Regina Haggo reviews Embracing Canada: Landscapes from Krieghoff to the Group of Seven now at the AGH
AGH exhibition of landscapes spotlights nature in all its moods
What does Canada look like?
Landscape painters have been asking this question for about 200 years.
The Group of Seven, whose members were mostly based in Toronto, searched for an answer by going north, first to Algonquin Park, Georgian Bay and Algoma, then to Lake Superior and the Arctic.
They first exhibited in Toronto in 1920 and have dominated the story of landscape painting in Canada since.
Which is why an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Hamilton is a refreshing reminder that, yes, there was landscape painting before the Group of Seven.
Embracing Canada: Landscapes from Krieghoff to the Group of Seven, organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery, comprises almost 100 landscape paintings from the 1830s to the 1940s.
Love of landscape painting is not unique to Canada. Landscape was an especially popular subject in European art in the 19th century, thanks to Romanticism.
Romanticist artists embraced nature in all its moods, from savage to soothing. They also sought out nature’s exoticisms. And what could be more exotic to Europeans than views of the New World?
Exotic Canada was loved and painted by 19th-century artists born and trained outside Canada, such as Dutch artist Cornelius Krieghoff. He came to Montreal in the 1840s. His paintings, executed in a traditional, lifelike and idealized style, were admired by traditionalists everywhere.
But he also wanted to paint what was unique about Canada. That included capturing the vastness of the land, untamed forests and wild waterfalls, rich autumnal colours and snow — lots of it. He often populated his landscapes with indigenous peoples and Quebec habitants.
Like a traditional painting, Krieghoff ’s “Autumn Landscape with Indians at the Big Rock” encourages us to enter on the left foreground.
The land slopes precariously on the right, a thrill for risk-relishing Romanticists.
Krieghoff creates his unique and exotic view by adding three natives around a fire, two of them smoking pipes. He colours the wilderness around them in rich reds, browns and greens. The seemingly infinitely receding hills and sky on the far right contribute to the look of a big country.
Canadian art patrons continued to favour an old-fashioned style well into the early 20th century. When Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven began to exhibit, critics mocked their decidedly modernist style.
Thomson took to the wilderness in “Opulent October.” Krieghoff lets us enter his painting. But Thomson keeps us out with a row of tangled trees in the foreground, a reminder that this forest is untouched by humans.
But Thomson was a modernist, not an imitator of nature. Consequently, the painting’s surface is highly textured, the paint layered, and the marks of the brush obvious.
His friend and Group of Seven founder Lawren Harris also liked to build up his landscapes with dabs of paint. By about 1921, however, he embraced a more simplified style and smoother surfaces. In “Quiet Lake,” he reduces his view to the lake surrounded by trees and hills that look almost quilted.
Also represented in this exhibition are Emily Carr, Maurice Cullen, David Milne and James Wilson Morrice, among others.