The Most Beautiful Country in the World According to the Group of Seven

Original Group of Seven Members

The original members of the Group of Seven consisted of four born Canadians as well as three British expatriates. They all met while living, working, and painting in Toronto, Canada, in the years leading up to the First World War. During the war years, some members went to Europe to document the war through their art, while others remained in Canada. After the end of the conflict, the members all found themselves back in Toronto where they formed the famous Group of Seven.

Franklin (Frank) Carmichael

Born in Orillia, Ontario, Franklin Carmichael (1890–1945) was the youngest member of the Group of Seven. He originally received training as a carriage maker from his father before moving to Toronto to study at the Ontario College of Art. In 1913, he traveled to Antwerp to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. His time there was cut short and he returned to Toronto in 1914 due to the outbreak of war in Europe and also due to a lack of funds to continue his studies abroad.

Upon his return, he moved into the Studio Building with Tom Thomson and married shortly thereafter. Carmichael was a great admirer of Thomson and learned a great deal from this mentor and friend. He worked as the art director of the printing company Rous and Mann from 1916 to 1925.

Sadly his freedom as an artist was restricted by the demands of providing for his family. He could afford neither the time nor the money to join on the Group’s more expansive trips such as those to Algoma. Each autumn he would carve out a few weeks of camping and sketching and his first major trips weren’t until joining a Group expedition to Lake Superior in 1923 and 1924. Despite his sketching trips being limited to yearly vacations in the north, he worked with great energy and intensity making the most of his time away from the city.

Lawren Harris

Born in Brantford, Ontario, Lawren Harris (1885–1970) was an heir to the Massey-Harris fortune (the company was the largest manufacturer of agricultural equipment in the British Empire at the time). This allowed Harris near unlimited financial freedom and he shared his wealth with the Group through funding painting expeditions.

As a child Harris attended a private boy’s school and spent his summers in the Muskoka district of Ontario. He attended the University of Toronto before going to Europe to study art where he took great interest in sketching the slums of Berlin. From Europe, Harris traveled to the Near East, visiting Beersheba and Damascus.

When he returned from Europe in 1908, he continued to explore slums by painting scenes of the Ward, a neighborhood in central Toronto that was home to many new immigrants and racialized communities. During this period critics attacked him for not painting the nicer houses in more affluent neighborhoods such as Rosedale. He continued to paint “house portraits” through the late 1920s as a way to explore the play of light on trees and façades and they demonstrate his awareness of impressionist techniques. Harris enlisted in the summer of 1915 and taught musketry at Camp Borden until 1917. He was discharged from military service when he suffered a physical collapse upon hearing of his brother’s death overseas.

In 1918, Harris used his money and influence to arrange a painting trip for himself, MacDonald, Johnston, and their friend and patron Dr MacCallum to Ontario’s Algoma district. Somehow Harris managed to borrow a boxcar from a local rail company that they could live and work out of while parked off rail sidings. The boxcar was outfitted with chairs, tables, bunks, a stove, and shelves for storing books and painting supplies. They also took along a canoe and a three-wheel handcar for short trips. Every few days arrangements were made for the boxcar to be moved to a different siding, giving the group various landscapes to work from during the trip.

When Harris visited Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1921, he revisited the theme of slums in his paintings. However, unlike his paintings of houses in the Ward in Toronto with their happy play of sun on the trees and façades, his Halifax houses are much more grey and gloomy.

A. Y. (Alexander Young) Jackson

Surely, A. Y. Jackson (1882–1974) had the polar opposite beginnings to Harris. Born in Montreal, Quebec, he had to earn a living from a very young age. After several failed business ventures, Jackson’s father moved to Chicago leaving his mother to raise six children on her own. Jackson managed to get a job working as an office boy in a lithography company to help support the family. He briefly lived in Chicago and worked for a commercial art firm before traveling to Europe on a cattle boat in 1905. By 1907, he had earned enough to afford two years of study in France and he returned to Canada in 1909.

In 1913, Jackson moved to Toronto, Ontario, but maintained connections with artists based out of Montreal. He thus became a link between the art scenes in the two cities. That same year, Jackson met J. E. H. MacDonald, Frederick Varley, and Arthur Lismer at the Arts & Letters Club. As a former commercial artist turned full-time painter they accepted him as a kindred spirit.

Jackson was the only member of the Group to see action during the Great War. He enlisted in June 1915 and was sent overseas that November. In June of 1916, Jackson was wounded on the front line and spent time convalescing in England. He was nearly redeployed in 1917 but instead was appointed to the Canadian War Memorials, a program that sent civilian artists to document the war.

Of all the members of the Group of Seven, Jackson made the most concerted effort to paint all regions of the country. Along with Harris, Jackson went to Jasper Park in Alberta in 1924 and in 1926 he visited the Skeena River in northwest British Columbia. In 1927, Jackson even left for an expedition to the Arctic in search of new forms and landscapes and made a second trip to the far north with Harris in 1930. The Prairies was the last region of the country Jackson visited and not until five years after the Group of Seven disbanded. Notwithstanding all his travels, Jackson was most comfortable painting in the familiar surrounds of Quebec and Ontario.

Arthur Lismer

Born in Sheffield, England, Arthur Lismer (1885–1969) won an entrance scholarship to the Sheffield School of Art at the age of 13 and started an apprenticeship towards becoming a silver craftsman. He became frustrated with his studies feeling that the teaching methods were outdated. At 21, he left to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. He returned to Sheffield in 1908 but struggled to make a living and moved to Canada in 1911.

In 1913, Lismer took his first trip to Georgian Bay. On the boat ride to Go Home Bay, the weather turned so rough that he and his family had to take shelter overnight on an island. This experience seeded in Lismer a deep love and respect for the North. He felt closer to Canada while in remote locations than he was in the city; he found Toronto to be a cultural backwater.

Aside from being a distinguished painter, Lismer led a career in art education. He moved to Halifax in 1916 to work as the principal of an art school, leaving that post in 1918 to join the War Memorials. In 1919, Lismer returned to Toronto taking a job as the vice-principal at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD), a position he held for eight years. However, there was often friction between Lismer and the old guard at the college who tried to block reforms and changes at the school that Lismer endorsed.

J. E. H. (James Edward Hervey) MacDonald

Another non-Canadian member of the Group, J. E. H. MacDonald (1873–1932) was born in Durham, England. He moved to Hamilton, Ontario with his family while he was still quite young, in 1886. There, he attended the Hamilton School of Art before moving to Toronto in 1889. A few years later, MacDonald got a job working as an engraver for the Toronto Lithography Company. After that, he worked at the Grip until 1911, except for a brief stint working as a book designer for the Crofton Studio in London, England. By the end of his time at the Grip, MacDonald had risen to the position of head designer. He ultimately decided to leave the firm to pursue painting full-time.

In 1913, MacDonald and Harris took a trip to Buffalo, New York, to see an exhibition of contemporary Scandinavian artists. The pair took particular interest in the landscapes on display, feeling an affinity for the similarities to Canadian topography. They were also impressed by the way the landscapes were depicted with a rustic simplicity.

MacDonald was the least outdoorsy member of the Group of Seven. He had a delicate constitution and could neither swim nor find his way through the bush alone. He was most inspired by the Algoma region that he visited in the boxcar and he predominantly created works depicting northern Ontario.

In 1922, MacDonald made his one and only trip to the Maritimes, spending six weeks near Petite Rivière, Nova Scotia. MacDonald suffered a stroke in 1931 and spent the following summer recovering in Barbados. He passed away in Toronto in November 1932 at just 59 years old.

Frederick Varley

Frederick Varley (1881–1969) was a schoolmate of Lismer. He was also from Sheffield, England, and attended the Sheffield School of Art on a scholarship. He left before completing the program to attend the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. From there, Varley moved to London, England, and later Yorkshire, where he married. At this time he was already known for living a “bohemian” lifestyle and for having temperamental moods, this reputation stuck throughout his life.

When Lismer returned to England in 1912, he reconnected with Varley who was struggling financially with a wife and two children to support. Inspired by Lismer, Varley borrowed some money from Lismer’s brother-in-law and moved to Canada in 1912. Shortly thereafter, he started working at the Grip. In 1918, Varley went overseas to paint for the War Memorials and was deeply moved by what he saw. He felt a deep emotional response to the tragedy in Europe and it matured him as an artist. In the post-war years, he created many portraits while other members of the Group focused entirely on landscape works.

In 1926, Frederick Varley moved to Vancouver, British Columbia to lead the department of drawing and painting at the Vancouver School of Art. He had little to do with the Group of Seven in the years that followed and only participated in two more of their exhibitions.

Frank Johnston

Frank Johnston (1888–1949) was born in Toronto and worked for just a short time at the Grip in 1908 after working as a designer and studying art in night school. In 1910, he moved to Philadelphia to continue his studies. From there he moved to New York to work in commercial art, eventually returning to Toronto in 1915.

While most members of the group worked in oil paints, Johnston often did his sketches in gouache. The quick-drying nature of this medium allowed Johnston to be incredibly productive on his sketching trips. At the exhibition that followed the boxcar trip with Harris and MacDonald to Algoma, he showed 60 works. Johnston always stood somewhat apart from the rest of the Group of Seven, preferring to work and show individually. Unsurprisingly, he was the first member to leave the Group in 1924, not wanting to be associated with any group of artists.

The Grip Ltd. and the Arts & Letters Club

The Grip was a commercial art firm that at one time or another employed five of the Group’s members as well as Tom Thomson; only A. Y. Jackson and Lawren Harris did not work there. It specialized in general artwork and layouts for large department stores such as Eaton’s and most of the designs were a late form of European Art Nouveau.

At the time it was difficult for young artists to make a living. The Grip provided employment to many aspiring artists who attended art school in the evenings and sketched on the weekends. Grip manager, Albert Robson, maintained a friendly yet demanding work environment and also took a sincere interest in his employees, encouraging them in their artistic endeavors outside of their time in the office.

Meanwhile, the Arts & Letters Club was a private men’s social club for those involved in the Toronto art scene of the time. It provided an atmosphere for creativity and collaboration between artists of all types, including visual artists, musicians, actors, writers, as well as patrons. Most days artists from the Grip would meet at the Arts & Letters Club for lunch and would sit at the same table as Harris and Jackson. Subsequently, the Grip Limited and the Arts & Letter Club were two institutions that were pivotal in the foundation of the Group of Seven.

Formation

The Group of Seven was very much a Toronto-based movement. All of the original members lived primarily in Toronto from 1913 until the Group disbanded in 1932. In the early years, prior to the Group’s formation, future members sketched in and around Toronto, producing few works farther afield. Most of the members knew the North well but made no attempt to make sketches of it until 1912 or 1913. As well, the Group of Seven likely would have formed several years earlier had life not been interrupted by the Great War and Tom Thomson most definitely would have been a member if it wasn’t for his untimely death.

The exhibition of Algoma works presented in 1919 marked the first ensemble showing on their own and the members felt that as a group they could defend more successfully against criticism. There is no exact known date of the Group of Seven’s formation although the decision was probably made in February or March of 1920. At the time, Jackson was on a sketching trip in Penetang, returning to Toronto in late April.

Exhibitions

There were only a few formal meetings each year of the Group of Seven. These were for planning exhibitions and trips and later on to consider adding new members. They held their first official exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto from 7–27 May, 1920. A year later in May 1921 they held their second exhibition which showed works by all the members except Johnston. By this point, the Group was already starting to gain some recognition and 2500 people visited the show during its 24 days on display.

More exhibitions would follow in the years to come, with their eighth and final exhibition in December of 1931. By this time, the Group of Seven no longer had seven members, it had eight! Frank Johnston left the Group in 1924 and A. J. Casson (1898–1992) was invited to replace him in 1926. Later, in 1930, Edwin Holgate (1892–1977) joined. The final exhibition featured works from all eight members of the Group of Seven plus works from another 24 invited contributors.

Dissolution

Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald (1890–1956) was the last official member to join the Group in 1932, the same year as MacDonald’s passing. Also that same year, the Group of Seven disbanded. They had achieved such widespread influence that they felt it was no longer necessary to continue as a group.

However, in 1933 the Canadian Group of Painters was established and was a direct outgrowth of the Group of Seven. This new group drew members from across the country and was concerned with figure painting as well as, but not exclusively, landscapes.

Group of Seven and Canadian Nationalism

In the post-World War I era, there was a broader national movement to build a distinct identity for Canada through art and culture in which the Group of Seven played an important role. For Canada to be a great country, it needed to have its own art.

The Group believed that the northern landscape made Canada unique and subsequently sought out rugged landscapes they felt best depicted the moods of the nation. They were not concerned with realism so much as with using nature and the elements as symbols of the nation’s beauty and greatness. Interestingly, their attempts to capture the “moods” of landscapes paralleled earlier efforts of the Post-Impressionists in Europe.

The claim that the Group of Seven was painting Canada is also a bit of a myth. The largest portion of their works depict landscapes in the Canadian Shield, a geologic area that spans the center of the country and is very different from the landscapes of the coasts. Jackson was the only member of the Group to make a serious effort to paint from coast to coast.

A Note on Artistic Process and Embedded Images

The members of the Group of Seven, like the Impressionists, painted outdoors to capture their landscapes directly from nature. However, because they were often camping out in the wilderness, taking full-sized canvases to work on just wasn’t a practical option. Instead, the Group took small boards on these trips to make their sketches on. Once they returned to the city and to proper studio space, these sketches were used as reference material for larger paintings on canvas.

If you scroll back and look at the descriptions of all the paintings embedded in this article, you will see that they are all painted on boards or paper. These are all sketches, not final works on canvas. The writer encourages you to explore and compare sketches by the Group of Seven with the final works if you take an interest in the process of painting!

Thank you to our partners at the McMichael Collection for providing images from their collection!