The Group of Seven and the Public Mind

When I lived in Ottawa in the 1970s, I used to enjoy passing lazy afternoons at the National Gallery looking at the pictures. I remember how surprised I was when I first encountered the Group of Seven collection. These paintings were completely familiar—I’d seen them in schoolbooks and on calendars, posters, t-shirts, everywhere—yet at the same time they were completely unexpected. I realized that I had never really seen them before. These were not the flat, insipid, washed-out images of the reproduction factories. Instead they were luminous and bright and spirited. In a word, they were beautiful—which was not a word I had thought to associate with the Group of Seven before.  

Most people who see the G7 for the first time in person must experience similar sensations of discovery and recognition. Our sense of them has been so attenuated over the years by repeated exposure to wholesale reproduction—Robert Fulford has called them "our national wallpaper"—that only an encounter with the real thing can rehabilitate it. Such an encounter becomes more probable this year because the National Gallery has mounted a major exhibition to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Group’s formation. The show opened in Ottawa last October and travels to Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver throughout 1996. It is supplemented by a handsome book-cum-catalogue, The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation, by curator Charles Hill.

More recently the myth of the misunderstood mod