A captivating account of the formative years of one of Canada's
best-known artists, Jackson's Wars follows A.Y. Jackson's education and
progress as a painter before he was a well-known artist and his time on
the battlefield in Europe, before he cast his lot in with a group of
like-minded Toronto artists.Jackson fought many battles: he was a feisty
and opinionated combatant when he crossed swords with critics,
collectors, museums, galleries, and fellow painters as an emerging
artist. Moving from Montreal to Toronto in 1913, he became a key figure
in a landscape movement that was determined to depict Canada in a bold
new way, only to have a war dash the group's collective ambitions. Alone
among his close associates, Jackson enlisted to fight with the 60th
Infantry Battalion. Wounded at Sanctuary Wood in 1916, he returned to
the field of combat as an official war artist - the first Canadian
artist appointed, the only infantryman in the program - and militated
for other Canadian appointments to what is now a storied moment of
creation for such artists as F.H. Varley and Arthur Lismer. Jackson
produced some of Canada's most memorable depictions of the world's first
industrial-scale conflict, even as he reckoned with the anguish caused
by the mysterious death of his close friend Tom Thomson. A life-changing
event for soldiers, families, and nations alike, the First World War has
been understood as a moment of stasis in the visual arts in Canada - the
dead ground from which the Group of Seven emerged in the early 1920s.
Douglas Hunter shows how Jackson's war was a moment of intense
transformation and artistic development on the canvas as well as an
experience that tempered a young man into a constructive elder statesman
for Canadian art. On his return home he was not only instrumental in the
formation of the Group of Seven in Toronto, but a key figure for the
Beaver Hall Group in Montreal.Jackson's Wars is a story of brotherhoods
of painters and soldiers, shot through with inspiration, ambition,
trauma, and loss, on the home front as well as on the battlefield.
Hunter widens and deepens A.Y. Jackson's world of friends, family, and
colleagues to capture the life of a complex man and the crucial events
and relationships behind the creation of Canada's best-known art
collective.
