PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST
A.Y. Jackson’s local roots
For years, motorists using the lot on the east side of Mackay St. below Ste-Catherine St. were probably unaware that they were parking on the birthplace of one of Canada’s cultural icons.
Alexander Young Jackson — Alex to his friends, A.Y. to the public — the controversial modern artist who co-founded Toronto’s Group of Seven and was president of Montreal’s Beaver Hall Group, was born in 1882 at what was then 43 Mackay St. — now a condo development.
The site was once home to large Victorian townhouses similar to those still standing in the area. Add wooden sidewalks, picket fences and big shade trees, and you get an idea of what the street looked like 130 years ago, when it was a middle-class neighbourhood of bankers, clerks, merchants and what Lovell’s Directory defined as commercial travellers.
Henry Jackson was ostensibly a businessman, but his ill-advised ventures all went nowhere.
“He was most kindly described as a square peg in a round hole,” A.Y. said of his father, who fell into debt and eventually moved his growing family to a smaller house at Fort and Ste-Catherine Sts., where a Provigo now stands. They weren’t there for long. One day in 1891, 8-year-old A.Y. came home to find his family’s furniture on the street and bailiffs taking inventory of the silverware. His mother tearfully told him that his father was gone. After his latest business failure, Henry abandoned the family and fled to Chicago, leaving 41-year-old Georgina Jackson penniless and alone with six children and a barrage of creditors.
Again the family was on the move — this time to working-class StHenri, where they rented a flat on Park Ave. (now Laporte Ave.) adjacent to the railway yards, the future site of the Imperial Tobacco plant. Here A.Y. learned French, which would serve him well on youthful jaunts through France and annual springtime sketching trips to Quebec villages in middle age.
His two older brothers got jobs to support the family while A.Y. attended Prince Albert Public School on Rose-de-Lima St. His education ended at age 12, when he began working at the Bishop Engraving and Printing Company on St-James St. (rue St-Jacques) in what is now Old Montreal. He apprenticed in the art department, where designing labels for canned goods was considered the height of creativity.
This sparked his interest in art, and throughout his teens he saved his pennies to take lessons. In 1898 he enrolled in evening classes under artist Edmond Dyonnet at the Monument National, which still stands on St-Laurent Blvd. Originally opened by the St-JeanBaptiste Society, the Monument National was a cultural hub at the time. It now houses the National Theatre School.
From there, A.Y. studied under William Brymner at the Art Association of Montreal (AAM) on Phillips Square, today the site of a Burger King. He could not have had better instructors, for Brymner and Dyonnet were key members of the Royal Canadian Academy. He was taught how to draw and paint in the traditional style, but was eager to experiment.
Each Saturday, A.Y. and eldest brother Harry would pack a lunch and walk southwest from St-Henri, over the Lachine Canal, and sketch the pastoral landscape of what is now LaSalle, Lachine and Dorval. Sometimes they ventured as far as Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue.
A.Y.’s earliest surviving work, the 1902 watercolour Rivière St. Pierre, resulted from one of those hikes. Painted near what is today the Turcot Interchange, it depicts the swampy shoreline of Montreal’s “lost” river with the silhouette of Mount Royal in the distance.
By 1904, the Jackson siblings had been working and saving long enough to move up the hill into Westmount and into an upper duplex on Hallowell St. This would be A.Y.’s home base for the next 15 years, the address to which he shipped paintings from Europe and from where his mother sent work to exhibitions in his absence.
In 1910, his head spinning with Impressionist ideas from a recent stay in France, A.Y. sat out on the upper balcony and painted a view of his old St-Henri neighbourhood. In those days, long before the VilleMarie Expressway, Laporte Ave. was visible from Hallowell St. and the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association (MAAA) grounds behind present-day Westmount High School.
That small painting, Saint Henry from Hallowell Ave., is now in the National Gallery of Canada.
The basement furnace in the Hallowell St. house played a dubious role in Canadian art history, for it consumed countless early Jacksons, some of which may have fetched a small fortune today had the self-critical artist not destroyed them.
Once, while sorting through his recent work and making a pile of those he considered failures, he found a sketch of a circus tent he’d painted the previous year in StMalo, France. Fellow artist Albert Robinson had praised it at the time, but A.Y. was skeptical. He tossed it among the rejects and asked his sister to burn them all in the furnace downstairs.
Soon after, Robinson asked him if he still had that circus sketch. “It was the best thing you ever did,” he said. A.Y. regretted discarding it, and Robinson kept chiding him.
The sketch got better each time Robinson mentioned it.
One day, while in the basement, A.Y. joyfully came across his rejected sketches, which his sister had forgotten to destroy. Sure enough, the circus sketch was there.
“I took a good look at it,” he recalled, “then went over to the furnace and shoved it in.”
But Montreal was hard on young artists, and A.Y.’s first exhibition was a failure. In early 1913, the new AAM building on Sherbrooke St. (now the Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) hosted a two-man show featuring himself and pal Randolph Hewton. A.Y. sold nothing, and Hewton just one sketch — to his aunt.
Stung by the rejection, A.Y. fled Montreal. He was sketching in rural Émileville, near Mont Yamaska, when he received a letter from artist J.E.H. MacDonald. It said that fellow painter Lawren Harris had seen one of A.Y.’s Sweetsburg canvases at a Toronto exhibition and would buy it if he still possessed it.
“If I still possessed it!” A.Y. recounted in his autobiography. “I still possessed everything I had ever painted.”
That letter changed A.Y.’s life, and the course of Canadian art. It drew him into the Toronto circle of the future members of the Group of Seven, and from that summer onward he spent less time in Montreal.
When the First World War broke out, many men scrambled to the nearest recruiting office. But A.Y. bided his time, believing it would end quickly. He spent that autumn in Algonquin Park with new friends Tom Thomson, Fred Varley and Arthur Lismer. This was a successful sketching trip for the struggling artists; their resulting canvases — A.Y.’s The Red Maple, Thomson’s Northern River, and Lismer’s The Guide’s Home — would soon be bought by the National Gallery and now rank among Canada’s most familiar images.
Facing the inevitability of enlistment, he reluctantly returned to Montreal, where recruits were being drilled on the MAAA grounds facing the Hallowell St. house. The guilt was too much. He signed up as a private in the 60th Infantry Battalion and, 100 years ago this month, was sent overseas as part of the 3rd Canadian Division. Before shipping out, A.Y. visited Hewton’s grandmother at 258 Bishop St. for news of his friend, who was already overseas. Here he was photographed in uniform, proud and confident — unaware of the horrors ahead.
In June 1916, he took a bullet in the shoulder during heavy combat at Sanctuary Wood, Belgium, and was evacuated to a series of bleak military hospitals in France and England. The next summer, while he was training for reassignment to the front, another letter from MacDonald reached him: Tom Thomson had drowned in Algonquin Park.
The news came at the lowest point of his life, just as he was being sent back to more horror in the trenches — but he got a last-minute reprieve.
Thanks to fellow Montreal artist Lilias Torrence Newton, who was working at a Red Cross unit and knew where he was stationed, A.Y. was found by an agent of Lord Beaverbrook and ordered to report for duty with the new Canadian War Memorials Fund (CWMF), which was recruiting artists to depict the war effort.
Shortly after he left for London, his unit was wiped out at Passchendaele.
As a war artist, A.Y. was promoted to lieutenant and spent the next year in relative luxury. He stayed behind the front lines, sketching scarred battlefields and artillery-ravaged villages for canvases he would produce in his comfortable London studio.
He was back in Montreal in late 1918, preparing for a CWMF assignment to Siberia. He bought 20 tubes of white paint, anticipating the bleak, snowy landscape. On Nov. 11, he was walking down SteCatherine St. when church bells began ringing — the war was over and his Siberia trip cancelled.
“I probably became a painter of winter landscapes because I had to find some use for all that white paint,” he often quipped.
By the following year, A.Y. moved into the now-legendary Studio Building in Toronto, and would find notoriety with the Group of Seven. But he remained tied to Montreal, frequently returning to visit friends and relatives, including girlfriend Anne Savage — the Baron Byng High School teacher and Beaver Hall artist with whom he maintained a close relationship for 50 years.
During his final visit, at age 84, he was given a private tour of Expo 67 and later led a group of friends on a stroll downtown to revisit his old haunts — no longer recognizable as the Golden Square Mile setting of a Victorian childhood.
I probably became a painter of winter landscapes because I had to find some use for all that white paint.
A.Y. JACKSON