Tom Thomson was two months old when his family moved to Leith, a small farming hamlet on the east shore of Owen Sound. He grew up there. He is buried there.
Between the two, Owen Sound holds the country’s most significant collection of his work.
Thomson painted seriously for only five summers before his death on Canoe Lake in 1917. In that short time he made more than four hundred oil sketches and about fifty larger canvases. Three years after his death, seven of his friends formed the Group of Seven. They always said there would have been no Group of Seven without him.
The Tom Thomson Art Gallery
The Tom Thomson Art Gallery is downtown on First Avenue West. It houses a nationally significant collection of Thomson’s works and artifacts, along with the work of the artists who followed him. The gallery is open year-round.
- Address: 840 1st Ave W, Owen Sound, ON N4K 4K4
- Website: owensound.ca/tomthomson
Leith — where he grew up and where he rests
North of Owen Sound, on a country road that ends at the water, is the small hamlet of Leith. You will not find it on most maps. It has a church, a cemetery, and a few farms.
Thomson is buried in the Leith United Church Cemetery. The family monument is a speckled grey granite stone on a rough-hewn base. It names him honestly:
Tom Thomson. Landscape Painter. Drowned in Canoe Lake, July 8, 1917. Aged 39 years, 11 months, 3 days. Below him, on the same monument, are two other Thomson names — a nine-month-old brother, and an uncle who died before Tom was born.
Along the base of the monument are small stones. At the front, a blue tin cup holds painters’ brushes and pencils — bristles worn, handles used. No sign asks visitors to leave them. No guidebook mentions them. Yet somebody always does.
Some stones come from Algonquin. Some from Killarney. Some from forests hundreds of kilometres away. Some brushes come from painting studios that saw work finished only that morning. Someone picks up a stone on an ordinary walk, or lifts a brush from a working set, and one day leaves it beside the grave of a man they never met.
It is one of Canada’s quietest pilgrimages.
Visiting
- Start: the Tom Thomson Art Gallery, downtown at 840 1st Ave W
- Then drive north: Highway 6 out of Owen Sound, then east on the country roads to Leith — about 15 minutes
- At Leith: the church, the cemetery, and the farm country that raised him
- How long: a half-day for both stops, unhurried
- What to bring: something to sit with in the cemetery. A small stone from a walk, or — if you paint — a brush from your own working set.
Photo: Jay Smith / Rjsbird287, CC BY-SA 3.0
