The Jack Pine
Beginning in 1913, Thomson annually stayed in Algonquin Park from the spring until the autumn, often working as a guide while also fishing and painting for his own pleasure.
[7] These include Northern Lake (1912–13), his first; Pine Island, Georgian Bay (1914–1916; pictured); and more famously, The West Wind (1917), another painting of iconic status.
[3][6] This stylization demonstrates Thomson's command of decorative effects, developed during his years as a graphic designer,[9] and with the strong colour and value contrasts, creates the picture's symbolic resonance.
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.
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.
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.
One reviewer notes the effect in it and The West Wind: "[these] 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 ...
Heavily laden with paint it swept over the canvas in broad, exultant strokes in which the very spirit of Tom Thomson still speaks aloud.
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 ... [Thomson] achieves pure poetry in painting, by combining an intuitive feeling for nature with an almost classical control of technique.
"[19] 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.
For the second visit, May 2, the display had been improved, and the director and his associate chose The Jack Pine (along with Thomson's Autumn Garland and 25 sketches) for the National Gallery.
Brown wrote to a colleague that The Jack Pine was "in our opinion, and that of Thomson's fellow painters, the best picture of any kind he ever painted.
"[22] Two months after The Jack Pine arrived in Ottawa in August 1918, it was sent to St. Louis, Missouri, as part of an exhibition of contemporary Canadian art.
Calmly it amplifies the beryline silence brooding on the waters where Tom's spirit rests forever alongside the sky stretched out in the shadow of the jackpine that holds heaven and earth together in an embrace encompassing the hills the lake, the seasons, and the void that fills the dark spaces between them and infinity.
In 1967, a stamp featuring The Jack Pine was released to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the painting's creation and Thomson's death.
The painting was the inspiration for Lone Pine Sunset by author and artist Douglas Coupland, an installation located at Parliament station of the Ottawa O-Train.
