Since his drowning in 1917, Tom Thomson has been recreated by poets, playwrights, novelists, filmmakers, biographers, and other artists as a legendary figure synonymous with Canada and its northern identity. Touted as a great artist cut off in his prime, his mysterious death in Canoe Lake, Algonquin Park, and the controversy about his final resting-place fired the popular imagination and raised him to the status of a national hero. In "Inventing Tom Thomson" Sherrill Grace examines many of the ways in which the figure of Thomson has been imagined by Canadians. Even people who do not know his paintings well will recognize "The Jack Pine" and know his legend through the marketing of Thomson memorabilia on the Web, in museums, and in stores. Grace suggests that the figure we have come to recognize as Tom Thomson is inextricably associated with many of the qualities that we believe characterize Canadian culture - love of the wilderness, northern purity, solitary independence, and a masculine ability to canoe, camp, fish, and rough it in the bush. "Inventing Tom Thomson" is about those artists who have felt compelled to imagine their own Tom Thomsons and about what the man has come to represent to the culture at large - it is about us and how the stories about this exceptional painter have shaped our sense of who we are as a nation.

Sherrill Grace
Sherrill Grace is a professor of English and theatre at the University of British Columbia. She is former President, Academy I, of the Royal Society of Canada. She has lectured widely in North America, as well as in Germany, Italy, England, Belgium, France, China and Japan.

A member of several professional associations, including the Association of Canadian Studies, the Canadian Association of American Studies, the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, the Canadian Comparative Literature Association, the Modern Languages Association and the International Association of Professors of English, Grace was awarded the prestigious Killam Teaching Prize in 2008, and in 2009 she received the Ann Saddlemyer Award for her biography Making Theatre: A Life of Sharon Pollock.

Sherrill Grace's profile page

“Grace's investigation into the "invention" of Tom Thomson is a compelling tour not only into the making of a cultural phenomenon, but into the myth of Canada itself. From the various biographical treatments of Thomson, which have become increasingly obse

“The title says it all – the process of inventing Tom Thomson continues. In this remarkable essay, not the man, nor the artist, but the icon co-opted into our national narrative is given wings as we watch him soar into the sun.” John Moss, professor of En

“This is a compelling book on myth-making and identity. Reversing the usual direction of investigative research, Inventing Tom Tomson analyzes the disorderly repertoire of stories about the artist’s life rather than the canonized repertoire of his paintings. To paraphrase one of the author’s central arguments, had the book not been written, it would have to have been invented." John O’Brian, professor of art history, University of British Columbia