The West Wind

Thomson painted this over the winter of 1916 and 1917, in a small studio shack in Toronto, working up a little oil sketch he had made outdoors the summer before while earning his keep as a fire ranger in Algonquin Park. That single wind-bent pine, leaning hard against the gusts coming off the water, was one of the last things he finished. In July 1917 he set out alone in a canoe on Canoe Lake and drowned; he was 39. Look at the ribbons of red laid into the foreground rocks and the loose, quick strokes in the sky, the shorthand of a painter who worked outdoors rather than a studio polish. The oil sketch it grew from hangs beside it in the same gallery.