Culture

Prospect recommends: Painting Canada

October 19, 2011
An expedition through the Canadian wilds: Tom Thomson's "Path behind Mowat Lodge"
An expedition through the Canadian wilds: Tom Thomson's "Path behind Mowat Lodge"
Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven

Dulwich Picture Gallery, 19th October-8th January, Tel: 020 8693 5254

When Tom Thomson’s canoe was found empty, floating in Algonquin Park in 1917, it bore witness to his artistic philosophy in a way that no painting ever could. His mysterious death testified to the savage, ungovernable force of the wilderness—one harnessed by his works and those of Canada’s iconic landscape artists, the Group of Seven.

A new show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery takes an expedition through the wilds with Thomson and his followers. The first truly Canadian school of painting, creators of a national aesthetic, these artists have been as neglected abroad as they have been celebrated at home. Returning to Britain for the first time in almost a century, they offer an essential supplement to the Eurocentric narrative of 20th-century art.

Before Thomson, generations of artists had rejected the dramatic beauty of the North American wilderness as both unworthy of artistic representation and impossible to capture. Inspired by the Impressionists, Thomson and his followers gave Modernism a Canadian accent, adding to its stylistic rebellion a quest for national identity. Their vigorous, rough-edged aesthetic finds expression in images of the Rocky Mountains, Atlantic seascapes and even the earliest western paintings of the Arctic.

Thomson’s arresting The Jack Pine is the centrepiece of a show that balances full-scale canvasses with little-known sketches—a rare opportunity to trace the development and scope of this undervalued movement.