’s 2014 Alumni Day celebrations, which took place earlier this month.
Clean Air by George Thomson
Though less famous than brother Tom Thomson (1877 – 1917), whose now iconic paintings of Algonquin Park inspired the Group of Seven, George Thomson was an accomplished painter in his own right.
Born in 1868 and raised in Leith, Ont., George became a successful businessman, but at the age of 38 had his life forever changed by the sight of a beautiful landscape painting in a shop window. According to a 1964 news story, “the picture fascinated him and woke in him the instinct and determination to paint.”
Thomson sold his business and began to study art at the New York Art students League and at Old Lyme, Connecticut. He then exhibited extensively in the US including at the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago, and won prizes for his work.
In 1926 he returned to Canada and was a member of both the Ontario Society of Artists and the Royal Canadian Academy. His work is held in collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Morgan Gallery of Hartford, Connecticut as well as in many public and private collections internationally.
On the day before he died at the age of 97, George Thomson was out sketching at Lion’s Head with his brother Fraser. He was the oldest practicing professional artist in Canada.
“Thomson always was a scientific painter,” wrote a 1942 reviewer for the Toronto Star. “With his high sense of rugged beauty in the Georgian Bay milieu, he has for 20 years painted the country that he knows as intimately as Homer Watson knew Doon and the Grand River, into thousands of beauty-spots on canvas.”
While the George Thomson painting is a treasure privately shared by the residents of Wallingford Hall, McMaster’s painting Algonquin Park by Tom Thomson will be on view in the conservation-related exhibition at the Museum of Art this summer.
