An illustrated tour of key places in the lives and careers of Canada's most famous artists, the Group of Seven.

From 1920 to 1931, the post-impressionist painters of the Group of Seven took a ride on a small yet resonant wave of precocious nationalism and ended up becoming Canadian heroes. Derided as iconoclasts in their day, they are now icons in history and art lessons across the land.

Despite considerable odds, these men managed to paint young Canada's portrait on the walls of a national psyche that was still under construction. "Canadian art" was an impossibility, they'd often heard. There was too much ground to cover, too much diversity for union, and pine trees are a bugger to paint anyway. "It's bad enough to live in this country," an old lady once told Group co-founder AY Jackson, "without having pictures of it in your home."

But a couple of the guys had just seen an exhibition of Scandinavian art in Buffalo, and figured if that northern territory could be tamed on canvas, in all its rugged simplicity, then so could Canada.

"Canada consists of 3,500,523 square miles, mostly landscape. It is apparently intended for the home of broad-minded people," ran one of the Group's "Algomaxims", so named for Algonquin Park in Ontario, where they derived much of their early inspiration.

There are eleven artists in all in this story � Tom Thomson, JEH MacDonald, AY Jackson, Lawren Harris, Franklin Carmichael, Arthur Lismer, Fred Varley, Frank Johnston, AJ Casson, Edwin Hogarth and LL Fitzgerald. We'll meet them all as we go along.

UPDATE Sept 7, 2006: My thanks to Gordon of the Islands for the correct position of Dreamer's Rock on the north shore of Lake Superior. The tour has been amended to show it.
UPDATE Sept 21, 2007: Thanks to directions and a description provided by Sheila Greer of Edmonton, the spot where AY Jackson painted "Camp Mile 108 West of Whitehorse" has been pinpointed, and it's a long way from where I originally had the placemark. "The painting," Sheila explains, "shows the temporary army accommodation established at Haines Junction during the building of the highway, with the view being to the south, with the east flank of the Auriol Range (which is in Kluane National Park) in the background." I really love this kind of help!
UPDATE Feb 29, 2008: Thanks to billmoses for guiding me to the correct location of the Jack Pine Equestrian Centre near Leith, Ontario, where Tom Thomson grew up, and to Amelia for pointing out that Humberside Collegiate Institute, where Arthur Lismer's mural can be seen, isn't in Etobicoke, Ontario, at all, but in Bloor West Village, also known as High Park/Parkdale.

Many of the placemarks are necessarily approximate, but anyone else who knows site-specific spots, please let me know.

IMAGE CREDITS AND MORE INFORMATION

There's a terrific private collection of Group of Seven painting scans here, and the Virtual Museum has 214 fine images. Meanwhile Cybermuse has a lot of the works, including many, many sketches.

The Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery has a thorough and informative website, and Wikipedia's Tom Thomson entry is quite good, including a description of his technique and links to the Group of Seven members.

The best site I've found for the full Tom Thomson story is here, and the Group is covered well too.

Finally, as usual, I've got a companion post to all of this on my blog.