Dali House

From 1920 to 1931, the post-impressionistic Group of Seven rode a queer, largely self-generated wave of nationalism to become Canadian icons. They were widely derided as iconoclasts in their day, as future icons often are, but now their history is taught in the country’s art schools, and in junior-school art classes by way of giving kids something to be proud about.
But if you don’t know the real story, they’re a dusty lot. The average Canadian will have heard about them, and knows they’re painters, but thinks they’re something to do with either the Inuits or the Fathers of Confederation, those statesmen who dragged the pieces of the nation together 40 years before the Group of Seven existed.

I got the pride lesson early, and I loved a lot of the pictures from the start, but later I got to know quite a bit about the Group of Seven because of a half-dozen visits to the McMichael gallery of Canadian art, out in the rolling rural hills by Kleinburg, Ontario, not far from where I grew up. Most of these were high-school field trips with the art class.

The first time was the best, because a member of the Group was actually there.

AY Jackson was the last surviving member of the original seven, and remains the only famous artist I’ve ever met (although a few years later I took a picture of the back of Andy Warhol’s head, but that’s a different story).
AY Jackson actually lived at the gallery for the last six years of his life (it was also the home of Robert and Signe McMichael). He must have been about 88, and he’d just come into the gallery from a sketching trip out in the woods behind it(!)
Us teenagers saw that our teacher, Mr McDonald, was in awe, so we were too. Jackson answered a few of our inane questions, no doubt for the millionth time, before someone ushered him off to get some rest. But A.Y., as everyone called him, had been the rugged sort from the start.

Actually, Tom Thomson called him Alec, and most of the others in the Group Alex.

Born in Montreal in 1882, Alexander Young Jackson was just a lad himself when his dad abandoned the family and he had to get a job. He worked as an office boy for a lithograph company, which proved to be good training. Then at 23 he toiled his way to Europe on a cattle boat, then got himself to Chicago, where he worked in a commercial art firm. By 1907 he’d saved enough money to return to France to study impressionism.
He settled in Sweetsburg, Quebec, as a struggling artist, and was just about to move to the US, where patronage was more likely, when he got a letter from JEH MacDonald in Toronto, who had a buyer for a painting he’d shown there years earlier. The buyer was Lawren Harris, and this was the painting: “Edge of the Maple Wood”.

A shy, frail redhead on the outside but a practical, vigorous character, a father figure in fact, James Edward Hervey MacDonald was really the guy who got the Group of Seven together.
Born in Durham, England, he came to Canada at age 13, studied art in Hamilton, just down the pike from Toronto, and did commercial art for the Toronto Lithography Company and then Grip Ltd, where he became head designer.
A transcendentalist who read Whitman and Thoreau, MacDonald believed that through nature, man reached a higher spiritual destiny.
In 1911 he quit his job and moved his wife and family up north to Thornhill so he could paint full-time. He began travelling further into the more rugged north – to the Georgian Bay area and vast Algonquin Park – and became good friends with Tom Thomson, the real hero of the Group of Seven story.
The is MacDonald’s “Farm at Thornhill”.

Lawren Stewart Harris came from Brantford, Ontario, and was an heir to the Massey-Harris farm-machinery fortune. He’d been to posh St Andrew’s College and the University of Toronto and at 19 went to Germany for three years to study art, then toured the Near East.

He had connections, but he was quite happy painting pictures of the modest house fronts in Toronto’s Ward district like this one, “Houses and Women”.

Soon Jackson was visiting Toronto for extended lengths of time and accompanying MacDonald, Harris, Tom Thomson and others on sketching trips to northern Ontario. He and Thomson were outdoorsmen anyway, and they canoed around and fished.

In 1913, a fan and fellow painter, the ophthamologist James McCallum, offered them the use of his cottage on Georgian Bay and a year’s expenses. The following year, with some of Harris’ money, McCallum built the Studio Building for Canadian Art on Toronto’s Severn Street. It’s still there apparently, although judging from a look around the Internet, the city of Toronto doesn’t seem to know about it.

These men were in the habit of lunching at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto, which was launched in 1908 by Augustus Bridle, a reporter who covered the arts scene. In 1909 is was at 36 1/2 King Street East, above the Brown Betty restaurant, then a year later got booted out and landed at 57 Adelaide Street East, the York County courthouse, with its stipulated entrance at the back, off Court Street. (By 1920, with Group of Seven patron and future governor general Vincent Massey as its president, it had settled at 14 Elm Street, where it remains today, with some 600 members.)

JEH MacDonald was president for a couple of years and designed the club crest, a Viking ship “to remind members of the open sea and the great adventure”. This is the bookplate he designed for the club.

Most of the future Group of Seven were commercial artists, many working together at the Grip Co. Tom Thomson and MacDonald were at the club early on, with Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley, Frank Johnston and Franklin Carmichael. Then came Harris and Jackson.

Franklin H Carmichael was born in Orillia, Ontario, in 1890. On arrival in Toronto in 1911 he apprenticed at Grip, where Thomson worked, then at the Rous and Mann printing house with Varley, Lismer, Johnston and, again, Thomson. In 1913 he studied at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp, Belgium.

@

@

@

The extroverted Arthur Lismer, whose paintings would become the most iconic of the Group of Seven wall-poster favourites and who would pioneer the notion of teaching art to kids, had been at Grip since 1912, the year he immigrated from England.
He’d trained in his native Sheffield to be a silversmith, but while stuyding at the Academie Royal des Beaux-Arts fell in love with post-impressionism. Someone told him commercial artists could make a fine living in Canada.
Lismer moved from Toronto to Thornhill in 1915, joining MacDonald there.

Torontonian Francis Hans Johnston, born in 1888, also of Grip and Rous and Mann, had studied art in Philadelphia and done commercial work in New York before coming home and pouring his considerable energy into the Group of Seven. He was the most prolific of the bunch, though he didn’t stick around for long.

Frederick Horsman Varley, born in 1881, was a classmate of Lismer in Sheffield and he too studied in Antwerp. A boozer and a bohemian, he almost starved to death in London trying to be an illustrator. In 1912 Lismer convinced him to try Canada, and they both got jobs at Grip.

Varley’s temper and disdain for convention put some of the others off, but he suited Thomson, and they went on weekend excursions, though they rarely sketched together because Varley preferred people to trees for his subject matter. He got work painting portraits of Toronto’s elite society, but he didn’t like it and started annoying his clients.

And what of Thomson, the spooky one, the one who died too young, the one who’s always “in” the Group of Seven yet never was?

Well, that’s for part 2…

@

@

@

@

@