This powerful little panel is one of the last, if not the last, of Thomson’s paintings. It offers telling indicators that artist Harold Town was right in his conviction that Thomson would have developed further had he lived longer. The prospect of abstraction had already infected the zeitgeist of the Western world.

The art market may have been dormant during the war, but the global conflict had invaded artists’ minds with brash new ideas, violently reshaping their manner of expression. Canada might have been an outpost in many respects, but Thomson was already reacting to a seismic shift in Western Art, without yet knowing exactly what it was.