JEH MacDonald

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

J.E.H. MacDonald (1873–1932) was a senior member of the Group of
Seven. His interest in design (a talent that earned him a living at Grip
Printing and Publishing Company in Toronto) affected his painting, as
did his love of poetry. Large and dramatic paintings such as The Tangled
Garden, The Wild River, and The Solemn Land have made him one of the
group’s best-known artists (the latter is one of the central works in
the rooms devoted to the Group in the National Gallery).

Bruce Whiteman, in this excellent short study, blends biographical
information with close criticism of individual paintings, and sets it
all in the context of the struggle for Canadian modernism that was going
on in all the arts in the 1920s. MacDonald disliked abstract art, which
he felt shunned “all poetic feeling in a search for a cold geometry of
pattern, a leaden quality of volume.” He also disdained realism,
calling realistic paintings “no more art than stock reports or railway
timetables are poetry.” Whiteman concludes that MacDonald’s work
“remains fresh and compelling today” and that, although somewhat out
of step with a postmodernist culture, he must finally be counted among
the most important Canadian painters of the 20th century. It would be
hard to forgive a critic who did not reach such a conclusion.

The book is handsomely produced and generously illustrated. There are
color reproductions of paintings and black-and-white photographs, as
well as numerous black-and-white reproductions of MacDonald’s designs,
including book plates, cover designs, and posters. It includes a
substantial selected bibliography, and deserves a place in any art
library.