The Group of Seven: Artistic Adventurers

When we think about Canadian painting, we often conjure up the image of a clear, crisp day, with a blanket of snow covering the ground, and slender evergreens surrounding a calm, deep blue lake.

The powerful compositions of the most significant Canadian painters of the first half of the twentieth century—whose paintings have become part of Canada’s national heritage—can be seen in some of the most visited art galleries in Canada. Among them are the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario.

Seven Canadian artists founded their own group between 1911 and 1913, and named it the Group of Seven in 1920. As romantics and mystics, they persistently and devotedly tried to establish freedom in the expression of their personal impressions on canvas.

Having studied art in Paris, Berlin, London, and Antwerp, full of modernist ideas inherited from the French impressionists and symbolists, they formed the Canadian school with their experiences.

The like-minded friends met at the design firm Grip Ltd. where they made commercial drawings and paintings. They would go to lunch at the Arts and Letters Club where would discuss various topics, debate about Canadian ideals, share their dreams, and share their enthusiasm about exploring Canada’s nature, above all with the intention of defining Canadian identity through art.

By canoe or on foot, they would arrive at rarely visited places in Ontario, Georgian Bay on Lake Huron, Algoma, Quebec, Vancouver, the Arctic, Lake Superior, and others.

Out of a great desire to change and modernize the thus-far conservative and superficial approach to Canadian painting, they wanted to show an authentic, contemporary, and raw depiction of Canada.

The artistic establishment was opposed to their rhetoric much more than to their actual works. Eric Brown, the director of the National Gallery of Canada, was of a different opinion, and believed in the future of their art even as early as 1925. He sent them to the prestigious British Empire Exhibition in Wembley, England, where the British press later published positive reviews, justifying their trip to the anxious members of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

The paintings magically transform Canadian landscapes into different dimensions and spheres with their clean colours and the dynamic of their simple shapes. To the human eye, they appear enchanting and familiar, inspiring and transcendental. They take us past the borders of experience into new textures, muted sounds and the freedom of our imaginations, showing the most beautiful nature of this country. They lived with nature, whose colours and light they depicted with the utmost feeling on their canvases.

Dark shadows stretch across some paintings, symbols of the devastating effects and scars of war on their generation. Their art is the personal testimony that the holy and healing power of nature can renew a world torn apart by war.

Lawren Harris received the highest honour for his outstanding talent and contribution to Canada and to humanity when he was awarded the Order of Canada in 1969.

In 2009, his small sketch entitled The Old Stump, Lake Superior was sold for $3.5 million dollars.

The significance of the Group of Seven was particularly great in 1926, and their influence would grow out of Toronto and Ontario soon after. Year by year, the group would grow in number, until it was renamed the Canadian Group of Painters in 1933, with 52 artist members.

The seven artists, icons of Canadian painting devoted to the same ideas, created a unique character of Canadian landscape painting. The found “the soul of things,” as they would often say, in pristine Canadian nature: in hilly regions and snowy mountains, in the frozen lakes and Arctic climate of the Canadian Shield. They made these regions accessible and recognizable thanks to their great works of art that are now a part of Canadian cultural heritage.

Inspired by the works of the Group of Seven, for 36 years Jim and Sue Waddington searched for the places that the famous artists painted. The result of these many years of locating, documenting, and photographing is the book In the Footsteps of the Group of Seven, a sort of travel memoire with 175 photographs that pays respect to the artists and to nature.