A Like Vision: The Group of Seven at 100 - part 2

Like Jackson, Lismer, and Harris he was appointed, in 1918, as an official war artist for the Canadian War Memorials Fund set up by Lord Beaverbrook in 1916, although only he and Jackson experienced the nightmare of the trenches at first hand. Varley was a particularly fine war artist, and the experience certainly honed his remarkable technical skill, but he never forgot the horror of it. He later struggled with depression, and had a reputation for reckless drinking. He was the “wild man” of the Group, regularly penniless.  

Varley was, by inclination, a portraitist—he and Harris both contributed portraits to the first Group of Seven exhibition—but in accordance with the aims of his co-founders, he painted landscapes also, including views of Georgian Bay that are among the Group’s masterpieces. 

Night Ferry, Vancouver was painted in Ottawa in “108 hours of enthusiasm,” a year after Varley returned to eastern Canada following a momentous decade in Vancouver, where he developed his unique colour palette, distorted perspective, and near-abstract portrayal of water. Varley’s personal turmoil appears in his proxy, the isolated figure on the ferry’s deck watching a place of intense growth and romance recede evermore.

Charles S. Band, the donor of this mesmerizing nocturne of Lynn, just north of Vancouver, was Varley’s most ardent supporter and a long-time friend. When Varley was awarded the Canada Council Medal in 1964, Band’s telegram to the Council gushed with praise and insight: 

“VARLEY HAS PROBABLY DONE MORE FOR CANADIAN ART THAN ANY OTHER CANADIAN ARTIST HE IS AN ARTIST OF HIGH CHARACTER AND INTEGRITY WHO LOVES THE WORLD OF COLOUR AND PAINTS WITH GREAT POWER AND BEAUTY 
I AM MOST GRATEFUL FOR HIS WARM FRIENDSHIP FOR MANY YEARS.”

First employed by the commercial art firm of Brigden’s, he moved to Rous and Mann in 1919 where he became assistant, and friend, to Franklin Carmichael, who encouraged him to develop his painting skills. The two of them then moved to the silkscreen firm Sampson-Matthews. Casson succeeded Carmichael as art director there in 1932, eventually becoming vice-president in 1946.

He and his wife, Margaret, became good friends of Robert and Signe McMichael. He was the last of the Group of Seven to die, at age ninety-three, in 1992. He is buried in the McMichael Artists’ Cemetery.

In 1958 Casson retired after a forty-five-year career in commercial art. During his career Casson was respected for his perfectionism and his refined understanding of colour and linear design. Shore Pattern is replete with these virtues. Painted when abstraction dominated artistic trends, the painting’s foliage is composed of irregular patterns and planes on the brink of abstraction. This is especially so from about one metre away, where the shoreline literally provides the horizon upon which we orient ourselves. Stepping back twelve metres into Gallery 5, we see those same patterns and planes shift into dramatic relief and evocation of nature.

White Pine is emblematic of the McMichael and its history. Only a couple of years after the McMichaels acquired their first Group painting, they were aggressively building their collection. According to Robert McMichael, Casson painted White Pine a few weeks after they discussed a silkscreen print of the subject. McMichael considered the print Casson’s best-known reproduction, and was elated to buy the painting Casson made on spec. The motif of the solitary tree is integral to the Group’s early history, appearing in iconic works by Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, and F. H. Varley.

The invitation to Edwin Holgate in March 1929 to join the Group of Seven reflected both the artist’s importance within the Montreal art scene (not to mention the national recognition he already enjoyed) and the shared values that appeared in his work; his landscapes hang very comfortably next to the Group’s.

He was, like Fred Varley, a highly accomplished portraitist and a notable printmaker. 

He was the ninth artist to join the Group, bringing its numbers up to eight (Johnston having resigned in 1924). Like all his colleagues in the Group, he was also a founder member of the Canadian Group of Painters in 1933, once the Group of Seven had disbanded.

Holgate had been back in Canada from France for less than a year when he showed The Cellist at the Art Association of Montreal’s 1923 Spring Exhibition. Although painted in Canada, The Cellist is French in conception. The cellist, Yvette Lamontagne, was a Montrealer studying in Paris whom Holgate and his wife met there; she also returned to Montreal in 1922.

Born in Orillia, Ontario, he arrived in Toronto in 1910 to study at the Ontario College of Art. In 1911, he enrolled at Grip Ltd as an apprentice. 

There, he met Tom Thomson, Arthur Lismer and later Fred Varley, from the latter two of whom he would have heard about the free tuition offered at the Royal Academy in Antwerp, Belgium. He took himself off to study there in 1913 – but the outbreak of war in 1914 cut his studies short and he returned, sharing studio space with Thomson over the winter.    

He was therefore part of the future Group of Seven from early on and became a founding member  in 1920. He, like the others, had left Grip Ltd for Rous and Mann, before moving on to begin a long association with the print-making firm of Sampson-Matthews as head designer. He co-founded the Ontario Society of Painters in Watercolour in 1925, with his friend and assistant A.J. Casson and F.H. Brigden.        

In 1932, he left Sampson-Matthews in Casson’s able hands and embarked on a career as Head of Graphic Design and Commercial Art at the Ontario College of Art. In the 1930s he developed an interest in industrial landscape, producing exquisite drawings and paintings of the ramshackle but picturesque mining town of Cobalt. At the end of his too short life, he even tried his hand at abstraction.  

He died, aged only 55, in 1945.      

When Carmichael went into his studio to paint October Gold, he recalibrated the balance of colours in its plein-air sketch, Lansing. All the Group’s artists did this. Sketches were (mostly) products of observation in situ, done in the time it might take to have a coffee. Paintings were creations in and of the studio where the artist had a larger palette, time to paint, and time to reflect. The sketch’s bravado is harmonized in the painting’s background with gentle vertical strokes to set off the foreground birch and foliage like dazzling gilt-metal-wrapped thread against a tapestry’s weft.

The McMichael’s 1990 retrospective exhibition of Carmichael was aptly titled Light & Shadow. From the early 1920s until his death in 1945, Carmichael consistently employed the effects of light and shadow to describe scenes and instill emotions. Autumn is a rare achievement for Carmichael, its phenomenally intense dynamism suggesting both the brilliance of watercolour and the intensity of oil paint.

Of course, Carmichael did not know Gambit #1 would be the last work he exhibited, but so it was. It therefore remains a gambit to an unknown end. Shown in the 1945 exhibition of the Ontario Society of Artists in Toronto, it was in a room of “experimental art,” commended for extending the search for artistic truth. Abstractions were painted in Canada in the 1920s, and advanced painting in Montreal, Europe, and the United States had already embraced abstraction’s potential. Like his friend Lawren Harris’s abstractions of the time, Carmichael’s Gambit #1 abstracted the visual grammar of landscapes, sitting comfortably between Northern Tundra and Hilltops.