Image:  Thompson - Jack Pine (Courtesy of Ross King)

25th November

Wild Men of the North: 

Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven

by Ross King

In 1924 an exhibition in London of Canadian landscapes moved the critic C. Lewis Hind to celebrate them as ‘the most vital group of paintings produced since the war - indeed, this century’. These landscapes of Canada’s northern lakes and rugged backwoods, painted in a boldly Post-Impressionist style, had been produced over the previous decade by a collective of Toronto-based painters known as the ‘Group of Seven’, whose aim was to forge a national school of landscape painting. This illustrated lecture introduces the painters - including their talismanic colleague Tom Thomson, who died in 1917 - and examines how they stormed the conservative bastions of Canadian art to establish themselves on the international stage as practitioners of a distinctive avant-garde.  

Images:  Wiki Commons Public Domain