Blodwen Davies, "Chapter 16: And In Conclusion", A Study of Tom Thomson, 1935.

[…] The significance of Tom Thomson was what he achieved by single-pointed devotion to his search for beauty and for truth, and that was the liberation of a great store of intuitive knowledge and inherent skills. His modesty, his sensitivity, his courage and his faith in his own inner promptings, serve to prove the value of those characteristics and the need to cultivate them in ourselves and in others.

In some respects Thomson has been given credit for more than he deserves. Thomson was part of a whole, a segment without which the circle would not have been complete. He gave much to the life of his group, and he took much from it, but the modern movement for spiritual freedom neither began nor ended with Tom Thomson. Interest in him lies not in a strange and solitary genius but in an outcropping that revealed a rich vein of genius running through his age and his people, waiting to be worked. Without predecessors and without successors, his life would have had little significance for others, but Thomson was slowly evolved by the intelligent forces that direct the progress of the race.

Thomson was not the goal, but he was a milestone.

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