07/01/2026
The seven painters who formed the Group of Seven did not invent Canadian landscape painting. What they did was decide that the Canadian landscape deserved to be painted differently than it had been. The dominant tradition in Canadian art in the early twentieth century was shaped by European academic painting: soft light, careful gradations, the kind of prettiness that made wilderness look manageable. The artists who would become the Group of Seven had spent years painting in the bush of Ontario and had come to a different conclusion. The Canadian Shield, the birch forests of Algonquin Park, the rocky north shore of Lake Superior, the Algoma highlands in the fall: these were not pretty places in the European sense. They were hard and bright and cold and dramatic, and the only way to paint them honestly was with bold flat colour, strong simplified forms, and brushwork that did not try to smooth anything over. The Group held their first joint exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto in May 1920. The founding seven were Lawren Harris, J.E.H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley, Frank Johnston, Franklin Carmichael, and A.Y. Jackson. Tom Thomson, whose bold wilderness paintings had influenced most of them directly, had drowned in Algonquin Park in 1917 and was never a formal member, though his spirit was entirely present. The critical reception was mixed at first. Some reviewers found the work crude or unfinished. Others recognized immediately that something new was happening in Canadian art. Over the following decade the Group's reputation grew steadily. They painted the Rockies, the Arctic, the Maritimes, and Quebec in addition to their familiar Ontario territories. Their work entered the permanent collections of major galleries. It became, over time, the visual language through which Canadians learned to look at their own country.
