Canadian Art

B

European Influences

Despite the growth of opportunities for study in Canada, Canadian artists increasingly traveled to Europe for study and inspiration in the late 1800s and early 1900s, although they were more often influenced by older styles than by the latest expressions. In Canada, collections of French landscapes of the Barbizon School and Dutch genre paintings (scenes of everyday life) popularized the taste for naturalistic portrayal and nonheroic, if somewhat sentimental, subject matter.

Three artists who, like Watson and Leduc, painted intimate, introspective scenes in the late 1800s and early 1900s were Horatio Walker and William Brymner in Québec and George Reid in Ontario. Walker, who traveled in France, and Brymner, who had studied in France, painted landscapes and figure paintings influenced by the Barbizon School. Reid painted domestic scenes, and his wife, Mary Hiester, gained her own reputation for flower paintings. The artists used warm colors and soft, enveloping light to convey their new concern for intimacy while exploring the truths of nature.

Some Canadian painters of the late 1800s and early 1900s remained tied to more conservative European traditions. Robert Harris, for example, painted formal portraits that reflected his academic training in France. Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté became interested in the advanced French art movement impressionism while studying in Paris, but his later works, including winter landscapes, were more traditional. Paul Peel painted sentimental images of children and peasant girls before his early death in Paris at the age of 32.

Impressionism, which was still considered avant-garde in Canada, introduced a new use of color and an emphasis on the lyrical effects of light in landscape and urban images. The work of Canadian impressionist Maurice Cullen, for example, demonstrates interest in French impressionism in its broken brush strokes, light-filled atmosphere, and seemingly spontaneous creation of forms. James Wilson Morrice, a painter from Montréal, spent much of his life abroad, particularly in Paris, from 1890 until his death in 1937. Morrice showed an exceptional understanding of international art, ranging from postimpressionism to the work of French artist Henri Matisse. Through a restricted range of color and simplified form, he imposed a design on nature, rather than taking the more traditional Canadian way of looking for design in nature. This approach made Morrice the most progressive Canadian artist of his time.

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V

The Beginning of the Modern Era: 1920s and 1930s

Participation in World War I (1914-1918) gave Canada a new sense of national identity and rapidly brought the country into the 20th century. Already important, landscape painting now gained additional momentum, largely from the success of Tom Thomson and his fellow painters, the Group of Seven. Thomson’s bold compositions appear almost abstract in their use of vivid color and expressive brushwork, as well as in their arrangement of trees and other landscape elements into flat patterns.

A

The Group of Seven

The Group of Seven formed in 1920, three years after Thomson’s death, and set out to establish a national school of painting that would express Canadian identity and the character of the Canadian land. The members of the group were Toronto-based painters J. E. H. MacDonald, Fred Varley, A. Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer, Frank Johnston, and Franklin Carmichael. Their mission received support from the National Gallery of Canada, which purchased and exhibited their work, thus weakening the influence of more conservative painters of the Royal Canadian Academy.

The majority of the paintings by the Group of Seven represented the wilderness of northern Ontario, which became the visual symbol of Canadian national identity. By the late 1920s and 1930s, however, individual members of the group worked in the Arctic and the west as well as in Québec and Nova Scotia. The group’s interest in depicting an unapproachable and uninhabited nature—despite the fact that Canada was now an urban, industrialized country—developed in reaction to a popular preference for European-inspired romantic images of a tamed Canadian landscape.

The Group of Seven’s visual vocabulary consisted primarily of wind-swept trees, rocky shores, and weathered underbrush—subjects that were considered daring at the time, although they later became national symbols. The painters used large, flattened, and outlined forms and decorative color that made an immediate impact and gave their work great visual appeal. Several of the artists were British born and trained, and the group as a whole was influenced by late postimpressionism.

Despite these European influences, the group was more concerned with promoting a vision of Canada and a sense of nationalism than with investigating aesthetic issues. Through their portrayal of the rugged northern landscape, the Group of Seven changed the image of the artist in Canada from that of a proper Victorian gentleman to one of a man in a canoe. As a result, Canadian art and the Canadian artist gained a new independence from tradition. This new independence was perhaps the group’s most important legacy.

B

Carr and Milne

Two important Canadian modernist painters worked from the 1920s on outside the burst of activity occurring in Toronto as a result of the Group of Seven. Emily Carr painted landscapes and First Nations peoples in British Columbia, and David Milne produced watercolors in upstate New York and rural Ontario. Carr’s approach comes closer than Milne’s to that of the Group of Seven, yet her work also conveys her deep belief in the spiritual forces of nature. Carr’s dramatic compositions, somber color, and swirling, dense forms express the energy and vitality of British Columbia’s land, its forests, and its native peoples.

Milne chose to investigate the world in terms of the timeless concerns of the picture-maker. Thus, he transferred his empathy for the landscape, the human figure, and the still-life into compositions with elegant simple forms, delicate color, and gentle light, so that the play of visual motifs becomes his primary subject matter. Although Milne had a great reverence for nature, he did not share Carr’s emphasis on its supernatural power. Nor did he have any interest in the Group of Seven’s desire to send a nationalist message through art.

C

The Canadian Group of Painters

A focus on landscape painting continued under the Canadian Group of Painters, which formed in Toronto in 1933. This group had a broader definition of what constituted Canadian subject matter than the Group of Seven had, and its primary purpose was to exhibit work by its members from across the country.

A number of the artists in the Canadian Group of Painters either distanced themselves from the Group of Seven’s approach to painting or reworked the group’s pictorial concerns in ways more appropriate to their own experiences. For example, landscapes by Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald in Winnipeg and Carl Schaefer in Hanover, Ontario, referred to the familiar and the domestic, rather than to the distant and untamed. Clarence Gagnon and André Bieler had a similar emphasis in their pictures of villages in Québec. Adrien Hébert, on the other hand, represented the energy of a Canadian metropolis in his paintings of Montréal.

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