From October 5, 2002 to January 5, 2003, the Vancouver Art Gallery is showing over 140 works of One of Canada's greatest painter, Tom Thomson, including all of his major paintings of his life such as The Jack Pine, and Autumn Foliage. This is not only a great chance to see Thomson's works, but great opportunity to compare them with another famous Canadian artist, Emily Carr - one of the permanent collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery.
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Most of Thomson's paintings are dedicated to Canadian culture along with the other artists from the Group of Seven, and it is the reason why Thomson has always been considered as the key figure in the history of Canadian painting. However, there are more than just what is about "Canadian- in his paintings; Thomson leaves the viewer perplexed in a world of purple sky and red trees, overwhelming the viewer within an enigmatic colour world of his perspective. "He began to paint that he might express the emotions the country inspired in him; all the moods and passions, all the sombreness and all the glory of colour, were so felt that they demanded from him pictorial expression. He never gave utterance in words to his feelings of the glories of nature. Words were not his instruments of expression - colour was the only medium open to him,"" and what Thomson tried to achieve were "truthfulness and beauty - beauty of colour, of feeling, and of emotion."" (MacCallum) Therefore, Thomson should be considered as an impressionist, despite of his connections to the Arts and Crafts movement and to the modernism in Canada. Although Tom Thomson and Emily Carr both has painted from the nature and are considered as two of the most well known artists in Canada, Carr's works seem to be more towards to modernistic abstract compared to Thomson's works. Thomson's brush strokes and colour pallets are rather similar to those of impressionists such as van Gogh and Cézanne.
