It’s hard to imagine landscape painting as controversial. What could be more traditional than painting the world around you? So it’s strange to discover that an upstart band of landscape painters known as the “Group of Seven” started a movement in the early 1900s that brought international recognition to Canadian art for the first time. Adding to their mystique was the sudden and mysterious death—accident, suicide, murder?—of Tom Thomson, one of their most promising young associates.
In order to understand the significance of Thomson and the Group of Seven, it’s important to understand mainstream Canadian art in the early 20th century. The national galleries were full of Canadian-themed art that tried very hard to pretend it had not been painted in Canada. Most of the early painters eagerly packed up their brushes and easels and headed for European academies to learn to paint like the French or English. At the time, European landscape painters were focused mostly on pastoralism, an artistic genre that emphasized idealism instead of realism (and included a lot of shepherds and pastures, hence the name). But there were no verdant pastures and moors in Canada; there were angry cliffs, rugged mountains, vast prairies, and freezing tundra. Yet rather than embrace those natural features, many Canadian painters stuck to the pastures. In some cases, they even went so far as to declare Canada’s dramatic landscapes unsuitable for painting.
There were exceptions, of course. Paul Kane (1810-71) was as much a mountain man as an artist, tramping across the wilds of Upper Canada, sketching and painting the forests he saw and the First Nations people he met. His work influenced Lucius Richard O’Brien (1832-99) and others. But even these men based much of their success on idealized landscapes painted in the European tradition.
