Seven Years with the Group of Seven

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 well designed and handsomely produced book offers an unpretentious
text and 59 illustrations, many in full color.

In the late 1950s, Joyce and Munroe Putnam moved to Grenville, Quebec,
in the Lower Ottawa Valley between Ottawa and Montreal. A renovated barn
was perfect as guest accommodation. Slowly, the Putnams set about their
dream of collecting art. The book focuses on the period 1964-71, during
which time most of the members of the Group of Seven stayed with the
Putnams and painted in the surrounding area. The book offers wonderful
reproductions of relatively unknown paintings such as Lawren Harris’s
Evening Solitude and J.E.H. MacDonald’s Logs in the River; glimpses
into the personal lives of the artists; and insight into the passion of
collecting and the deep joy that paintings can give. The wilderness
scenes “spoke” to the Putnams, as they have done to millions of
Canadians, expressing their own love of Canada’s forests, lakes, and
rocky terrain.

This book records the gradual realization of two amateur art
collectors’ shared dream, and affords what its author calls “a
privileged look inside the single most important generation of Canadian
painters.”