An imaginative space can define a cultural space, an identity of a people. This is a space that is wholly Canadian. What is Canada’s most valuable possession? It is its boundless space. Canada consists of a vast terrain that virtually no single person can, in a lifetime, expect to know every single part of its far reaching shores. This results in an unreal land existing solely in the imagination of its people.

Much of Canadian identity is tied to the land itself. And Canadians are considered by many critics - among them Elisabeth Cameron – to be a “marginal people” (Cameron, 1997:9). The indigenous peoples who were the only ones with a deeply rooted culture were also marginalized. White European appropriation and the stereotyping of the image of the Indians all help to explain this travesty. Due to the fact that the north is also considered as the most marginal area of this marginal country that is why it has been an important repository for Canadians’ sense of themselves. By analogy many of the characteristics attributed to Canadians are projected upon this feature of whiteness. As Carl Berger appropriately shows Canada was seen by the white 19^th century immigrant as symbolizing virtues (mostly Christian) as “purity, moral strength, chastity, good health, freedom and spirituality” (Cameron, 1997:12). For Lawren Harris (one of the members of the Group of Seven) the northern landscapes that attracted him evoked powerful “psychic vibrations”. Therefore, the notion of Canadians as a northern people formed a strong symbolic contrast with the “darker, hedonistic, immoral races that were seen as sullying the American society to the south” (Cameron, 1997:12).

The representation of “space” in the forms of snowy landscapes, blizzards, icebergs, ice-sculpture, northern lights, snowmen, snowbirds, polar bears, etc. weave in and out of Canadian artistic productions.

There has always been a rich legacy of landscape painting since the earliest settlements in Canada. This may be considered as the predominant mode of artistic expression well into the 20^th century. Why does landscape painting and not portrait painting or even urban scenery that characterizes early Canadian art? This is mainly because of this boundless space, which has always struck its viewer the most profoundly. Canada has provided the artist with a vast amount of subjects, which have been viewed somewhat differently by each succeeding generation. The individual painter has managed to transform the scene before him using conventions acquired through cultural absorption or professional training.

From the 1750s through the early 19^th century British military personnel and visitors made small water-colour studies in the then popular style. These, however, had a specific function: to document facts and to provide souvenir images.

By Confederation in 1867 Canadian landscape painting had developed among artists centered in Montreal and Toronto. These artists drew heavily on European and American Romantic traditions and developed a more monumental approach to presenting the New Dominion in their awe-inspiring images of the Laurentians, the Rocky Mountains, etc. Here, again the landscape signified the symbolic power, strength, majesty and endurance present within a boundless terrain that also attributed to the characteristic features of its peoples.

With the emergence of the 20^th century Canadian painters were yet again adjusting their vision of the country to suit the more recent developments in European art. The French Impressionists’ interest and fascination with light and colour urged Canadian painters to pay greater attention to subjects like Canadian winter. Those who studied in Europe (like Emily Carr, a BC painter) also began to reflect a tentative “modernism” by using whiter colours and a looser brushwork. These vaguely impressionistic touches were, however, rather superficial, still this was the first shift away from the firmly embedded and rigid academic naturalism in Canada.

Many young artists at the turn of the century in Canada were struggling to free themselves from the artistic traditions of England and Europe. These artists did not approve of the public’s taste for art that glorified the themes of rural work and taming the land, since the depicted images were not in unison with the existing images of Canadian nature. Still, as Europe was the centre for European art this continued to be the destination of artists in search of training and developing painting techniques.

The artistic and cultural centres of the early 1900s were Toronto, Montreal and Quebec. The Arts and Letters Club in Toronto was a vibrant meeting place for men interested in arts. This was a place where artists of all descriptions felt welcome. This is also the place where the members of the Group met (for example Lawren Harris and J. E. H. MacDonald).

Several years before World War I the Toronto-based artists were already working on forging a new Canadian landscape school, which was culminated in 1920 with the official formation of the Group of Seven. While these artists shared certain ideals about a new approach to Canadian painting, still there was no single theme that united their work. The only thing that could be said about them was that they were seven artists. Its members included Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, J.E.H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, Frederick H. Varley, Franz Johnston, and Franklin Carmichael. After the departure of Johnston, the Group was joined by A.J. Casson, and later Edwin H. Holgate and L. L. Fitzgerald. And Tom Thomson must be mentioned here as well, who was never a member of the Group due to his drowning in 1917 (on the Western shore of Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park), still he had made a decisive contribution to the movement in its early years and continued to act as a vital source of inspiration even after his death.

During the 1920s and the early 1930s, when the Group held its last exhibition, the paintings of the Group brought about a profound change in the direction of Canadian landscape art. The critics, who were first extremely hostile – even defining them as “The Hot Mush School”, gradually came to accept them and to understand their endeavours in wanting to create a distinctly Canadian form of approach in Canadian art.

Why were they able to achieve what others had found impossible before them? Firstly, they were able to devise an original or even an indigenous style out of several European sources; secondly, through the formation of the Group they were able to project a strong public profile, something that was highly impossible for an individual artist; and they maintained a commitment to paint Canada’s northern wilderness, a land which through their works has entered the imagination of every individual in Canada. This was the imaginative space that they gave expression to in their paintings.

The true and basic subject of the Group was the landscape, however F. H. Varley painted portraits and Lawren Harris also favoured house motifs for a time. Instead of viewing the urban environment the Group sought to explore the uninhabited wilderness of northern Ontario (the areas around Georgian Bay, Algonquin Park, later Algoma, and the North Shore of lake Superior). Though the Group had also travelled to other regions in Canada, still the major essence of their work was established within the Ontario landscape. In this sense their work may be said to be synonymous with that province’s or areas’ vast hinterland. What actually makes the Group’s images unique is the distinctive quality of the land itself, the imaginative space, depicted on their canvasses, and the fact that unlike other regions of Canada, it had received only limited attention.

The huge area of Algonquin Park was more or less untouched artistically. Algonquin Park is unique in the sense that it differs from Canada’s western mountains in its aspect. Consisting of countless small lakes, bold rock faces, and dense forests of birch and ragged pine, this is a place that is neither gentle nor familiar, but rather remote and lonely. This harsh air provides an intimacy with the land and nature that the Group was seeking to convey with the public through their works. Arthur Lismer, a British born member of the Group, once wrote critically of artists who wanted to “[paint] Canada to look like England with soft hues and misty horizons. Canada is not like that.” He also added that “[Canada] is a country without shades and shadows, with bright colors and brutal changes of climate” (Darroch, 1981:58). And he also added that “Canada is not a subtle country” (Darroch, 1981:157).

What was their fascination for the north and why the north? One must take into consideration that Tom Thomson and all the members of the Group were city dwellers, who considered their base as being in Toronto. They began taking regular trips to the north from 1912, but these were mostly of short duration, although they lasted up to six months in the case of Thomson. These artists never settled there or even attempted to, and as a consequence only experienced the north as visitors, and three of the Group’s members (Varley, Lismer and MacDonald) were even foreign-born visitors.

What was then the basis of their attraction for the north? Their trips to this region meant more than just mere curiosity. They wanted to experience fully the mysteries of pristine nature and to capture these experiences in paint for all time. They felt a deep response to the natural world and their sketches and many finished paintings reveal an acute sensitivity to the subtlest changes in seasonal and weather conditions. As J.E.H. MacDonald wrote in 1918 from Algoma:

The whole Montreal River is very impressive. Looking at it from the railway track
on our way home, we felt that we could understand something of the feeling of
the early Canadian explorers. The whole scene seemed so primeval and unspoiled…
(Hunter, 1940: 21)

These artists believed that nature was more than simply a visual feast of form and colour. In their work they sought, like other landscape artists such as the Romantics J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, to transcend mere physical description of the outside world. They were familiar with the works of the mid-nineteenth-century American nature-poets (Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson), and also the more current trends in mystical thoughts as theosophy. The members came to regard nature as a powerful spiritual force which might be comprehended through prolonged contemplation and compelled to yield to its store of higher truths. MacDonald said that it was important “to paint the soul of things, the inner feeling rather than the outward form,” (MacDonald, 1931: lecture) and Harris spoke of his “deeply moving experience of oneness with the spirit of the whole land” (Harris, 1964: 26).

The Group was not interested in the topographical facts of the landscape, but rather they wished to impress on the public’s consciousness the pervading sense of the north – its solitude and its rawness. The subjects within the landscape were treated generally and by eliminating any suggestion of specificity, archetypal motifs and images were allowed to emerge. Therefore, what the paintings reproduce are not the details of a given landscape, but the artist’s experience before that landscape and its effect upon him. These effects were not only the sharp air and windswept pines, but that of standing alone, in communion with the whole cosmos.

One of the dominant motifs used by Thomson and the Group in rendering the spirit of the north was the repeated use of the tree. This is not the rounded form of a tree, but rather a rugged pine and a graceful birch. The tree appears in many varieties of configurations: most powerfully as a single form isolated in the centre of composition; as dense clumps; or a thin screen over the surface of the picture; or even as framing devices to either side. Many of their paintings feature the region’s myriad lakes, glimpsed through branches and leaves, their surfaces ruffled and darkened. They also painted rivers, streams and cascades, but never the dreamy, meandering waters depicted by Canadian impressionists nor the sublimity of the Niagara. They sought rather the effects of white water depicting them as being turbulent and exciting.

Everyone in the Group studied the peculiar effects of the clear, hard Ontario light and its variations throughout the day, seasons, and changing climatic conditions. Only rarely did they depict the mists and hazes of the Impressionists, even though this is also a common enough occurrence in the north. It is the wind, however, that most often fills their canvasses as an eternal and invisible force of nature drawing about it immeasurable amounts of energy and motion.

In any discussion of the Group of Seven closely related to design is the question of style, or the manner in which Thomson and the Group depicted their carefully chosen and formulated motifs. Thomson and his fellow artists were able to successfully synthesize a variety of foreign influences, and therefore, it is quite obvious that in much of their work no single influence predominates. The Group also emphasized the notion that their individual styles had no European antecedents. This, of course, is not the case. They, however, repeatedly acknowledge that their work arose as a “direct reaction from nature” (Housser, 1926:77). This statement is naturally misleading and discouraged any attempts to unravel the origins of their style.

In viewing and examining their works one must take into consideration certain European movements. There were four important European movements: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Art Nouveau, and the related landscape paintings of early 20^th century Scandinavia. In discussing their impact on Thomson and the Group there are two questions that ultimately arise: how these influences came about, and how they were manifested.

In considering Impressionism it is well acknowledged that it had become a significant modern style and Jackson, Lismer, MacDonald, Harris and Varley, all of whom had either studied or worked in England or even on the Continent, must have been fully aware of it. Therefore, when the future Group members came into contact with this style they adopted (and later modified) its fundamental tenets, such as painting outdoors, studying light and atmospheric effects, employing a bright palette, using quick dab-like brushstrokes, and eliminating detail.

Another source in becoming acquainted with Impressionism was the fact that these artists were in touch with and also admired the works of two Quebec-based artists working in this style: Maurice Cullen and Marc-Aurele de Foy Suzor Coté, who exhibited regularly in Toronto up to the First World War.

Then the art of van Gogh, Gauguin and their Post-Impressionist contemporaries were a remarkable force in avant-garde European painting during the 1880s and 1890s. The stylistic features were the expressive brush technique contrasted with areas of flat paint, simplified forms, cropped images, and what perhaps was most important for the Group and Thomson were the use of vibrant colour effects. These influences probably entered through similar channels to those of Impressionism.

Art Noveau, a style widespread in the decorative and graphic arts at the turn of the century shares some of the features of Post-Impressionism. Through periodicals such as The Studio and also through professional training as commercial artists, Thomson and his colleagues were able to absorb the essentials of Art Noveau (e.g., T. Thomson: The West Wind).

Their interest in Art Noveau design was reinforced by an exhibition held in 1913 on Scandinavian art. Lawren Harris and J. E. H. MacDonald travelled to New York to view this exhibition of contemporary Scandinavian landscape painting. What most impressed them was its devotion to northern subjects – wilderness landscapes, swirling water surfaces, winter and snow itself – and also the vigorous and decorative depiction of these scenes. In these the Canadian artist saw a reflection of their own yearning to celebrate what was dear to them about their land. As Jackson later commented, “[We] treated our subjects with the freedom of the decorative designer, just as the Swedes had done, living in a land where the topography and the climate are similar to out own” (Mellen, 1970:45).

Undoubtedly, other sources also had an influence on the works of the individual members. In general there are elements of Cézanne and Cubism, and occasionally even Fauvist art and German Expressionism arise in the work of Thomson and the Group. Some of these influences were no doubt consciously rejected by Thomson and the Group as being inappropriate to their special endeavours.

In their early careers they worked extensively in pencil, pen and ink, and water-colour, but beginning around 1910-11 oil came to be the preferred medium. They painted out-of-doors, usually from early spring to late autumn, using small scale board panels. These intensely personal, quick oil sketches capture in their dazzling configurations of dots, dashes, smudges and dragging the unique character of each artist.

Thomson and the members of the Group all shared the desire to create works of art which in both subject matter and treatment would be unmistakably Canadian. This was an accomplishment, which they considered important in contributing to the nation’s developing social, economic, political and artistic self-awareness during the first decades of the 20^th century.

Their works continue to fascinate us today, and numerous publications and exhibitions in recent times have been devoted to their art. Throughout all is the recognition of the fundamental concerns of these painters – the struggle to define a new land and an imaginative space, a desire to understand the spiritual immensity of nature, and a belief in the wilderness as a catalyst in creating an indigenous landscape art.

Bibliography

Cameron, E. 1997. Canadian Culture, an Introductory Reader. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.
Darroch, L.1981. Bright Land: A Warm Look at Arthur Lismer. Toronto and Vancouver: Merritt.
Harper, J. R.. 1985. Painting in Canada: A History. Canada: University of Toronto Press.
Housser, F. B.1926. A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven Toronto: The Macmillan Co.
Hulan, R. 2002. Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture .Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Mellen, P. 1970. The Group of Seven. Toronto and Montreal: McClelland and Stewart.
Newlands, A. 1995. The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson. Canada: Firefly Books.
Wistow, D.1982. Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. Canada:Art Gallery of Toronto.