Group of Seven

Student: Minkwan SonCanadian History 10

Teacher: Brian

Lawren Harris

-Lawren Harris was born on October 23, 1885, in Brantford, Ontario, to a wealthy family - The Harrises of the Massey-Harris industrial fortune.

- He took up painting at an early age and studied in Germany from 1904 to 1907. He worked briefly with Norman Duncan, illustrating several of Duncan's stories, but Harris was in fact the only member of the Group of Seven who was free all his life from monetary pressures and temptations of commercial art and advertising designs.

J.E.H.MacDonald- In 1895 he joined the Grip

Engraving Company in Toronto where he met and encouraged

other staff members, including Tom Thomson, Frank Carmichael, Arthur

Lismer and Fred Varley, to paint with him on weekends - laying the groundwork for what would later

become Canada's famous Group of Seven.

- A founding member of the Group of Seven, J.E.H. MacDonald

challenged and vastly broadened the scope of Canadian Art.

MacDonald believed that art should express the "mood and

character and spirit of the country", and he portrayed his vision in vast panoramas using dark, rich colours

and a turbulent patterned style.

Franklin Carmichael

- In 1913 he went to Paris to study painting but was soon

back in Ontario to participate in the founding of the Group of Seven. In 1932 he was appointed

Head of Graphic and Commercial Art at the Ontario College of Art.

Frank Johnston

- He painted very much differently than the others.

He chose close-up views that often seemed

crowded. Other works showed more simple

landscapes, with subtleties like clouds reflecting on

water.

Arthur Lismer

-Lismer was born in Sheffield, England. At the age of 26, he immigrated to Canada seeking work as a commercial illustrator. It was at the Grip Engraving Company in Toronto that he met a group of other talented young artists and formed the Group of Seven. Together, they organized trips to explore and sketch the wilderness - capturing the spirit of Canada in their work, and setting Canadian art on a bold and original new course.

- Although Lismer painted throughout his life, he devoted the majority of his time to art education. A gifted teacher, Lismer pioneered the field of child art education across Canada and around the world.

Fred Varley

- In 1912 he came to Canada, where he found himself working in the same commercial studio as Tom Thomson. With Thomson and the others he took to painting Northern Ontario landscapes, and also began to do considerable work as a portrait painter.

- In 1926 Varley moved to Vancouver to become Head of Drawing, Painting & Composition at the newly formed Vancouver School of Decorative & Applied Arts. In 1933 he founded his own school, the B.C. College of Arts, but this venture led to his bankruptcy in 1935. In 1938 his marriage also collapsed.

A.Y.Jackson-Like other members of the Group of Seven he was trained as a Commercial Artist and for many years made his living by that means. He apprenticed to a Montreal lithographer at the age of 12, and though he later spent two and a half years in France studying painting, he was soon back in Canada paying his rent by designing cigar labels.

-In 1920, with Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer, Frank Carmichael, Fred Varley, James MacDonald and Frank Johnston, he formed the most famous exhibitors' group in the history of Canadian painting: the Group of Seven.

- In the following years he painted the Arctic, the West Coast, the Prairies, and the North Woods, as well as his beloved St. Lawrence, where his countless sketching expeditions earned him the nickname Pere Raquette- Pappa Snowshoe.