CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: The Group of Seven And Their Influence

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In May 1920, seven painters held an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto under a new name: the Group of Seven. The founders were Lawren Harris, J. E. H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley, Frank Johnston, Franklin Carmichael and A. Y. Jackson. Several of them had met years earlier while working as commercial artists at Grip Limited, a Toronto design firm, where they produced advertisements and illustrations to pay the bills. They shared a conviction that Canadian art should stop imitating European landscapes and instead capture the rugged character of Canada itself. Their thinking was shaped strongly by their friend Tom Thomson, whose bold paintings of Algonquin Park inspired them. Thomson, however, never became an official member; he drowned in Canoe Lake in 1917, three years before the group was formed.

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The painters developed a distinctive way of working. On trips into the northern Ontario wilderness, they made small, quick oil sketches on wooden panels, often in freezing conditions. Back in their Toronto studios, the best of these sketches were turned into large canvases. Many of the small sketches are now valued as highly as the finished works. Lawren Harris, who came from a wealthy family, even arranged for a railway boxcar to be fitted out as a mobile studio, allowing the artists to live and work along the rail line in the Algoma region. Their bright colours and heavy brushstrokes shocked some viewers at first, and one critic famously dismissed their style as the “Hot Mush School.”

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The membership did not stay fixed. Frank Johnston left early, and A. J. Casson joined in 1926. Later, Edwin Holgate of Montreal and Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald of Winnipeg were invited in, which helped the group claim to represent more than one province. The painters also influenced artists outside their circle. When Emily Carr travelled east from British Columbia in 1927, Harris encouraged her to return to painting after years of working mainly as a landlady, and the two exchanged letters for years. In 1933, the group disbanded and was replaced by the larger Canadian Group of Painters, which welcomed artists from across the country.

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Today the Group of Seven is often described as Canada’s first national art movement. Their paintings appear in textbooks, on postage stamps and in major galleries, and some have sold for millions of dollars. The McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario, holds hundreds of their works, and six of the members are buried on its grounds. Not everyone, however, views their legacy uncritically. Some historians argue that by showing the North as an empty wilderness, the paintings ignored the Indigenous peoples who had lived there for thousands of years. Several galleries now display the group’s work alongside that of Indigenous artists to tell a fuller story.