Painting a Country Into Being

In the early twentieth century, Canada was still working out how it wanted to see itself. That question hasn’t entirely gone away. 

Confederation was young. Cultural gravity leaned toward Europe. Much of the landscape painting of the day followed familiar habits—pastoral calm, softened light, tidy compositions. The land behaved. It sat politely inside the frame. 

Then a small group of painters began turning their gaze toward something that didn’t. 

John Geoghegan, curator at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection—the gallery that now holds roughly 8,000 works, about a third of them by the Group of Seven and their contemporaries—suggests that to understand what they were doing, we have to return to the mindset of a century ago. 

They weren’t simply wilderness romantics, at least not in the way the story is sometimes told. They were modernists. They had travelled. They had seen post‑Impressionism and other currents in Europe—bold colour, loose brushwork—and began applying those approaches to Canadian ground in a sustained way. Landscape painting had existed here since the early nineteenth century, but much of it still echoed European models. Mountains resembled the Alps. Forests could feel transported rather than rooted. 

The Group of Seven edged away from that inheritance. 

They painted close to home at first—Algonquin Park, Georgian Bay, the North Shore of Lake Superior. They also benefited from new mobility: railways, roads, cars. As John puts it, they offered audiences the chance to experience places, often places they would never reach themselves, in something like “Technicolour.” 

The terrain had its own ideas about how it should be seen. 

Across shield rock and wind‑shaped pine, composition doesn’t settle easily. Rock can occupy foreground and horizon at once. Trees bend under exposure. Sky presses down, then opens without warning. With few human markers, scale becomes difficult to judge. Distance refuses to behave. Anyone who has stood on open rock with nothing but water and sky for reference knows the feeling.

That friction seems to have drawn them in. 

They painted outdoors—en plein air—often on small panels that could be carried and worked quickly, then later translated into larger canvases. A.Y. Jackson made rapid graphite sketches and scribbled colour notes in the margins—violet in the rocks, green in the sky—because light was shifting and the moment wouldn’t wait. It was painting in the landscape, not simply of it. 

After time spent in northern places, the practical problem behind the style becomes easier to recognize. In the North, light can wash the rock flat at midday, then carve hard edges into it an hour later. A hillside that looked grey turns blue, then white. Colours fade almost to nothing and then flare back again. Even now, standing on exposed rock or along a long sweep of coast, the eye needs time to adjust. You don’t master that light. You work with it. 

You can picture them trying to do the same—find a visual language that might hold what they were seeing without taming it. 

The First World War threads through this story. Several members of the Group served as war artists; Jackson enlisted, was wounded, and later reassigned to paint battlefields overseas. In the years after the war, Canada was stepping out from under a colonial identity and searching for cultural confidence to match political confidence. Landscape became one place to test that confidence. It wasn’t only about what was painted, but about where those paintings travelled and who saw them. 

Exhibitions helped carry that new vision outward. With support from figures such as Eric Brown at the National Gallery of Canada, their work travelled—to Wembley in 1924, to Paris in 1927, to major American exhibitions. In Toronto, annual shows built an audience and a following. What began as friends painting side by side gradually took on the shape of a movement. 

In 1927, Jackson travelled north aboard the CGS Beothic, a supply vessel servicing RCMP outposts and Hudson’s Bay Company posts. Few artists could reach the Arctic at that time without government sponsorship. On board were scientists, officers, and Sir Frederick Banting—the co-discoverer of insulin and an accomplished amateur painter.  

Although delighted by the northern access provided by the ship, Jackson was also frustrated by the inability to control his vantage point. In Algonquin, he could walk toward what interested him, set up, and stay as long as the light held. If a cloud passed or the colour shifted, he could wait it out. In the Arctic, that patience wasn’t available. On the Beothic, some of what he most wanted to paint slid past the rail—brilliant, fleeting—because the ship kept moving. 

In 1930, when Lawren Harris joined the journey North, the work shifted again. Forms simplified. Mountains grew more sculptural. Ice resolved into planes of light and shadow. Detail fell away. The paintings began searching for structure rather than surface. 

These two images from the same region of Baffin Island—a Lawren Harris painting and a contemporary photograph—capture strikingly similar landscapes. The terrain visible today is very much what the artists themselves saw. 

The reach of these images was considerable. Reproduced widely, they shaped how many Canadians imagined their country—through granite, wind, water, and ice. Wilderness became shorthand for resilience and distinctiveness. The North stood in for something essential. 

But every frame leaves something outside it. 

Many canvases present land as vast and unpeopled. Yet these territories were, and remain, deeply inhabited and known. The era in which the Group worked was also marked by expansion and colonization—residential schools, enforced settlement, displacement. The idea of wilderness as empty was never neutral. 

John is careful here. The Group of Seven are important artists, he notes, but not beyond critique. Their work emerged within systems of privilege. There were no women among the official members. Harris’s independent wealth gave him unusual freedom to pursue modernist painting that did not need to sell. Paintings of Indigenous communities, particularly in the Arctic, can carry a power imbalance—part documentation, part what John calls “salvage ethnology,” shaped by the assumption that ways of life were disappearing. 

Acknowledging that doesn’t erase the achievement. It changes how we read it, and how we place it within a larger story.

Several members of the Group are buried on the McMichael grounds. Their legacy is preserved there and, in John's words, continually questioned. That balance feels right. 

More than a century later, the landscapes remain. Granite fractures along ancient lines. Light moves across water and ice, and in the oblique angles of northern sun, long shadows stretch thin across rock and snow. People continue to live, travel, and learn in these places in ways that extend far beyond any painted edge. 

Revisiting the Group of Seven now is less about judgement than about paying attention. What did they help Canadians see? How did their paintings shape a national imagination at a moment of cultural emergence? Was that imagination shaped and restricted by the biases of the time? 

Staying curious means holding those tensions without rushing to resolve them. A sense of place is never finished. It grows through conversation, through time on the land, and through a willingness to look again—from another angle, and then another.

Journeys for the Curious