The Group of Seven in London

Since I started this series of blogs about the Group of Seven, they seem to be everywhere. It's one of the things I've come to expect over the years I've been thinking about art - once I become fascinated with a subject, that subject starts to follow me.

I understand that these connections don't just pop up because I'm thinking about the Group of Seven - though it feels that way. I understand that they've always been there and that, suddenly, I'm noticing them.

This painting, Tom Thomson's The West Wind is an iconic Canadian painting and now it's everywhere I look.

This is a big connection - and I definitely didn't know this before I began writing about them. For the first time - although there was a small show in London many years ago - the Group of Seven is making a huge splash in Europe. I've heard it on the news, seen it in newspapers and magazines, seen it on TV shows.

And it all came about because a single curator (also the director) - Ian Dejardin - at the Dulwich Gallery in London had fallen in love with the Group of Seven's work. He plotted and planned for many years (having first seen the paintings 25 years ago) and there they are, the biggest collection of the Group of Seven ever assembled outside of Canada and maybe the biggest collection in one place at one time. After London, they're off to Amsterdam and Scandinavia.

This is what the Dulwich's website says about the Group of Seven:

"In the early twentieth century in Toronto, Canada, the first stirrings of a new movement of painting were being felt. A group of artists started to engage with the awesome Canadian wilderness, a landscape previously considered too wild and untamed to inspire ‘true’ art. Tom Thomson paved the way for this artistic collective, the Group of Seven, and their works have become revered in Canada. This exhibition will reintroduce their stunning impressions of the Canadian landscape to the British public for the first time since the 1920s."

It's nice to know that the rest of the world is getting to see some great Canadian paintings.

Kate

A.J. Casson - Housetops in the Ward

A.J. Casson is one of the "unofficial" members of the Group of Seven but is definitely my favorite. I love his work, all of it.

He began painting at a very young age and had his very first exhibition at 19. He lived a long life, painting throughout, and died at 93.

And just as an aside - I learned something I hadn't known about the Group of Seven. Casson and six other members of the group are buried on the grounds of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection north of Toronto - now that's interesting.

This painting is one of my favorites - though I admit that there are many many of of them. With Casson, my problem wasn't finding a building, it was choosing a painting with buildings in it. I choose this one because I love the clear warm colors that brighten up what might have been a gloomy winter scene. I love the way the houses are fitted in all higgledy-piggledy. I love the fact that it's square - he must have had to cut and frame this canvas himself to get this odd shape.

I actually own two of his silkscreens from the 1920s and I wouldn't sell them for any price. It's the connection to one of my favorite artists. I took pictures of them so you can see the range of his work - he was working for a commercial art / printing firm during the time these were done.

Kate

Tom Thomson, The Tent

After last week, I thought I'd do a little series on the Group of Seven (which will be longer than seven weeks because the Group of Seven kept expanding past the original seven members - Fitzgerald wasn't an original member). And because I began with a painting of a house rather than a landscape - which the Group of Seven is famous for - I thought I'd try and find something unusual - a house or a building or at least a structure of some kind from each of them. It wasn't easy.

Tom Thomson, though not officially a member because he died before they formed, was in many eyes the man who inspired the formation of the Group of Seven.

And I'll tell you that for some of these painters, finding a painting that wasn't a landscape was tough. This is as close as I could get for Tom Thomson - famous not just for his art, but for his disappearance and death. He disappeared in the Northern Ontario wilderness while on a canoe trip and his body was found 8 days later. Suicide? Murder? Accident? No one really knows.

But this painting of a tent - probably a tent that Thomson spent a lot of time in while painting in the wilderness - is fabulous. I'm so happy I thought to do this, because, even though I've been to many galleries that contain many Thomson pieces, I'd never seen this one before.

The deep blue of the lake, the autumn colors of the trees and grass, and then the white of the tent - they make me feel as if I'm in Northern Ontario. I guarantee you that the day this painting was created was cold. And yet there he was, standing behind his easel, painting this amazing rendering of the place he loved.

Kate