mother nature's children
on cheap excursions
coast to coast
Combines Tom Thomson's Autumn's Garland (1915–1916) with Pierre Girieud's Portrait of the Painter Émilie Charmy (1908), an antique map of Canada, and an ad from The Dominion Illustrated (1889).
The story
The landscape is Tom Thomson's Autumn's Garland, one of his paintings of autumn colour from the years just before his death in 1917. The woman is from Pierre Girieud's Portrait of the Painter Émilie Charmy (1908). Charmy (1878–1974) was a French painter in the circle of Henri Matisse, the artists nicknamed les Fauves, "the wild beasts", for their violent, unnatural colour. Very few of them were women.
Under them lies an antique map of Canada. Over them runs a notice from The Dominion Illustrated of 1889: the Canadian Pacific Railway "are running a series of cheap excursions from stations in Quebec and Ontario to all points in Manitoba, the North West, British Columbia and the Pacific Coast". The line to the Pacific had been finished only four years earlier, in 1885.