Northern Light: The Enduring Mystery of Tom Thomson and the Woman Who Loved Him

Northern Light: The Enduring Mystery of Tom Thomson and the Woman Who Loved Him by Roy MacGregor. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780307357397.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER FINALIST 2011 – Ottawa Book Award for Non-Fiction Roy MacGregors lifelong fascination with Tom Thomson first led him to write Canoe Lake, a novel inspired by a distant relatives affair with one of Canadas greatest painters. Now, MacGregor breaks new ground, re-examining the mysteries of Thomsons life, loves and violent death in the definitive non-fiction account. Why does a man who died almost a century ago and painted relatively little still have such a grip on our imagination? The eccentric spinster Winnie Trainor was a fixture of Roy MacGregors childhood in Huntsville, Ontario. She was considered too odd to be a truly romantic figure in the eyes of the town, but the locals knew that Canadas most famous painter had once been in love with her, and that she had never gotten over his untimely death. She kept some paintings he gave her in a six-quart basket shed leave with the neighbours on her rare trips out of town, and in the summers shed make the trip from her family cottage, where Thomson used to stay, on foot to the graveyard up the hill, where fans of the artist occasionally left bouquets. There she would clear away the flowers. After all, as far as anyone knew, he wasnt there: she had arranged at his familys request for him to be exhumed and moved to a cemetery near Owen Sound. As Roy MacGregors richly detailed Northern Light reveals, not much is as it seems when it comes to Tom Thomson, the most iconic of Canadian painters. Philandering deadbeat or visionary artist and gentleman, victim of accidental drowning or deliberate murder, the mans myth has grown to obscure the real view — and the answers to the mysteries are finally revealed in these pages.