Surely they are out of place here: vast windswept bays in a city of narrow, busy streets; wilderness tangle in the land of the clipped English garden – and not a single human face in a stately museum largely dedicated to portraits by Old Masters.
And yet, it seems only appropriate these Canadian landscape paintings return to London – many of them 87 years after they were first seen, and appreciated, by British eyes. The exhibition that opened this week at the Dulwich Picture Gallery – Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven – is, in many ways, a tip of A.Y. Jackson’s beret to the nation that embraced Canada’s now-iconic art before Canada itself was able to do so with any confidence.
Canadians, of course, prefer to hear applause from beyond – for Anne Murray, for Mordecai Richler – before they are willing to put their own hands together in enthusiastic support of homegrown brilliance. And so it was, too, with the Group of Seven, a largely Toronto-based gathering of painters formed three years after Thomson’s mysterious death in Algonquin Park in July of 1917.
Thomson, Jackson and their painting friends – J.E.H. MacDonald, Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer, Fred Varley, Franklin Carmichael and Frank Johnston – wished to break the colonial and American bonds of painting and create an art that was as Canadian as, well, today they would say “as Canadian as the Group of Seven.”
It was not an easy ambition to realize. When these artists first dared show their works in the days just before the First World War, they were dismissed as the “Hot Mush School” of art. A later attempt had critics suggesting the paintings not be called after wilderness sites but go by such titles as Hungarian Goulash and Drunkard’s Stomach.
“Those who believe that pictures should be seen and not heard,” sniffed Saturday Night’s Hector Charlesworth at the time, “are likely to have their sensibilities shocked.”
The painters persisted, however, inspired by Thomson’s near-manic obsession with capturing the dancing colours of Algonquin Park. Thomson himself saw little success, writing just before his death to his patron, Dr. James MacCallum, in the hopes that MacCallum might sell one of his sketches. “If I could get $10 or $15 for it,” he wrote, “I would be greatly pleased – if they don’t intend to put in so much, let it go for what they will give.” Today a Tom Thomson sketch might fetch $2-million at auction.
The painters had some success, but it was only after several of their works went on display at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition in Wembley that they broke through. Though members of the stuffy Royal Canadian Academy of Arts protested over the number of paintings that came from the Group, the British press raved; the prestigious Tate Gallery even purchased a Jackson. Their paintings, noted one critic, embodied “the buoyant, eager, defiant spirit of the nation.”
It is somewhat baffling that art given such praise in a major arts capital would fail to return to that capital for 87 years. And had it not been for serendipity, the Canadian works might never have come back. Ian Dejardin was working as a curatorial assistant at London’s Royal Academy in the late 1980s when, partly out of curiosity, partly boredom, he opened a book that a student had just returned. It was on the Group of Seven – “I had never heard of them” – and the page that fell open showed MacDonald’s Falls, Montreal River.
“I was smitten,” says the 56-year-old co-curator of the exhibition that will run through Jan. 8 at the 200-year-old Dulwich. Those who were given looks prior to Wednesday’s official opening were equally impressed.
