The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

If there were to be an award for Art Book of the Year, The Group of
Seven and Tom Thomson would win hands down. The book celebrates the
artistic work of 11 artists—Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris, J.E.H.
MacDonald, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, Frederick H. Varley, Franklin
Carmichael, Frank Johnston, A.J. Casson, Edwin Holgate, and Lemoine
FitzGerald—painting in the 1920s and early ’30s. All were members of
Toronto’s Arts and Letters Club who knew and encouraged one another
and, together with like-minded colleagues, went on sketching trips to
Lake Simcoe, Lake Scugog, Haliburton, and Muskoka.

Their common touchstone was “the true north strong and free,” and
this approach proved to be welcomed by “ordinary-thinking
Canadians.” As the years passed, their boundaries moved farther north
from Lake Simcoe and Orillia to Algonquin Park and Georgian Bay.
Spiritualism was another shared strain in the group’s philosophy. All
admired American writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David
Thoreau, who saw in the natural world the “spiritual dimensions of
human life.” Lawren Harris wrote that the source of their art was
founded “on a long and growing love and understanding of the North in
an ever clearer experience of oneness with the informing spirit of the
whole land.” These artists were not unlike missionaries who found in
the pristine beauty of this land a healing and uplifting power.

The full-page colour reproductions that fill most of the book are
breathtaking, but the text is also considerable, well-documented, and
lively—indeed, it is difficult to imagine a better representation of
Canada as a country from sea to sea (paintings of West Coast landscapes
by Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald and other artists are
also included).

The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson has come as close as any one book
could to a substantial introduction to Canadian art. This is a book to
savour unhurriedly.