Ada Kinton And The Painted Lakeland

Photo By Fred Schulz

ADA FLORENCE KINTON PAINTED THE WOODLANDS OF PIONEER MUSKOKA

At the moment, I’m staring out my office window, at a warm Spring morning, with a small amount of rain spiraling with the wind, occasionally hitting the pane of glass creating a sort of crystal mosaic. The artist looking for inspiration, as this writer seeks out the words, wouldn’t find too much inspiration from nature today, unless it either soon begins a heavier rainfalll or the sun suddenly breaks through the cloud cover. As a matter of some irony, writer / artist Ada Florence Kinton, the biography I’m currently composing, would have found something remarkable, attractive and memorable about this same framed landscape, of a storm-clad Muskoka woodland. Despite what I find dull and uneventful now. She found beauty in nature every day, and it’s what she so poignantly depicted on her paint boards, and wrote in her daily journal, while residing here almost 130 years ago.

Born and raised in the urban landscape of Victorian England, Ada Kinton arrived in the Canadian wilds with some trepidation, as most visitors and immigrants felt on seeing the vast forests of the dominion. Having spent most of her life in the thick of city existence, and drawing art from the old world standards of architecture and romantic pasture, seeing the thick forest stands of the Ontario hinterland was admittedly frightening at first. Greatly exhausted by the grueling steamship passage across the Atlantic, and long train ordeal from Quebec to Toronto, the traveler must have been absolutely astonished by the boundless snowscape yet to come. Imagine the sleigh passage north through Muskoka in the 1880's, much of it in the evening hours, illuminated by small oil lamps, gyrating from rough travel over perilous frozen trails, the snorting team rising sluggishly up and over rocky hillsides, racing down the ice-shimmering trails into the valley, across half-frozen boglands, the steam of the horses’ breathing making a ghostly passage across the eerie moonglow. She found it a lonely, somewhat threatening passage, as she should have, yet her diary entries make it a work of art....as it is easy to visualize what she had experienced.

After her mother and father’s deaths in England, Ada Kinton was encouraged to visit with her brothers Ed and Mackie, who had emigrated to Canada much earlier, and who were by the 1880's, very much a part of the new economy of pioneer Huntsville, in North Muskoka. In 1907, shortly after her death in Huntsville, after a lengthy illness, her sister Sara Randleson, published Ada’s journal, entitled "Just One Blue Bonnet," containing some of the observations the young artist made, upon taking up painting forays into the woodlands, then so beautifully wreathing the pioneer hamlet. She adored exploring the hinterland, removing herself often, from the warm homestead hearth, for long treks into the largely unexplored forests, not yet fully exploited by the vigorous tree harvest, at the time, which would eventually strip most of the countryside of its natural resources. Ada wrote the following passage after one such spring outing:

"Out painting a fallen hemlock all afternoon, till it commenced to rain and forced me to return. The rain turned to snow, and all the earth is white again. More geese flying north. - signs of warm weather coming....wish it would hurry up. After lunch the air seemed milder and the snow had ceased, so that about four (p.m.) I made an attempt to complete my fallen hemlock but got cramped with cold, so meandered a bit in the pathless tangle of fallen trees and splintered boughs, damp leaves, and sprouting ferns and curious little four-leaved vegetation which is just appearing above the earth, with a few violet leaves - the only signs of spring yet."

On the third of February 1883, while residing temporarily in Huntsville, Ada made the following entry into her journal: "Made an apron for myself - felt proud. Miss the rumbling of carts and carriages in the road. Can’t seem to get used to the silence of the snow. Seems a long way from England. (Feb. 16^th) Concert. Mrs Kinton sang ‘Take Back The Heart.’ Very much struck with the ease and natural grace of some performers. Everyone kept time to the music, either with their hands or their feet, and the interest and excitement was very great. Thaw on! Heard the sound of the rain again. It sounded nice. Masses of loosened snow slip from the roof and fall with a soft crash and thud. Cold wind and glare ice, thawed surface of snow frozen over again. Makes walking difficult. Village very picturesque and quaint in the moonlight, like a lot of miniature toy wooden cottages chucked down anyhow on the uneven ground, covered over with nice snow and just a light here and there to make it look pretty; and then all around a dark bordering of great hills fringed with forest; and through the village, the river coiling and under the wooden bridge to the lake, all steely ice except in the middle, where the current is rapid and strong, a dark inky blue bit of stream shows itself in a fitful, broken sort of way. Wonder where all the water lilies have hid themselves. Been feeding on huckleberry pie, and crabapple jelly and cream, and hot biscuits, and hot home-made currant buns, and tea and toast.....feel dreadfully ashamed of myself."

Already a competent writer, artist and teacher at this point of her young life, having begun both disciplines at home in England, her attention to the detail of the pioneer community of North Muskoka is of critical importance. Even in the 1880's she was aware of how the destruction of the woodlands would impact habitat, and as future journal entries will reveal, Ada was very much in touch with the creatures that would visit her while on sketching adventures, from curious chipmunks, to birds flitting from overhead branch to branch, almost as if they were interested in her depictions of their forest home. As well, what her art panels and descriptions reveal, is a passionate interest in the flora and fauna of the fledgling region, and these are of particular importance to historians, trying to piece together the community’s growth at this time of settlement investment. As many artists lamented, she had a sense of urgency, to paint the forested landscape before the crack of the axe, and rumble of log laden sleighs pushed down these same paths of her paradise.