The Canadian painter Tom Thomson (1877-1917) was the forerunner of the Group of Seven, the national movement in landscape painting. He is best known as an interpreter of the Canadian wilderness.

Tom Thomson was born at Claremont, Ontario, not far from Toronto but was brought up at Leith on the shores of Georgian Bay. After an unpromising beginning as a machinist, he worked as a photoengraver in Seattle, Wash., from 1901 to 1904, when he returned to Canada. In 1907 Thomson joined the art department of Grip Limited in Toronto, where several of the men who after World War I formed the Group of Seven worked, among them J. E. H. MacDonald.

In 1911 Thomson made his first sketching trip by canoe into the Mississauga Forest Reserve with one of his fellow artists. The following year he went on a longer trip into Algonquin Park, a provincial forest with which his name...