The MacCallum-Jackman Cottage Mural Paintings

Patricia Morley is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University, an associate fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute, and author of Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

This slender, attractively designed book celebrates the artists who
painted the murals on the walls of a summer cottage in Georgian Bay in
1915–16 (chiefly J.E.H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, and Tom Thomson) and
the patrons who encouraged and supported them.

Shirley Thomson, Director of the National Gallery, notes in the
foreword how collectors and friends of artists (“men and women of
intelligence and taste” have helped the Gallery acquire some of its
most beautiful works. Landy, Assistant Curator of Canadian Art,
underlines this point. James MacCallum is the story’s central
character: “He was an unusual man with out-of-the-ordinary
accomplishments; in this case, he carved a place for himself in the
history of Canadian art without being an artist.”

The relatively brief text consists of three parts. The first is a
biographical sketch of MacCallum, the son of a Methodist minister whose
Collingwood parish included a mission up the east coast of Georgian Bay.
The second is the story of the 1898 formation of the Madawaska Club by a
group of University of Toronto professors who bought land at the mouth
of Go-Home River. The third is a commentary on the appeal of this
wilderness terrain, accessible only by boat, to the young Canadian
landscape painters who were making their names known in this century’s
second decade.

Disappointingly, the mural paintings are reproduced only in black and
white. The reasonable price reflects this economy. Color is confined to
the handsome fold-in cover, but even here the reproduction fails to
convey the brilliance and depth of the originals, some of which may be
seen at the National Gallery. However, the bold designs show well even
without color.

The narrative and the images are happily partnered in this valuable
contribution to the literature on the School of Seven.