Group of Seven stamp collection includes painting from VAG
100th anniversary commemoration draws from galleries across the country
A painting donated to the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) by a collector who didn’t think the gallery deserved it is now a stamp marking the 100th anniversary of the Group of Seven.
The painting is J.E.H. (James Edward Hervey) Macdonald’s Church by the Sea, which was inspired by a visit to Nova Scotia. The stamp is one of seven in a commemorative set unveiled Wednesday.
Jim Phillips, director of the stamp services team at Canada Post, said it was impossible to tell the story of Canadian art without including the Group of Seven, which had its first exhibition in 1920 in Toronto.
“Lawren Harris (a Group of Seven member) once said, ‘We were told quite seriously that there would never be a Canadian art because we had no art tradition.’ The Group of Seven built that tradition,” Phillips said via Zoom video conferencing.
“Their work gave Canadians and others around the world a new way to view our landscape, to see the country as it really was: raw, unspoiled and full of rough beauty.”
In addition to Macdonald and Harris, the other members of the Group of Seven were Franklin Carmichael, A.Y. Jackson, Francis Johnston, Arthur Lismer and Frederick Varley.
The stamps were unveiled online throughout the day by art galleries across the country. The first was Harris’s Miners’ Houses, Glace Bay, by the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; the last was Church by the Sea, by the VAG.
Grant Arnold, the VAG’S Audain curator of B.C. Art, said Church by the Sea’s intense and sombre colour evokes in him a “sense of austerity rather than serenity.”
“There are certain aspects of this work that link up to the larger ideals of the Group of Seven,” he said via Zoom. “The church, for example, is a kind of symbol of individual shaped by severity of landscape (and a) metaphor for the link between earth and heavens.”
He said the rhythm of the landscape — an idea championed by the Group of Seven — is implied by the rocks in the foreground.
The painting was purchased by Harold Mortimer-lamb. He supported modern Canadian painters and was a friend of the influential New York artist and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz. He was also the father of artist Molly Lamb Bobak.
He was on the VAG’S purchasing committee in the 1930s but was often at odds with other members over what Arnold called their “hostility to modern Canadian art” such as the Group of Seven and Emily Carr.
Mortimer-lamb wrote a letter to Macdonald’s son confirming the purchase and said he was an “enthusiastic admirer” of the artist’s work.
He said he had made arrangements to donate Church by the Sea and his collection to the VAG in his will. But he was anything but enthusiastic about his decision.
“They don’t deserve to be given anything but junk, as that is what appeals to the taste of the ‘powers-that-be’ and determines their buying policy ...”