The Jack Pine

The Jack Pine is a well-known oil painting by Canadian artist Tom Thomson. A representation of the most broadly distributed pine species in Canada, it is considered an iconic image of the country's landscape, and is one of the country's most widely recognized and reproduced artworks.

The painting was completed in 1917, the year of Thomson's death. It is a roughly square canvas that measures 127.9 × 139.8 cm. It has been in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa since 1918.

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. In 1916, he also worked in the Park as a fire ranger. It was there, on Grand Lake with the hills near Carcajou Bay in the background, that Thomson made the oil sketch in 1916 that he would use for the final painting in 1917. There are numerous other paintings by Thomson with compositions similar to that of The Jack Pine: in fact, the majority of Thomson's canvasses depict the far side of a shore. These include Northern Lake (1912–13), his first; Pine Island, Georgian Bay (1914–16; pictured); and more famously, The West Wind (1917), another painting of iconic status.

The painting depicts a jack pine as a decorative and abstracted pattern, its shapes boldly simplified against the sunset. This stylization demonstrates Thomson's command of decorative effects, developed during his years as a graphic designer, and with the strong colour and value contrasts, creates the picture's symbolic resonance. The pine, its branches bowed and placed to the right of centre, extends nearly the full length of the canvas, and is cropped at the top. 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. It is silhouetted against water and sky, with the canvas bisected by the far shore.

The final canvas differs markedly from Thomson's spring 1916 sketch. He made the tree appear larger by lowering the hills on the far side of the lake. 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. In the final painting, Thomson has swapped the storm clouds for a clear twilight sky. 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.

...
Wikipedia