The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson: Separating Fact from Fiction

by Gregory Klages Dundurn Press, 256 pages, $26.99

The year 2017 marks the centenary of Tom Thomson’s death. Interest in his iconic art has always been equalled by fascination with his rugged backwoods life and speculation about his mysterious death. In 2010, a Globe and Mail headline referred to him as “Canada’s Van Gogh,” with all the mesmerizing — and sometimes misleading — mythologizing that implies.

Thomson’s decomposing body was pulled from Canoe Lake in Ontario’s Algonquin Park on July 16, 1917, eight days after he was last seen alive. At the time, the coroner released a verdict of accidental drowning. With little hard evidence, it was perhaps inevitable that people would wonder exactly how this sad, sudden, and early loss — Thomson was thirty-nine when he died — came about. According to cultural historian Gregory Klages, “The difficulties inherent in answering the question, however, would make Thomson’s death an increasingly compelling topic for speculation, conjecture, and gossip.”

Currently an adjunct faculty member at York, Ryerson, and Guelph universities, Klages also worked on the website Death on a Painted Lake: The Tom Thomson Tragedy — which is part of the Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History project, an award-winning online teaching resource. In The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson, Klages offers a detailed and rigorous review of the material on Thomson’s death, carefully assessing the theories that have proliferated since 1917.

The possibility that Thomson’s death was due to unnatural causes, Klages states, “appealed to a typically Canadian romantic pessimism.” Suggestions of murder or manslaughter — included in high-profile works by journalist Roy MacGregor in the 1970s and curator and art historian