The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation

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.

This large, handsome catalogue was prepared for the Group of Seven
exhibition mounted at the National Gallery of Canada in the fall of
1995. The volume is testimony to both beauty and scholarship.

Hundreds of illustrations, most of them in full color and half-page
size, reveal the rugged beauty of Canada’s wild terrain and the
painters’ emotional and aesthetic reactions to it. There are a few
portraits and street scenes, but Ontario’s wilderness and Superior’s
North Shore drew these painters like a magnet. One finds J.E.H.
MacDonald’s The Tangled Garden and The Wild River and Tom Thomson’s
In the Northland, as well as less-well-known gems like A.Y. Jackson’s
Dawn—Pine Island and Albert Robinson’s Winter: Baie-Saint-Paul. The
exhibition also includes works by the friends and associates of the
Seven who showed with them from 1920 until the early 1930s.

The scholarship that underpins the entire venture is revealed in
lengthy lists at the back of the catalogue as well as in a graceful and
substantial text. “Works in the Exhibition” (with 179 entries)
includes an exhibition history and bibliography for each work up to the
end of 1936, with periodical, newspaper, and book references. In a
“List of Exhibits” the paintings and drawings covered are arranged
chronologically to 1936 (the year the Seven held a retrospective
exhibition in the National Gallery). There is a very long bibliography,
and an index.

At the exhibition, comments by contemporary critics were mounted beside
many of the paintings. Some are incorporated in the book. They
illustrate the passionate arguments that raged around these works
three-quarters of a century ago. The paintings easily outlive their
critics and remain as a precious legacy in the development of Canadian
national consciousness as well as Canadian art. The Group of Seven: Art
for a Nation is a book for every art lover and every library.