LEITH, Ont. – The first thing you notice at Tom Thomson’s grave in winter is the little cluster of paintbrushes bursting like flowers through the snow.
Look closer and you read that it is in fact three graves, also containing the great painter’s infant brother James Brodie Thomson and maternal grandfather Kenneth Mathison.
Sweeping the snow off the base reveals painted rocks frozen into place, little tributes from pilgrim artists to this rural churchyard northeast of Owen Sound, Ont. Beneath the ice, probably, are coins and pebbles, as is the tradition, likely some from Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park where Thomson died in the summer of 1917, in circumstances that have passed from mystery into history and beyond into national myth.
A few paces away is the little church, built in 1865 as the Auld Kirk, with its single stained glass, a little round window above the pulpit that was originally just plain glass in the austere Presbyterian style. The graves all face the rising sun. The window faces the other way, northwest toward the prevailing winds off Georgian Bay. Across the road is the farm where Thomson grew up, now an equestrian centre.
This is the stained glass that this year is on the National Post’s Christmas front page. It is the paper’s festive journalistic tradition, many years running, to choose a notable Canadian stained glass and tell its story.
For example,
last year’s was from St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church
in Halifax on the first Christmas after it closed, where original stained glass windows were replaced after they were blown out in the 1917 Halifax Explosion. In 2006, it was from Christ Church Anglican in nearby Meaford, Ont., notable for being assembled out of shards of broken stained glass collected by a military chaplain from damaged churches in Second World War Europe.
This one has had fame before, even aside from the fact that Canada’s greatest painter, and the victim of the most legendary death in the Canadian wilderness since Sir John Franklin, rests outside under an old English oak. This window was even a Christmas stamp once.
But the funny thing about “Nativity Scene,” the 52 cent Christmas stamp put out by Canada Post in 1997, is that this is not a nativity scene at all. That’s no newborn baby. He’s standing up with a full head of hair. He’s ready for Grade 1. He’s closer to the Finding in the Temple than to the Nativity.
But this is to quibble. The keepers of the church refer to it as the “Holy Family” window. Like Thomson, its story is of a person who died too soon, and whose memory lives on in art.
In 1952, the window was donated to what was then the Leith United Church by Laura Webster of Toronto, in memory of her daughter Frances Pauline Webster, who died aged 23. Ellen Simon designed it, and Yvonne Williams rendered it in stained glass, both of them prominent Canadian visual artists and collaborators on many church projects on grander scales than this one.
The Historic Leith Church has been restored and is more of a concert and ceilidh venue now, with a few weddings and the odd funeral, a regular Christmas service and one or two others.
Thomson’s gravestone calls him simply a “landscape painter,” which almost undersells his achievements as a painter of wind you can see and waves you can hear. He vanished at the peak of his talent into a wilderness lake, taking up a sanctified place in Canadian art. Whether that was by malice, suicide or accident remains the alluring mystery that sustains his fame, and brings tourists here to this gravestone, though usually in summer.
In any other case it would be crass to even mention that a gravesite might actually contain a casket full of sand. But that is one important strand of Thomson’s legend, widely believed but not uncontrovertibly demonstrated, that his body in fact remains in Algonquin Park, where it was first buried after he was found floating eight days after he disappeared in high summer.
Pete Telford, chairman of the Friends of Leith Church, points out the references in the window, the seagulls over the Christ figure’s head as if flying in from Georgian Bay, and under his left arm, the unmistakable shape of a pine tree in Thomson’s style.
It is a subtle nod to the national significance of this remote and holy place, something a visitor might not see but would definitely recognize.
“It is until you notice it, then you can’t take your eyes off it,” Telford said.
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