Clarence Gagnon’s The Train, Winter, shows a locomotive steaming through a snowy land.PAUL ELTER, National Gallery of Canada/National Gallery Of Canada
When the exhibition Canada and Impressionism showed in Munich in 2019, it concluded with a room devoted to the Group of Seven. Here, enthusiastic German audiences discovered, was the full flowering of an encounter with French Impressionism by Canadian expat and repatriated artists from the 1880s to the 1920s.
As the same show finally opens at the National Gallery of Canada – delayed a year by the pandemic and another month by the Ottawa protests – it doesn’t need that final room. It ends, perhaps a bit limply, with works by Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris, J.E.H. MacDonald and Arthur Lismer from the mid-teens, before the Group was formed in 1920, and with two unforgiving portraits from 1927 and 1930, Prudence Heward’s Anna and Edwin Holgate’s Ludivine. Canadians hardly need to be reminded of the Group. English Canadians, at least, know the story well: In 1920, inspired by Thomson’s example and saddened by his premature death, a group of seven stalwart outdoorsmen set out to paint the harsh Canadian landscape in a new, modern way.
One hundred and two years later, revisionism is in the air. The McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., marked the centenary with an overview of the Group, but also with Uninivited, a show devoted to the male painters’ neglected female contemporaries. In a way, the Canada and Impressionism show, which brings together about 100 paintings from public and private Canadian collections, is a healthy part of that same rethinking of a national myth. It reminds viewers that the Group did not spring full-grown from the brow of Zeus – or from Algonquin Park, if you prefer.
There were Canadian precedents for their plein air painting, other artists who had travelled to Europe and seen what the Impressionists were achieving with their focus on everyday urban life and attention to effects of light in the countryside and the garden. Many of these artists are already well-known to Canadians, if never as revered as Thomson or Harris: This show includes European and Canadian scenes by Clarence Gagnon and Maurice Cullen, and many reminders of the easy pleasures to be had in the work of the expat James Wilson Morrice, represented here by luminous views of Paris, Venice and North Africa.
On the other hand, it’s a stretch to argue that Canada made much contribution to Impressionism, either in France or globally, as this show might imply. Organized by Katerina Atanassova, the National Gallery’s senior Canadian curator, the exhibition takes a very broad view of the movement. It includes early landscapes by William Brymner and William Blair Bruce that it concedes owe more to the darker, more delicate approach of the Barbizon school, than to anything produced by Claude Monet or Camille Pissarro.
Also, it makes little distinction between the academic painters and the refuseniks since the chief ambition of many Canadian artists was to hang in Paris’ annual Salon so to advance their careers at home. And it continues into a period when abstraction had emerged in Europe while in Canada the landscape painters soldiered on. (To be fair, these distinctions are acknowledged in the catalogue, where there is room for a more subtle approach to the subject. In his prologue, Adam Gopnik warns against the notion art was a single-file march towards modernism.)
Florence Carlyle’s The Studio is a prime example of the Japanese influence on Post-Impressionist art.John Tamblyn/Collection of the Woodstock Art Gallery
Still, it seems improbable that anything by Toronto artist George Reid might be labelled Impressionist: He was an academic genre painter who specialized in narrative scenes, represented here by a studied oil of a boy reading a book. Similarly, Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté's carefully observed profiles of Quebec woodsmen or dainty landscapes feel beside the point. And it’s foolhardy to compare the subject of Henri Beau’s bland pointillist painting of a family picnic to Édouard Manet’s earth-shaking Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, but the wall text does just that.
On the other hand, one could mention the Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne and the Fauves in the same breath as Emily Carr’s Autumn in France, a striated rendition of Breton hills dating to 1911. Carr is a powerful example of the show’s thesis: She went to France in 1910 for an experience that would revolutionize her approach to her Canadian subjects. Unfortunately, that is one of only two Carrs in the show. Coincidentally, her European work was already spoken for by the Audain Art Museum’s 2019-2020 show about her relationship with French modernism.
If there are confirmations here – of Morrice’s light pleasures; of Cullen and Gagnon’s solid endurance – there are also, thankfully, some revelations in a show that includes nine women among its three dozen artists. Florence Carlyle’s The Studio, a bold portrait of a woman lounging in a kimono, is a prime example of the Japanese influence on Post-Impressionist art and a provocative statement of the subject’s intellectual and sexual power. Mary Bell Eastlake’s In the Orchard, a portrait of a young girl in dappled light, does a notable job of turning impressionistic effects into graphic patterning.
It hangs in a rather original section devoted to portraits of children where Atanassova remarks how softening social attitudes were refashioning childhood as a cherished state. That includes Paul Peel’s The Bubble Boy, a familiar image of a chubby-cheeked cherub blowing soap bubbles that can be seen with fresh eyes in this new context. The cutesy genre sensibility is still there, but the sunlight shining through the broken brim of the child’s straw hat – that’s Impressionism.
In the end, revisionism be damned, a triumphant nationalist narrative does emerge: Canada’s major contribution to Impressionism turns out to be, unsurprisingly, the winter scene. Cullen returned to Canada to produce such acute observations of winter atmosphere as The Ice Harvest; Gagnon, who moved between Paris and Quebec, popularized the quaint Canadian snow scene with works such as Old Houses, Baie-Saint-Paul and, early in his career, Lawren Harris would observe the blue tints of snow in shade with Snow II, that lovely 1915 canvas from the National Gallery’s own collection.
But perhaps the most revealing is Gagnon’s The Train, Winter, of 1913-14. It shows a locomotive, that subject so elevated by Monet, not sitting majestically in the Gare St. Lazare but rather steaming through a snowy land. It’s the history of Canada, of course, the country forged by a railway, but as a composition it offers an arrestingly awkward contrast of black and white and nature and technology. Heedless of incongruities, it plows onward, rather like Canada’s uneven encounter with French Impressionism.
Emily Carr’s Autumn in France is a striated rendition of Breton hills dating to 1911.National Gallery Of Canada
Canada and Impressionism continues at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa to July 3.
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