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.

Art historian and cultural administrator David Silcox is former director
of the University of Toronto Art Centre, author of the definitive
biography of David Milne, and co-author of books on Tom Thomson,
Christopher Pratt, Jack Bush, and other artists.

This hefty, spectacularly beautiful book celebrates the enduring legacy
of the 11 best-known and most admired Canadian painters. In his preface,
Silcox notes that he begins with a “fanfare” of major paintings, now
icons, by Thomson and the other 10 artists who at one time or other were
members of the Group of Seven. Not all focused on landscape. Some
preferred rural, urban, or domestic settings. “But all of them,”
Silcox writes, “… created paintings that reflect a thousand
different aspects of the physical environment, life and spirit of
Canada.”

A substantial introduction covers the now-famous first meeting that
took place in March 1920 at Lawren Harris’s elegant Toronto mansion.
The artists shared their attitudes to painting, their beliefs and
ambitions. The introduction includes a paragraph on each of the founding
artists. Tom Thomson did not attend this first meeting and would later
drown in Canoe Lake, Algonquin Park, in mysterious circumstances. At the
initial meeting, friendships were confirmed and strengthened. Shortly
before World War I, the seven artists had become known informally as
“the Algonquin School.” All were enthusiastic nationalists who felt
that Canada’s time had come and that her spectacular landscape should
be better known. The First World War put everything on hold.

To the original seven who attended the first meeting—Lawren Harris,
J.E.H. MacDonald, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, F.H. Varley, Frank
Carmichael, and Frank Johnston—Silcox adds Tom Thomson and, soon
after, A.J. Casson, Edwin Holgate, and Lemoine Fitzgerald. He compares
the group to missionaries whose basic text was that “the artistic
salvation of Canada required art that was all-Canadian.” Members
already represented a decade of painting “the spirit of the North,”
This ill-defined area initially meant somewhere north of Toronto, but
was soon extended to the north shore of Lake Superior and the Gaspé,
and east to Newfoundland and Labrador.

Hundreds of spectacular colour illustrations, a long selected
bibliography, and a general index add to the usefulness of this
impressive work.