Thomson is a noted art collector and owns works by
Rembrandt,
J. M. W. Turner,
Paul Klee,
Hammershoi,
Edvard Munch,
Patrick Heron,
Joseph Beuys,
E. L. Kirchner, and
Egon Schiele. Thomson owns the world's largest collection of paintings and drawings by the English painter
John Constable. In an interview with Geraldine Norman in
The Independent in 1994, Thomson said he bought his first Constable drawing at 19, giving the seller "an oil painting in exchange and quite a lot of money". Norman described him as a "fanatical collector", and Thomson described how he "fell in love" with Constable's style as a young child. In his twenties, Thomson stunned the art world with two monumental purchases. In 1984, he acquired J. M. W. Turner's spectacular
Seascape: Folkestone, for a record £7.3 million (£21.8 million in 2017) from the sale of the collection of noted British art historian
Kenneth Clark, Lord Clark. The following year, Thomson, 27, broke another world record when he bought Rembrandt's monumental
Christ Presented to the People, from 1655, for a record £561,000 (£1.7 million in 2017) at Christie's London, when the Duke of Devonshire sold the Chatsworth Collection in one of the largest auctions of the time. Thomson sold both masterpieces within a few years during the 1980s financial crisis. In 2002, Thomson and his father paid a world record price of $76.7 million to acquire Rubens'
Massacre of the Innocents, now the centrepiece of the Thomson Collection at the
Art Gallery of Ontario. In 2012, Thomson shattered records buying a painting by Danish artist
Vilhelm Hammershøi,
Ida Reading a Letter, paying the highest price ever for a Danish artist. In 2012, Thomson broke the record for the most expensive 18th-century British watercolour when he paid £2.4 million for a small landscape by
John Robert Cozens. Thomson has donated upwards of $276 million to the Art Gallery of Ontario's renovation costs, in addition to creating a permanent endowment with an additional $20 million donation. Thomson is an active acquirer of Canadian art. In 2007, Thomson paid $1.8 million for a face mask, the highest price ever paid for a single piece of Native North American art. And in November 2016 he paid a record C$11.2 million to buy a painting at auction by Group of Seven artist
Lawren Harris entitled
Mountain Forms. Thomson operates his collecting activities through his personal Thomson Works of Art. Thomson also funds the Archive of Modern Conflict, based in London. Specialists within the archive purchase photography collections worldwide and also run a book-publishing arm, AMC Books, which has a Canadian imprint, Bone Idle Books, based in Toronto. ==Personal life==