Tom Thomson was a man with a message. He might have been a musician, a poet or a dramatist. What he had to say had to be said. Circumstances of environment turned him towards form and color. Thomson was not a man with a medium seeking adequate objects for his brush. He was a man with the theme innate within him, groping about for seven-eighths of his life for a medium.
A. Y. Jackson
Tom Thomson's Last Spring 