FREDERIC MARLETT BELL-SMITH (1856-1923)

Bell-Smith was a lively and liberal-minded lover of people and a friend to all the arts. A British-born painter, illustrator, photographer and art teacher, he was also admired as a co-founder of the Society of Canadian Artists, and as an amateur actor and producer.

His visits to Mazinaw Lake in 1911, 1912 and later, resulted in a series of large, atmospheric landscapes, such as Silent Sentinel of the North, Highlands of Ontario, the hit of the 1912 Ontario Society of Artists' annual spring show; Bon Echo Rock, Hazy Morning, included at the Royal Canadian Academy's exhibition the same year; and Grey Day, Highlands of Ontario (Bon Echo Rock) at the 1912 Canadian National Exhibition.

The Denisons bought at least four of Bell-Smith's Mazinaw pictures. The Silent Sentinel, a favourite painting of Flora's, was acquired in 1916 for the main hall of the Bon Echo Inn. She spoke of this work in The Sunset of Bon Echo: 'The hanging of the massive picture gave us great satisfaction. Mr. Bellsmith [sic] has painted many pictures of Bon Echo, but this splendid masterpiece of "Old Walt" will take a premier place in the Whitman Hall that is to be built in days to come.' Unfortunately, this picture and the other three by Bell-Smith had to be sold over time to deal with financial problems, and the Whitman Hall and library were never constructed.

Bell-Smith's life interacted with Flora Denison's in other ways. The two may well have become friends through a joint acquaintance. Dr. Benjamin Fish Austin, who was a central figure in Flora's life. Austin was the first principal of Alma College for Women in St. Thomas, where Bell-Smith was the director of fine arts from 1881 until 1901. Austin had been a fellow-student of Flora's psychically and mathematically gifted sister at Albert College in Belleville. A convert to Spiritualism, Austin experimented with spirit communication at Alma College. After he preached a sermon directing his parishioners to keep an open mind about psychic phenomena, a sensational trial brought about his excommunication from the Methodist Church. Later, in Los Angeles, California, he became a leading figure in the North American Spiritualist movement. His friendship with Flora led to his publication of her book Mary Melville: The Psychic (1900), which described the strange life and death of her sister, thinly disguised as fiction. Austin also published What Converted Me To Spiritualism (1901), which included personal testimony from Flora, whose commitment to Bon Echo was based on visions of her dead sister and of a Whitman-like union of the inner and outer life.

No evidence exists that Bell-Smith was a believer in spirit communication, but he did join Flora's Whitman Club of Bon Echo and participate in its activities. Through his friendship with Austin, the London-based Bell-Smith may also have met Richard Maurice Bucke, Walt Whitman's literary executor, who founded the School of Medicine at London's University of Western Ontario.


FRANK HANS JOHNSTON (1888-1949)

Toronto-born Frank Johnston apprenticed as a jeweller before studying art at the Central Technical School and the Central Ontario School of Art and Design. After a first job at the engraving firm of Brigden's, he joined Grip Engraving in 1908. At this time he and Merrill Denison seem to have met through common friends or Johnston's technical work on plates for Torontonensis, the University of Toronto's student magazine, to which Denison contributed some graceless cartoons.

Soon after, Johnston went to the United States to study art at the Pennsylvania Academy. By 1914 he was sketching with Denison, who was now at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Architecture. Flora was seriously annoyed, as perhaps she was intended to be, by Merrill's next birthday gift — an oil study of her cherished boy as a piratical, cigar-chomping voyageur in a red bandanna, which Merrill had encouraged Johnston to paint, possibly as a gesture of independence.

Both young men moved to New York City, but when it became apparent that World War I would not end quickly, Johnston returned to Toronto, while Merrill went overseas with the American Ambulance Corps. During this period Johnston visited Mazinaw for the first time, in the winter of 1916 or 1917. One of his most important early works, dated 1917, A Northern Night, has only now been identified as a view of the Narrows painted from a South Lake vantage-point at about the same angle selected by C.W. Jefferys at about the same time.

Once Merrill had returned to Canada in 1919, Johnston began to receive commissions from the Bon Echo Inn. The earliest seems to have been the front-cover design for The Sunset of Bon Echo, which was used on all six issues, alternately printed on buff or pale blue paper. Although the illustration is unsigned, it can safely be attributed to Johnston on the basis of the bookplate he designed for Merrill Denison in 1919. Showing a section of the Bon Echo Rock just as it appears on the Sunset cover, it is initialled 'F.H.J.' on the lower left. Johnston chose to treat the subject by illustrating the title with an enormous sunset cloud billowing up behind a line drawing of the Big Rock. (However, the escarpment runs almost due north, and even in high summer the sun goes down much further to the west, almost directly behind the eastward-facing inn.)

Two brochures advertising the inn also feature Johnston's work. The first dates from about 1921, the year of Flora's death. Printed on brown paper in two different formats under the title Bon Echo: A Summer and Autumn Resort, it features ink drawings of the inn, the cliff and the views from the point, looking north and south. The cover of the second brochure, printed in 1927, is a handsome art-deco illustration in vivid scarlets and blues, which suggests the name of Bon Echo through the device of an Indian brave who has risen in a canoe to throw his voice against the cliff face on which his shadow falls.

After his split with the Group of Seven, which became formal in 1924, Johnston taught art in Winnipeg and in Toronto, where he continued to work as a book and magazine illustrator. Although, as a popular landscape painter, he became associated with the conservative, pastoral side of Canadian art, he also created bold arctic works and imaginative pieces. In painting thesd to life and work in the intense social atmosphere of the Bon Echo Inn in Flora Denison's day. Nevertheless, he found his way to Mazinaw Lake, and two watercolours and a graphite sketch record his visit.

As one of the older pioneering generation that began to paint 'clear, northern light' and Canadian subjects in the 1890s, Jefferys was eager to explore the pictorial possibilities of the Ontario Shield country. From 1892 to 1904 he regularly contributed to the annual Toronto Art Students' League calendars, which impressed Tom Thomson and the future Group of Seven with what could be done in the way of exploring distinctive national themes. Starting in 1901, Jefferys visited the wilds of Muskoka, the Lake of the Woods, the Kawarthas and Lake Temagami on canoeing and sketching expeditions, and made occasional painting trips to the prairies. As a commercial artist, he designed resort and railway posters and brochures that incorporated typical lakeside scenes.

His only visit to Mazinaw took place in 1916 as the guest of Robert Glasgow, the owner of a cottage near Bon Echo on Mazinaw Point and co-publisher of the Chronicles of Canada series, for which Jefferys was the picture-editor and principal illustrator. At this time the Glasgows subscribed to The Sunset of Bon Echo and occasionally dined at the inn, although relations worsened later, owing to the predictable tensions between cottagers and resort owners.

A transitional figure in the history of Canadian landscape painting, Jefferys sought lucidity and clarity above all, avoiding what he saw as the excesses and garish palette of the Group of Seven, while dissociating himself from the growing conservatism of the Royal Canadian Academy. The watercolours and single drawing he produced at Bon Echo give a cooler, more distanced interpretation of the Rock than most of the Mazinaw images. This effect is partly due to a vantage-point on the western side of the lower lake looking north-west, near the site of what used to be Camp Mazinaw. This angle sets Jefferys apart from the inn-based painters of the Big Rock, who were forced into a more immediate confrontation with the looming cliff. Instead of concentrating on the rock-face, he focused on the play of sunlight and cloud-shadow on nearby foliage and the brow of the headland far up the lake. In his meticulous graphite drawing Mazinaw Point, Jefferys managed to avoid the Rock altogether as his focus shifted from close-up detail to middle-ground silhouettes to distant outlines. Like all of his landscapes, these are reticent in their avoidance of romantic excess and their preference for facts over fancy. They are Flora Denison-era pictures only by virtue of their date.

A sceptic, Jefferys did not follow in Bell-Smith's footsteps by joining the Whitmanite rites at the inn. Although he admired Whitman in his own way, and his name appeared on the Sunset of Bon Echo's subscription list, he was never a believer in Richard Maurice Bucke's theory of Cosmic Consciousness. In the 1920s Jefferys would extend his range to Muskoka's Peninsula Lake and to the Haliburton Highlands around Bobcaygeon and Gull Lake, but he never returned to Bon Echo.


JOHN WILLIAM BEATTY (1869-1941) & ALICE AMELIA INNES (1890-1970)

J.W. Beatty, of Toronto, was strangely impervious to influences, apart from those of the Canadian north and the fellow artists, usually younger, who loved it. While seizing every opportunity of learning more about painting and drawing, he survived in his early years by working as a house painter, a bugler in the l0th Royal Grenadiers, and a fireman. In fact, as one of his friends observed, the aggressive and irritable Beatty 'was always a fireman, forever rushing away to some new blaze.' Even when he had given up painting houses and blowing bugles, if not rushing about, Beatty survived, like most artists, through a patchwork of teaching and commercial art — largely illustration for the Canadian Magazine — and the occasional sale of a painting.

He studied art with F.M. Bell-Smith and at the Central Ontario School of Art and Design, beginning the new century with a Paris year at the Academie Julian. Later, he returned to Paris for more study, then went to London, and then toured Europe.

Beatty's first painting excursion to northern Ontario occurred in the spring of 1909, when he sketched in Haliburton with Lawren Harris. The following October he headed for Fort Mattagami on the Abitibi River, and in March 1914 sketched in Algonquin Park with J.E.H. MacDonald and A.Y. Jackson. Later that year he moved into Lawren Harris's Studio Building, and painted in the Canadian Rockies with Jackson. These acquaintances and expeditions did more than all his European studies to modernise his style, but, as Jackson observed, he could never fully free himself from traditional ways of painting.

The time of Beatty's sole known visit to Bon Echo is uncertain, but his one recorded Mazinaw picture is thought by its owner, the Glenbow Museum, to have been painted between about 1916 and 1920. It was strongly influenced by the style of Tom Thomson, who drowned at Canoe Lake in the summer of 1917. However, Beatty's name does not appear in the inn's guest registers or cards. No evidence exists for a winter visit, except the painting itself.

Beatty would have known Merrill Denison through the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto, and may have received an invitation to stay at Mazinaw Lake and paint the scene in its winter aspect. Or perhaps, like Jefferys, he was a guest of the Glasgows, or some other cottagers. Whatever the explanation for his presence at Bon Echo, it seems likely that the visit took place before the 1920s, when his style became more conservative and he reverted to placid, pastoral themes.

Beatty did not visit Bon Echo alone. He was accompanied by Alice Amelia Innes, who was his pupil, disciple and chauffeur. Her Northern Rocks in December, on a small birch panel, clearly dates from that trip and must have been painted by his side.

Born near Woodstock into comfortable circumstances, where the arts were appreciated as accomplishments for ladies, Innes commuted to Toronto for a weekly piano lesson at the Royal Conservatory of Music and used the opportunity to take private art training. Refusing to study nursing, she entered the Central Ontario School of Art and Design in 1911.

About 1913 she began to help Beatty in his summer classes and painted with him at the Studio Building, where she also became a friend of A.Y. Jackson's. Innes's independent income allowed her to join artists' societies and take sketching trips across Canada. Her work was accomplished enough to be included in the Canadian Pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair, but, like her mentor, she was an old-fashioned painter, sticking to landscapes and floral studies in a lyrical manner, when others were exploring ideas from abroad. After Beatty's death in 1941, she dropped out of the Toronto art scene.

Innes made a clean break by moving to British Columbia in 1950, where at last she developed her own style, expressing her emotional response to the mountains through profound blues and warm pinks laid on with her usual free and fluid brushwork. Forced back to Ontario about 1955 by her arthritis, she settled in Woodstock, where gradually she sank into depression, losing faith in her own talent and destroying much of her work. She died in the St. Thomas Psychiatric Hospital, a victim of the barriers that stood between gifted women and full accomplishment, but a few of her pictures survive in private collections.


DORIS HUESTIS MILLS (1894-1989)

According to a Bon Echo Inn guest card, Mrs. Doris Mills rented the North Cottage from 5 to 19 July 1923. A note adds, 'Paints, recommended by Jackson and Lismer.' Another card indicates that Mr. Gordon Mills, his wife and sister-in-law spent two days at Bon Echo during the summer of 1924, but fails to give the month.

Doris Huestis Mills was born in Toronto, the second daughter of Archibald Huestis, manager of the Methodist Publishing House (later named the Ryerson Press), and Florence Gooderham Hamilton Huestis, a member of Toronto's established, non-conformist upper class. Born out of wedlock, Doris's mother had been reared by her grandparents, which gave her a special perspective on the life of privilege. Like her mother, Florence became a social activist, fighting alongside Flora Denison for women's rights, a better life for poor people and improvements in public health.

Doris Huestis was educated at Havergal Ladies College in Toronto, which she entered in 1902, one year after Muriel Goggin. She took 'Special Drawing' at the age of sixteen from a teacher who informed her that she would become an artist. Illness brought her formal education to an end in 1915, but she continued her education through serious reading at home. Though drawn to her mother's social activism, she responded more to her father's literary milieu, resolving to become a writer.

Her interest in art had been kindled by her visits to museums and galleries during a tour of Europe in 1912. In 1916 she married Gordon Mills, an amateur writer, musician and member of the Toronto Arts and Letters Club, whom she had met on a train. An accountant by training, Gordon Mills eventually joined the T. Eaton Company and moved rapidly into its upper offices. In 1918 the young couple joined the First Church of Christian Science in Toronto, where they met members of the Group of Seven and their friends and families. As part of this cohesive circle, the Millses developed an appreciation of the writings of Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman.

Around 1923 Doris Mills received private instruction in the academic discipline of drawing plaster casts and fruit in charcoal. She became eager to try her hand at painting and, on the advice of A.Y. Jackson, she bought supplies and set to work at home and on sketching trips in the summer. That fall, her friend J.E.H. MacDonald invited her to share space with him in the Studio Building, clearing out his storage area for her use. She also took twelve private lessons from F.H. Varley before his move to Vancouver in 1926.

Thus launched, Mills ventured off on the sketching excursion that took her to Bon Echo in July 1923. The only record of her first stay at Mazinaw Lake is a letter on Bon Echo Inn stationary to a cousin, telling him that she was enclosing a few miscellaneous poems, mostly written by her husband. She also sent a sample of her own free verse. If she did sketch or paint during the 1923 stay, no results have surfaced. If, as the second guest card indicates, Mills spent only two days in the summer of 1924 at the Bon Echo Inn, her seven recorded Mazinaw Lake oil panels, six linocuts and twenty small sketchbook drawings were a remarkable output. It seems more likely that her second visit was longer. Years later, she remarked to a friend: 'At Bon Echo we had a cottage...Every evening Merrill Denison, the writer, would come and sit on the step. "Let me see everything you've done today," he would say.'

Though strikingly hued and reduced to basic abstract forms, Mills's Sunset Light shows her lack of training in its failed perspective. Her linocuts are more successful, especially those that present the cliff in total or partial silhouette, for this inexpensive medium makes a necessary virtue of simplicity, flatness and lack of halftones. These interpretations of the essential theme of cliff, reflection and tree are the most openly modernist of the entire Mazinaw Lake picture gallery.


ARTHUR LISMER (1885-1965)

Another native of England, Arthur Lismer received his art training at the Sheffield School of Art, but also studied in Antwerp at the Academie Royale des-Beaux-Arts. On his arrival in Toronto in 1911 he found a position at Grip Engraving, where he met and worked alongside J.E.H. MacDonald, Tom Thomson, F.H. Johnston and Franklin Carmichael. Liking the job, the people and the landscape, he encouraged Frederick Varley, an art-school friend from Sheffield, to come to Canada.

His career as an art educator began when he accepted the position of principal of the Victoria School of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he also worked for the Canadian War Records by recording images of returning troopships in the last years of World War I. After the war he came back to Toronto to become vice-principal of the Ontario College of Art and a founding member of the Group of Seven, along with Varley and some of his old companions from Grip.

As an occasional contributor to The Canadian Theosophist, a lover of Whitman's poetry, a member of the Arts and Letters Club and an active collaborator at Hart House Theatre, he could have met Merrill Denison through any of these interests, but his first to visit Bon Echo took place in August 1921. 'Arthur Lismer came up today,' Denison wrote to Muriel Goggin, 'and I took him out under the Rock...a great artist's reaction. He looked and looked and could do nothing but gurgle uneffectual nothings. He is one of the elected because Old Walt silenced his tongue.'

Lismer's second visit a year later bore fruit in December 1922 when he exhibited three Bon Echo subjects at the Art Gallery of Toronto. In Grey Rocks the effect of eliminating all foreground foliage is to remove the implied presence of the artist or any other human being. The rock face has been flattened by distance into a sheer stone wall with diagonal faultlines in the rock face that draw our eyes to the centre of the picture without forcing the painter's skill on our notice. The Big Rock is simply there, needing no further emphasis.

We can learn something about how a real artist works by examining the way Lismer created his major canvas Big Rock, Bon Echo, now at the National Gallery of Canada. He started with two rough planning sketches on a notebook page inscribed 'The Big Rock — Bon Echo.' These concentrate on the section of the Rock known as 'Egyptian Head', where the Whitman memorial had been carved on a smoothed-off surface. Based on the upper planning sketch, the first oil sketch, probably executed on the spot, roughly blocks in the basic forms, including the clouds in the upper left; the band of pollen just above the waterline; the shadowed headlands; and the large patch of sunlight.

Next comes a detailed panel of the same size with the clouds more defined and the rock shapes built up with shading or bright touches of colour to give them depth. This is a finished work, but Lismer took the process even further. The final version, was exhibited in the annual show of the Ontario Society of Artists in 1922.

According to Norah McCullough, a smaller 1923 version of The Big Rock, entitled Bon Echo Rock, is a studio painting, possibly done for the newspaper owner and art collector, H.S. Southam. Here, both the blues and the greens are more intense, but Lismer has brought back some of the lightness and freedom that give the original sketches their charm.


A.Y. JACKSON (1882-1974)

Like many artists of his day, the Montréal-born A.Y. Jackson received his basic artistic training from a combination of part-time lessons and on-the-job experience with commercial lithography firms in Montréal and Chicago. In 1907 he travelled to Paris, where he studied for several years at the Academie Julian. By 1913 he was sharing a studio in Toronto with Tom Thomson and developing friendships with the artists who were to form the Group of Seven in 1920. Between 1915 and 1918 the strongly nationalist Jackson served in the Canadian Army as an artist with the Canadian War Records but, once back in Toronto, he returned to his life-long interest in painting northern landscapes.

Jackson likely met Merrill Denison at the Arts and Letters Club, possibly through Frank Johnson or J.E.H. MacDonald, but his autobiography, A Painter's Country, records only that his first visit to Bon Echo took place on 24 January 1924. He agreed to design a poster, brochure and letterhead for Merrill Denison as a special concession to a friend, for by this date he had suspended his career as a commercial artist. After his return to Toronto from Mazinaw Lake, in the spring of 1924, he personally oversaw the production of a handsome five-colour poster at Rous and Mann, based on his wild, bright original painting. This was the most ambitious assignment he ever undertook for Denison, who hoped that the poster would be extensively circulated by the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Bon Echo Inn on the Mazinaw Lakes is one of the finest Canadian artist-produced posters from any period, a rare example of the happy marriage of design and state-of-the-art technology. The parasol-shaded passenger in the canoe adds an oriental touch to an otherwise robustly posterish treatment of the Mazinaw Rock, giving a human presence to the landscape while indicating the scale. The flat patterning of the sunlit and shaded areas of the cliff and the angular trunk of pine in the foreground suggest that Jackson was familiar with Japanese woodblock prints.

At Denison's request, Jackson also designed a brochure and letterhead for the inn, featuring the great rock, with a stippling effect achieved by flicking paint on to the drawing with a toothbrush. Like the brochure featuring F.H. Johnson's drawings and lettering, the folding brochure is mainly illustrated with photographs depicting the inn's setting and amenities.

Jackson's work at Bon Echo shows the Big Rock's seldom-painted winter face just at the point of spring's arrival. 'I'm very glad the place is to be painted in its winter garb by a fine painter,' wrote Merrill Denison to Muriel Goggin in February 1924, shortly before Jackson's arrival at the inn. It is clear from this letter that Merrill found Jackson a good companion. 'Jackson's a joy,' he observed.
'An ample man who has read, who grasps life and is a profound painter. His influence is...stimulation. He is really painting the place for the first time and will get some notable canvases.'

Surprisingly, Jackson's small but interesting body of work from Bon Echo has not received much notice. The most important Mazinaw painting, a dramatic night view of the cliff called Bon Echo, Lake Mazinaw, Ontario, cannot now be located, and only two pieces from his one visit have entered a public collection. Of the eight Mazinaw Lake oils by A.Y. Jackson, seven are sketch panels, probably painted out-of-doors as was his custom, even on the bitterest winter day.

The artist's eye was also drawn to the distant vistas of the South Lake, as viewed from bare ice out in the bay or glimpsed from behind a barricade of stumps or through a lattice of slender birches. More than most interpreters of the place, Jackson looked beyond the Rock to other, less dominant features, such as woodland interiors. Birches, Bon Echo gives full expression to his love of fat ice-creamy snow against aquamarine skies and patches of meltwater. His masterly use of colour brings out birches in purest white against faintly blue-green ice and snowdrifts.


DOROTHY STEVENS (1898-1966)

Born into a conservative Toronto milieu, Dorothy Stevens received her education at an English boarding school until the age of fifteen, when her obvious artistic talent and her parents' blessing got her into the Slade School in London and then the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris. Although she won prizes for drawing and painting, her etchings were most admired, and were exhibited in both London and Paris. On her return to Canada she turned to oil painting, specialising in portraits and figure work.

Stevens, who was prominent in Toronto's upper social circle, did not mingle much with the Denison crowd of radical artists and thinkers. As a woman, she could not have been a member of the Arts and Letters Club, and although she was elected to the Ontario Society of Artists in 1914, this was a practical organisation focused on affording its members opportunities to show and sell their work. It may be that she was courted by the Denisons because of her connection with the moneyed world of potential patrons and vacationers.

Although her name does not appear in any Bon Echo guest register, a 1926 on-the-spot photograph by Brigden's (our frontispiece) shows her smiling over her shoulder, elegantly self-possessed beneath the deep brim of her hat. In front of her stands an easel bearing a now-lost oil sketch of a shingled building. Her three Mazinaw paintings that we know of are undated and enter the record in November 1931 at a 'little pictures' show of the Ontario Society of Artists, where Stevens exhibited a pair of oils, both called Bon Echo. A small painting now entitled Bon Echo Rock may be one of these. Obviously painted at the site, it shows a free and radiant view of the cliff at the Narrows, with a deep-blue canoe front and centre, in contrast to the touches of unmixed crimson, green and black on the rock wall behind.

Nudes on Rocks was the third Mazinaw piece in the 1931 exhibition. Stevens had made a daring speciality of sensuous female nudes in outdoor settings, but social attitudes in Ontario at the time would have meant that such pictures could only be studio work. Here the bathers are posed with their backs to the viewer in front of the rock, which darkly sets off the pale bodies.

For a portraitist and figure artist like Stevens, the Bon Echo Rock was not the draw that it was for a landscape painter, and the bohemian atmosphere of the inn may not have been to her taste, although she would have concealed this at the time with her ready wit and charm.

No mere social butterfly, she taught portrait painting at the Doon School of Fine Arts, near Kitchener, and at other classes through some of the many associations of which she was a member. Stevens also held office or was otherwise active in women's organisations, including those concerned with classical music and the broad cultural life of Toronto, as well as fine art. Women of talent may well see Stevens as a role model, for she lived without sacrificing her art to her life or her life to her art.


FRANKLIN CARMICHAEL (1890-1945) & A.J. CASSON (1898-1992)

The Orillia, Ontario-born Franklin Carmichael received his earliest training in industrial design as a boy working with his father, a carriage-maker. For more formal instruction he turned to Toronto's Central Ontario School of Art and its successor, the Ontario College of Art. He apprenticed at Grip Engraving but spent his weekends on sketching trips with MacDonald, Thomson, Lismer, Varley and other older but like-minded painters of Canadian subjects. By 1913 he had saved enough money to sharpen his technique with a year's study in Europe — like Arthur Lismer before him, at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts at Antwerp.

On returning to Canada he shared workspace in Lawren Harris's Studio Building with Tom Thomson until Carmichael's marriage and move to north Toronto. Never a full-time painter, he supported himself and his family as an art director at Rous and Mann and then at Sampson-Matthews. As a graphic designer, he specialized in lettering and illustrating, ending his life as head of graphic and commercial art at the Ontario College of Art.

After his parents' move to Hamilton, Ontario, the young A.J. Casson studied at the Hamilton Technical School, then apprenticed at Laidlaw Lithography in the same city. He returned to his birth-city, Toronto, to work as a freelance illustrator by day and take classes by night. Carmichael became his mentor and major influence during a seven-year period as the older artist's assistant at Rous and Mann. In 1927 he followed him to Sampson-Matthews, where he eventually replaced him as art director.

The two artists arrived at Bon Echo Inn late in August 1928 for a working family holiday at reduced rates. At this time they were painting mostly in watercolours, but they returned to oils for their Bon Echo assignment of creating a series of sketches in tones of black and white for advertising purposes. If they fulfilled their commission, Carmichael and Casson each painted ten pictures during their four days at Bon Echo, but only a few of these paintings can be located today.

Carmichael's Bon Echo Camp was bought by its present owners at an exhibition of forty small oils and watercolours from the artist's estate in October 1964. The Toronto Globe and Mail had dated the painting to 1926, but Casson corrected this misinformation, explaining that the oil had been painted in sepia tones so that it could be used in a two-colour brochure. Carmichael had arbitrarily added the dark silhouette of a hill on the far right to balance the composition.

As described by Stuart MacKinnon in his poem, 'Mazinaw, Mazinuhigun, Mazzinabikon,' quoted as this book's epigraph, the robust oil sketch, Bon Echo, is a loose and confident revelation of Carmichael's grasp of tonal relationships in nature. It was painted from an unusual angle, looking down on the inn buildings from the heights of the Rock. Carmichael's hand-drawn map, with its streamlined lettering and suggestion of pirate treasure, shows the international manner he adopted earlier in the 1920s.

Best of all is Carmichael's coloured cut-out image for the back and front cover of the one published brochure that resulted from this visit. The starlit Big Rock in black, pale green and three shades of blue embodies the artist's idyllic vision of Canada as the landscape of inspiration. It is an outstanding example of advertising art, as pure and passionate as any Carmichael painting.

Where are the rest of Carmichael's and Casson's now-dispersed series? As the sale value of these pieces at the time of production would have been minimal because of their lack of colour, the artists may not have felt they could afford to keep them around. If so, or if they were dissatisfied with their quality, they would have scraped them down or painted over them, since prepared art board was expensive during the 1930s.

Although they would have seen each other at the Arts and Letters Club over the years, Casson's next artistic connection with Merrill Denison did not come until 1949, when he designed Denison's first 'corporate biography', Harvest Triumphant, the history of the Massey-Harris farm implement manufacturer. This project may have led to an invitation to stay at Bon Echo in 1951 and again in 1952. At any rate, Casson returned to paint the landscape on a number of occasions throughout the 1950s and 1960s, producing a sizeable body of Mazinaw Lake watercolours, including the 'cool high windy' one praised by Stuart MacKinnon. Casson's reputation has suffered as his later work became increasingly predictable. Continually described as the last surviving member of the Group of Seven, he had become a kind of icon of establishment art by the end of his long life.


CHARLES FRASER COMFORT (1900-1994)

Charles Comfort, born in Edinburgh, Scotla he won first prize in watercolours and an invitation from Frederick Brigden, the contest judge, to apprentice at the Winnipeg branch of Brigden's Ltd. In his spare time, Comfort studied art, winning the T. Eaton Company's 1919 country-wide competition for catalogue covers. His prize money paid for a trip to Toronto, where he joined the Arts and Letters Club and was inspired with the goal of breaking out of commercial art by the works of the Group of Seven, which he first saw at their exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto. A year of study in New York and a presence in several exhibitions at the Winnipeg Art Gallery moved him a few more steps on his way.

In February 1926 Comfort, now settled in Toronto, heard Merrill Denison read one of his plays at the Arts and Letters Club. He would also have encountered him in May of the same year at the Toronto Whitman Fellowship's celebration of the poet's 107th birthday. Through the literary editor of Saturday Night, William Arthur Deacon, Comfort was introduced to the Toronto Writers Club, where once again Merrill Denison was a member, along with the leaders of the Toronto literary world.

Comfort first visited Bon Echo towards the end of July 1927, accompanied by his wife and William A. Ogilvie, a colleague at Brigden's. Since, in 1926, Brigden's had sent two photographers to Mazinaw to document the inn, Comfort and his friend may have been there to design a never-published brochure.

In his unpublished autobiography, Comfort notes that he and Ogilvie set out for Bon Echo in his Ford Tudor while his pregnant wife made the trip by train to Kaladar, where the motorists met her. The road to the inn proved to be one of the roughest and most primitive ... we had ever driven over. It heaved across igloo-sized boulders and twisted through hazardous rocky denies in an endless succession of bone-shaking lurches. I was terrified throughout that phase of the journey.... I did want my child to be born at the scheduled time and not on a Lennox-Addington County road.

Only three Bon Echo views are definitely recorded in the Comfort inventory for 1927: Bon Echo Rock, a small oil-on-panel; and The Great Rock, Bon Echo, which formed the basis for the large and more muted The Great Rock, with a greater focus on the surface of the cliff. After being included in the sixth exhibition of the Group of Seven in February 1928 and at the art gallery of the Canadian National Exhibition the following August, the larger canvas become lost and was recovered in bad shape, years later, from a Salvation Army store. The Great Rock, Bon Echo, in the most vivid colours, shows a solid, simplified rock form, haloed at the top with bands of deepening blue, with a rush of white-capped waves in the lower right and centre.

After his successful, if rainy and mosquito-ridden, visit Comfort wanted to return to Mazinaw, but the Depression had closed down the inn. In July 1936 he visited Bon Echo with his wife and the husband-and-wife painting team of Bobs Cogill Haworth and Peter Haworth, but by then the inn had burned down. Although no paintings made during that visit have come to light, Comfort took colour photographs, which inspired a new round of studio-painted Mazinaw images when he had them developed thirty years later.

On a nostalgic visit to Bon Echo in 1977, Comfort and his wife had to correspond with Bon Echo Provincial Park in order to find the site of the inn, so much had the trees grown up. In order to get a clear view of the Big Rock across the bay, he was forced to place his easel on the north beach, but the result was a fine painting, Whitman Memorial Rock, Lake Mazinaw.


ERIC ALDWINCKLE (1909-1980)

Eric Aldwinckle, a painter and designer born in Oxford, England, showed an early aptitude for art and music which his family encouraged, but with the death of his father in 1921, the boy was sent to Canada to live with an aunt. He was apprenticed at the lithography firm of Rolph-Clark-Stone in 1923, moved through a number of firms in Toronto, and finally ended up at Sampson-Matthews, where he worked under Frank Carmichael in 1928. Beginning in 1929, he described himself as a freelancer. Despite being self-taught in art, his diverse abilities must have impressed his old supervisor, since he assisted Carmichael as an instructor in design at the Ontario College of Art from 1937 to 1942.

Aldwinckle's early paintings reflect the influence not only of Carmichael but of Lawren Harris, Bertram Brooker, Charles Comfort, Frederick Varley and an eclectic range of American and European masters, most notably Rockwell Kent and Charles Burchfield. Naturally curious, enthusiastic, and a ceaseless experimenter with materials, Aldwinckle mastered not only oil painting but egg tempera, watercolours, charcoal, graphite, pen-and-ink and scraper-board drawing. As a natural man of the theatre, the dashing and elegant artist participated in dramatic productions as an actor as well as a designer in plays at Hart House Theatre and other venues.

Merrill Denison appears to have met Eric Aldwinckle through the Arts and Letters Club, which owns a prized cartoon by Arthur Lismer depicting a judicially bewigged Denison conducting 'Interview Stuff,' while an over-eager Aldwinckle leans forward from the crowd to get a word in. During the 1950s and 1960s the gifted Aldwinckle's versatility found new outlets in mural painting, calligraphy, typography, illustration, heraldry and the design of medallions and coinage (including the Great Seal of Canada in 1952, and the swan symbol of the Stratford Shakespearean Festival).

Merrill Denison may have played host to Aldwinckle on his one visit to Bon Echo in the 1960s as much because of his interest in the stage as because of his painting. Perhaps because the topography is so different from that of the Killarney area where he had painted previously, Bon Echo did not bring out the best in Aldwinckle. The landscape lacks the anthropomorphic qualities of the La Cloche 'mountains,' with their fleshy mounds and curves, and he presented it straightforwardly as an assemblage of pleated planes and volumes highlit with dabs of brilliant red. In Bon Echo, Haliburton [sic] the crisp, short brushstrokes are built up in a precisely textured fashion reminiscent of the Winnipeg painter / teacher L.L. FitzGerald's backyard vistas and still lifes of the 1930s. It is clear that a certain amount of artistic license also went into an untitled oil-on-board in which the cliff, viewed head-on, is foregrounded by a rocky peninsula airlifted from Georgian Bay.

Now housed in Greystones at the Bon Echo Provincial Park is a brown-ink (or perhaps felt-tipped-pen) sketch by Aldwinckle of a boulder-strewn woodland interior, simply entitled Bon Echo. If the medium is felt pen, as the uniformity of the width and saturation of the strokes suggests, this is an unusually early use of this now-common drawing instrument.

Trapped in an increasingly anti-figurative era, Eric Aldwinckle was a decorative realist with skills and abilities for which the mid-century had no appreciation. His arts-and-crafts technique and his romantic idealism worked against the once-handsome and self-assured artist, who died in 1980 as a near-recluse embittered by a lack of recognition all too characteristic of his generation.


FREDERICK HAGAN (b.1918)

To find work, Fred Hagan's cabinet-maker father had to leave the land his grandparents had pioneered in Muskoka, but in summer he and his family exchanged Toronto for the district of his many stories. On school trips to the Art Gallery of Toronto, Hagan found in the titles of paintings by the Group of Seven such familiar names as Algonquin, Georgian Bay, Algoma and Temagami, which were already part of his life and his own attraction to 'rock country.'

In 1931, when Hagan was thirteen years old, his father's death forced him, like Jefferys, Lismer, Comfort and Aldwinckle before him, to work to put food on the family table. Four years later, he built a studio in his garage and, after studying drafting in the evenings at Central Technical School, he entered the Ontario College of Art, graduating from the night course in the spring of 1940. When he was rejected for military service in the Canadian Army, he tried to fill the gap with a few more months of training in printmaking at the New York Art Students League.

In 1941 Hagan had been teaching arts and crafts at Pinecrest, a YMCA camp near Bala in Muskoka, when the camp's distinguished director, C.R. Blackstock, recognised his remarkable character and abilities. Through 'Blackie,' he got a similar position at Pickering College in Newmarket during the school year, and then in 1944 at Camp Mazinaw, the boys' camp that had been revived on the west shore of South Mazinaw Lake. For Hagan, Mazinaw was a 'Canadian artist kind of place with serious painting possibilities' — many of them not noticed by earlier artists.

During the 1946 summer season Hagan concentrated on making quick wash studies as the basis for later lithographs. He abandoned the familiar shoreline altogether to show the Mazinaw back country west of the lake in Swamp Plains, where the road, culvert and telegraph pole remind us that human contact has altered the landscape. The pattern of sketching on-site in black ink and sepia wash, and then producing lithographs in his Newmarket studio, was repeated in 1947. Once again Hagan looked beyond the lake to the surrounding countryside and its lingering remnants of settlement, from old swaybacked barns to the dilapidated Kaladar Station, always choosing the particular over the general, the foreground over the distant vista.

Hagan did not experiment with wet-wash watercolours at Mazinaw Lake until 1951, after which he alternated that medium with lithographs. These pictures are evidence that he saw blues and greens, greys and browns, yellow-golds and orange-reds that no other painter has captured at Bon Echo. From 1951 to 1956 and then again on several occasions in the 1970s and 1980s, he painted every conceivable aspect of the shoreline, including the Rock itself, but he also roved inland, where at nearby Buck Lake, for example, a swamp tangle caught his eye. He found a paintable essence in humble buildings along the highway near the outlying villages of Northbrook and Cloyne, subjects never noticed by pilgrims to the Rock.

In the latter 1950s through the 1960s, Fred Hagan's teaching load at the Ontario College of Art forced him to resign his position at Camp Mazinaw. He did not return to Bon Echo until the winter of 1970, some forty-six years after A.Y. Jackson's February-March stay with Merrill Denison, and then again in 1971 and 1974. Like Jackson, he occupied himself with snowy shoreline views and woodland interiors, but in loosely painted, freshly tinted watercolours, rather than the older artist's oils. In painting snow, Hagan correctly lets the white paper do much of his work for him, supplying shape and form by means of shadows. In 1974 he launched a new series of Bon Echo lithographs on such seasonal themes as Spring Run-Off, Summer's Night and October Hills, with the last of these airily capturing the fleeting effects of sun and cloud-shadow on the fir-clad headlands and shoreline of North Mazinaw Lake, seen, as in earlier views by Carmichael and Casson, from the top of the Rock.

In 1981 Hagan resurrected the brush-and-ink method of his first Bon Echo drawings. His most recent Mazinaw watercolours date from 1982, when he reaffirmed his interest in two favourite motifs: the shoreline woodland interior and the distanced view of the Rock. On 1 August 1993 Hagan was rightly in attendance at the unveiling of the Ontario Heritage Foundation plaque honouring all those who contributed to the cultural enrichment of Bon Echo.


JOHN MORTENSEN (b.1947)

In 1993 the Friends of Bon Echo Provincial Park decided to establish the voluntary (unpaid) position of artist-in-residence, awarding this honour first to the Bancroft, Ontario painter Margaret Ford, and to John Mortensen. Born in Bismarck, North Dakota, into a cultured household, Mortensen's painter mother encouraged his early artistic ambitions by arranging some informal training for him with his uncle, an immigrant artist of the German Expressionist school. In the course of his travels through Western Europe and Greece in the late 1960s, the young Mortensen reaffirmed his wish for a life in art. In moving to Canada in 1969, he consciously rejected the growing violence of American society, as expressed in popular and political culture and foreign policy.

Mortensen worked and studied in cities and smaller centres as diverse as Montreal, Winnipeg, Vancouver and Aurora, Ontario, exploring different media and artforms, grappling with the perennial challenge of buying the time to make art. He and his wife settled in the town of Roslin, where he set up Clear Creek Studio in 1988.

Ready for a different experience, he applied for the position of artist-in-residence at Bon Echo. Looking back over a difficult first year, he reflected on the challenges of space, light, silence — the otherness of nature and his need not to impose an interpretation, but to accept whatever nature has to offer.

His work on this sacred ground is strongly influenced by the Group of Seven, whom he felt he had learned to know, years before, through his membership in the Arts and Letters Club. His painting reflects some of the 'poster-esque' qualities found in canvases by Group members, but he often chooses the unusual viewpoint favoured by Comfort or the less-obvious subjects often chosen by Hagan. He hopes to paint at the park for years to come, alternating his visits with working holidays sketching in the south of France under different light and in a gentler landscape.


CONCLUSION

From time immemorial —or at least since the last Ice Age — the granite face of Bon Echo Rock has risen above the waves of Mazinaw Lake. With the movement of sunlight and shadow, the cliff's multifaceted surface changes in mood and message: it broods, it radiates, it remains, in spite of the levelling forces of frost, rain, snow, wind and, now, acidulation, which chisel continuously at its resisting face. Tenon'd and mortised in granite, a footstep on the larger landscape, quietly it knows the amplitude of time.

The Bon Echo Rock is a stone thrown into water to generate ever-expanding circles of meaning for the generations that have found spiritual grace in its gneiss and granite reality.

The first circle of meaning lies in the ancient trees, lichens, rocks and minerals that form a microcosmic ecosystem unique in itself. Next comes the circle of Algonkian artists who used its sombre planes as raw canvases on which to draw mythical forms embodying the spirits of the place, direction signals, news bulletins, or their own dreams and nightmares.

The circle of exploitation follows next — first, the loggers who clear-cut the shores and the uplands, herding their logs down Mazinaw Lake past the cliff into the upper Mississippi watershed. Then came the prospectors, seeking elusive caves of silver and gold, not guessing that the real treasure of this hinterland would be cultural.

The next concentric ring encompasses the first 65 years of the twentieth century. During the Denisons' time, events at the foot of the silent sentinel travelled far beyond the shores of Mazinaw. Painted images of the Rock made their way into private homes, public galleries and corporate boardrooms. Like the unique features of Algonquin Park and Georgian Bay, the Rock became an icon of 'Northernness,' anchoring an emerging sense of national identity for Canadian artists in search of a new tradition.

For a brief period the inn across the water from the scarp attracted radical thinkers who debated such ideas as women's suffrage, free love, equal rights, cultural nationalism, the evils of organized religion, and the need to conserve and preserve, to change and move onward. Inspired by this landscape, Merrill Denison wrote plays about Canada for the Hart House stage and, later, for the CBC. The inn drew to it those who celebrated the democratic vision of Walt Whitman and the ideals of the League of Nations. Things thought, things said, things done at Bon Echo resonated across Canada and into the northern United States, and beyond.

The last concentric ring emanates from within the boundaries of Bon Echo Provincial Park itself. Today, Mazinaw is subject to public policy made at Queen's Park in Toronto and to economic forces that threaten to tear apart the legacy handed down for safekeeping by the Denisons.

Those who are drawn to the Rock now are more likely to carry cameras than paint-boxes. They may be members of an alpine club testing their limits on the climbers' rock-face, scientists struggling to unfold the mystery of the pictographs - or vacationers in search of a good campsite. But whatever their purpose, all who come in contact with Mazinaw are compelled to acknowledge its allure. Campers still troop to the amphitheatre on summer nights to hear tales of the Rock and to wonder if the ghost of 'Old Walt' might still be stopping somewhere waiting for them.

The message of Bon Echo is centred in the power of place to create cultural energy. In Canada, much money and effort have been expended in defining national identity; elections may be lost or won on questions of who and what we really are. We seek broad national definitions, then try to shoehorn in all the regions. As defining mythologies, we have tried the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Constitution, the National Hockey League, the Canadian Football League and the social safety net. None of them is a custom fit. Always there is the exception: the province that doesn't sign; the city without a team; the town that has lost its rail service; those who want less government, but not fewer amenities.