Thomson and Burke were good friends, beginning with their time as roommates in Toronto on Gerrard Street when Burke attended college, in 1909. Burke owned three other works by Thomson in the McMichael: Young Fisherman (1905.05), Sailboat, c.1906 (1906.06), /entry1912.05/ and Head of a Woman, 1907 (1907.01) as well as Design for a Stained-Glass Window, Havergal College, c.1908 (1908.07) (AGO 81/132) (see Dulmage, 1963).
The subject was a favorite of the artist. Margaret Thomson Tweedale once owned a similar watercolour.
The source for Tom Thomson`s Girl Looking in Mirror (1903) in the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg is a postcard dated 1901 by the Austrian artist Raphael Kirchner (1876 – 1917).
In 1903, Thomson worked at the photo-engraving trade, with Maring & Blake in Seattle. The firm in which he worked would have given him access to a wide variety of magazines and printed material.
Henry Thomson, one of Thomson`s brothers, said that when Thomson was young it was “a regular game with him” to study an illustration and then change the design and compare it with the original. (This letter is in the National Gallery of Canada. It was written for Henry by another brother, Fraser.)
In his version, Thomson changed the leaves to flowers. He made the young woman look slightly demented with a wild eye and a headband low on her forehead. He meant his version to be humorous, as he obviously found the image of the young woman in the postcard to be comical.
This postcard and the use Thomson made of it provides us with evidence of his working methods at this early time in his career. We do not have any other example of the way in which he actually worked and of what his brother meant by “a regular game with him.”
Kirchner applied the Art Nouveau style to images of young women that were basically the pin-ups of the day.