Dali House

Somewhere between the Group of Seven and their acclaimed juniors who are painting today there was a vast swath of Canadians poking away at canvases, all of whom are relevant in the big picture and most of whom are actually worth a look. I have posts coming up separately on the abstract artists of Painters 11 and the Automatistes, and will eventually get around to two other outstanding people who deserve individual consideration, Emily Carr and Graham Coughtry.

But for now, here, in no particular order, are a few of the more crusty codgers who toiled away in the Seven’s shadow and earned their vertical patches of turf on the National Gallery walls. There are many more than this; I’m just taking a sampling.

“The Cloud”, from 1942, at the top of this post, is by Bertram Brooker (1888-1955), who I think was one of the best Canadian artists who ever lived. He was a British-born writer and musician as well as a painter who was blown into Toronto in 1921 by the wind from Portage la Prairie. Freelance journalism somehow led to advertising, and thence the Arts and Letters Club, where he met Lawren Harris and others of the Seven. He and Harris must have been soul brothers, because they both ultimately soared with the spirit.

Brooker’s “Tree Fantasy”, a later work, and below, “Ascending Forms”, from all the way back to 1929.

Bertie was a charter member of the Canadian Group of Painters and also won the Governor General’s Award for his novel “Think of the Earth” (something of an underground classic) but, influenced by the Group of Seven’s LeMoine FitzGerald, his realistic work eventually morphed into abstraction — a genuine first for Canada. Looking for the trick to how life spiritually propels itself skyward, he ended up in surrealist, cubist and even futurist territory, and with Kandinsky singing in his ear, he derived art from music too.

Interestingly, Brooker was among the first to notice that the Group of Seven had begun to smell a bit. “The experimentation is over,” he lamented to Fitzgerald. “The old aggressiveness has declined. The Group of Seven has become orthodoxy and now, I suppose, the public will start buying their pictures.”

Also usually flying high though on a somewhat different airline was Thoreau MacDonald (1901-1989), whose “Loons Flying Down the Coast”, from about 1927, is seen below.

The son of the Group of Seven’s JEH MacDonald, Thoreau may have been destined to be an artist, and thanks to the name and the rural upbringing his dad gave him, a creature of nature, even transcendentalism.

He wrote about flora and fauna as much as he portrayed it on paper and canvas and in linotypes and woodcuts. He founded the Woodchuck Press and published 16 books and booklets of his writings and designs, as well as illustrating hundreds of other people’s books with his drawings and calligraphy, including his father’s poetry collection “West by East” and an edition of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s “Anne of Green Gables”.

Like Arthur Heming, who’s waiting to be introduced below, he was colour-blind, so he too tended to the black and white where it was safe, and like his namesake, Thoreau MacDonald advocated the simple life and and believed in letting well enough alone.

The colour blindness that afflicted lifelong Ontario boy Arthur Heming (1870-1940) — if it is an affliction, maybe not — kept him working primarily in black, white and grey until he was 60 years old, which may or may not have had something to do with his acknowledged gift for capturing the Canadian north, even when he did put some colour in its frosted cheeks. Above is “Timber Crib in the Calumet Rapids” from 1910, and this is the striking “Canadian Voyageurs”, from roughly the same time.

Neutrality in tone and subject matter pretty much summed up Archibald Barnes (1887-1971), but there were those who thought they saw a subtle Spanish “severity” in his work. I suppose they mean Goya-style lines and some coarse brushwork. Critics found his work poetic, just was the country needed in the 1930s and ’40s when, post Group of Seven, things had become a little grey (no pun on the title of this piece, “The Grey Veil”).

Charles Comfort (1900-1994) was an Edinburgh boy shipped to Canada at age 12. In Winnipeg he apprenticed with Fred Brigden’s father and, after a spell at the Winnipeg School of Art, moved to New York and was a regular at the Art Students League.

In Toronto in 1931 he opened his own studio and began a long, successful career, teaching for a while at the Ontario College of Art, University of Toronto and Banff School of Fine Art. Like so many Canadian artists he sketched battle scenes near the front lines of World War II. By the time he died at 94, he had a vast collection of honours and awards. He was Mr Academic and it tended to show in his paintings, such as “Northern Silence”, from 1976.

Charles William Jefferys (1869-1951) was another transplanted Briton who did very well indeed in Canada, thankyou very much, as a painter, illustrator, muralist and a writer too. Good enough for a statue in North York, where schoolkids can put a face to the name of the guy who illustrated all their texts on Canuck history.

And Jefferys was another artist determined as all get-out to, by gosh, discover “the true nature of our landscape”. Nationalism flowed in his veins and pigment tubes.

Jefferys did some illustrating for the New York Herald before heading north and running the doodle shop for the Toronto Star. He was a member of the Toronto Art Students’ League while it lasted, along with David Milne and Fred Brigden, then in 1904 co-founded the Graphic Arts Club. Both of these groups attracted professional graphic artists from F Brigden Ltd and Grip Ltd, the latter firm playing a key role in fomenting the Group of Seven.

AC Leighton made pretty pictures for the Eaton’s retail giant but gradually got himself some elbow room with English-style pastorals and distinctively Canadian prairie, as well as some Rockies vistas. He lived close to the mountains, in Calgary, and kept horses just for carting his sketching gear around. Shown here is “Valley of the Giants, Banff” from about 1950.

Reading about Leighton I learned about the “Claude glass”, a smoked slab of glass through which many 19th-century painters sized up their subjects, indoors or out, the benefit being that it cut out the chromatics so they could compose based only on tonal harmony. I think JMW Turner used one as well.

Leighton teamed up with Franklin Carmichael and AJ Casson when they and Fred Brigden formed the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour to get some recognition for oil paint’s ignored kid brother. I admire his efforts, but I reckon if you’re going to paint mountains, you need oil’s muscle — you have to do some sculpting in pigment to dig into the rock of the Rockies.

Fred Brigden (1871-1956), yet another English expatriate (though he too emigrated to Toronto at an early age), took over his dad’s engraving business and was pretty much a weekend artist, but he was dedicated enough to the craft that he actually died on a sketching trip. Mind you, he was 85. the painting is “Ontario Stream”.

And this is “Noontime, Longue Pointe Village” by Montrealer Albert H Robinson (1881-1956), which could easily be mistaken for an AY Jackson. Robinson in fact participated in the first Group of Seven exhibition in 1919, and was quickly applauded as an unrestrained innovator. It’s quite lovely.

Lawren Harris’ wife Bess Housser (1890-1969) was doubtless a shoo-in for the 1928 Group of Seven exhibition, but she was clearly talented as well. Seen here is her “Laurentian Village”.

She and Harris didn’t marry until 1934, he having dumped his wife of 24 years, and they fled family outrage to the US, not to return for six years, when bizarre British Columbia offered to bring the abstract out of Lawren’s soul.

David Milne (1882-1953), another Ontario lad, carved out a niche all to himself. He already had some training as well as recognition in New York by the time he heard his first cheer in Canada in 1934, and even then had to live in the Group of Seven’s penumbra. Non-Canadians tend to think of him as the best Canadian painter, even better than Tom Thomson. Clement Greenberg ranked him in North America’s top three.

This is “Billboards”, from about 1912. Having binned his commercial career, Milne dived into the avant-garde after seeing all the latest European swagger at the New York galleries. He was even in the infamous 1913 Armory Show and earned plenty of New York Times drool.

He did a spot of frontline painting at the end of World War I, then spent the next 15 years trying to make Canadians understand what he was doing with his art. The wealthy Vincent Massey finally figured it out and showed Milne’s work to National Gallery director-to-be Alan Jarvis, who went nuts.

A bit of Matisse, a dash of Monet, and there was an epic glow to the most mundane things in his canvases. There is, it’s been said, a biblical greatness in his later paintings of baby bottles.

Little remembered today, Homer Ransford Watson (1855-1936) was nationally esteemed in his time as the “Canadian Constable”. Among those who owned his works were Oscar Wilde, railway magnate Lord Strathcona and Queen Victoria, who received a painting as a gift from Canada’s Governor General and liked it so much that she bought two more.

Born and raised in rural Doon, Ontario, where the 1883 canvas seen here, “After the Rain”, was also painted, Watson moved to Toronto at age 19 to pursue a career in the arts and studied further in New York. He enjoyed success from the beginning for his realism and detailed craftsmanship — and the lack of threat in his pastoral scenes. There is no Turneresque gale approaching.

Nor did he appreciate the Group of Seven’s flag-waving charge to stamp their art as “Canadian”. He felt they were trying too hard. They swept right past him.

A finally for this round-about tour there is Frank Black (1891-1988), who you’re certainly not going to find in any art history books, but he found his way into mine because he gravitated to Georgetown, Ontario — my hometown — and one of my first assignments as a reporter on the local paper was interviewing him.

Black had sketched in the area with AJ Casson of the Group of Seven and liked it so much that in 1952 he bought the former home of George Kennedy, after whom the town was named. This is Black’s own painting of it. It ended up being right next door to the high school, where in later years Frank and his wife Lillian, a milliner by profession, taught art classes.

Black was particularly gifted at seascapes, a talent he honed while living in Bermuda. Shown here is his “Spring Thaw”, a scene from Georgetown’s outskirts. There’s a self-portrait and some of his painting gear on display at the local Civic Centre.