Artists, Patrons and Public: An Enquiry into the Success of the Group of Seven

Artists, Patrons and Public: An Enquiry into the Success ofthe Group ofSeven DOUGLAS COLE For the vast majority of Canadians, it has been said, Picasso and the group of seven are probably the only modern artists remembered from school or general reading.I This remarkable fame enjoyed by a single Canadian artistic group resulted from a number of factors, not least of which were nationalist aspirations, delightful controversy, influential friends, and vigorous self-promotion. One essential element in the group's success was the commonality of experience established between artists and their patrons and public. A leader of the group, J.E.H. MacDonald, once observed that "art requires associated ideas"; the observer "must have experiences generally similar to the artist" before he can appreciatively respond to the work before him.i" The group's success, first with a small number of important people and then rapidly with a larger public, was built upon a shared discovery of the northern wilderness as a central fact and symbol of Canadian life. This essay is an examination of some aspects of the common experiences of painter, patron and public which aided in the group's unprecedented acceptance and fame. From the last decade of the nineteenth century, one can observe a quickening response by Canadians to the wilderness landscape around them. Paralleling and often led by a similar movement in the United States,3 Canadians developed what may be called a wilderness "ethos," a new appreciation of the physical, aesthetic and spiritual values of those areas where man's incursions upon nature were relatively absent.4 Within the ethos, wilderness called man back to his primitive strength, refreshing him through strenuous living in a natural environment . There he found a spiritual regeneration from close contact with the vitfil forces of nature Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 13, No. 2 (Ete 1978 Summer) and he drew from it an appreciation of the beauty and grandeur of unspoilt nature. The Canadian wilderness ethos expressed itself in a dozen ways - in the creation of wilderness parks like Algonquin and Garibaldi, in children's woocfcraft camps, in Grey Owl, in the wild animal stories of Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G.D. Roberts, in the summer cottaging movement, in the art of Emily Carr and the group of seven, even in the historical writing of Harold Innis and Arthur Lower. Its roots lay in the western tradition of ideas of Arcadia, primitivism and romanticism, but the reason for its rapid development between 1890 and 1930 lay in the growth of crowded industrial cities and the simultaneous development of easy means to escape them. It was the urban condition which, more than anything else, caused Canadians to seek wild landscape. The period from 1891 to 1921 witnessed a phenomenal growth of Canadian cities. Montreal and Toronto almost tripled their populations , while the newer Winnipeg increased by seven times. Vancouver grew from 42,000 in 1901 to 179,000 in 1921.5 For the first time, many Canadians found themselves living within an industrial and urban landscape, a landscape made all the more alien by its newness, its inadequate accommodation, sanitation and recreation facilities and by its noise, increasingly intensified by the motor car. Enthusiasm for city life was, as J.S. Woodsworth wrote, only for the visitor: The novel sights and sounds soon become familiar. The higher the buildings, the less sunshine; the bigger the crowds, the less fresh air....We become weary in the unceasing rush, and feel utterly lonely in the crowded streets. There comes a wistful longing for the happy life of 'God's out-of-doors' with the perfume of the flowers and the singing of the birds. But our work now lies in the city and in the city we must stay.6 The reaction to urban conditions was, at least for many of the middle and upper classes, to escape them. The prosperous moved into outlying garden suburbs, commuting into the city's core only for work and urbanity. Not surpris69 ingly, they sought recreation completely away from the city and all that it meant. The harassed city-dweller could, of course, go back to the land, to a rural setting, and...