THE STORY BEHIND THOMSON'S PAINTING

When Tom Thomson painted on pulp board supports he would usually prepare them with a warm, ochre-coloured oil paint, which can usually be seen at the surface between individual strokes of paint, providing a unifying half-tone, or a background color to counterpoint with lively tints.

This technique was especially useful for Sunset Sky, providing general tone for the richly glowering sunset when there would have been a special need to work rapidly to capture such an effect without muddying the colors. Thomson achieved this by mixing tints on his palette before laying them on in individual glides.

The sketch shows him experimenting with an array of tints, from burnt orange to pale blue-green, which many painters would shy away from. The overall horizontal alignment of the strokes is fitting for calm landscapes and cloud studies and the array of tints produced in Sunset Sky would eventually form the building blocks of Thomson’s celebrated masterpiece, The Jack Pine.