In St. Anne’s fire, Canada lost the only known ecclesiastical art by Group of Seven

Open this photo in gallery:

There is probably one in your neighbourhood, too: that handsome old church, a once-thriving spiritual centre and notable local building, where today the dwindling congregation debates whether it’s time to sell to a developer.

Canada has many struggling churches, but only one could boast decorative paintings by members of the Group of Seven. The murals that were destroyed when St. Anne’s Anglican Church in Toronto’s west end was gutted by fire Sunday were unique in Canadian art history – the only examples of ecclesiastical art by the Group.

The church was constructed in 1907-8 in a neo-Byzantine style, and in 1923 the Reverend Lawrence Skey commissioned J.E.H. MacDonald to design a decorative scheme for the blank walls and the interior of the dome.

MacDonald brought in two fellow members of the Group, Frederick Varley and Franklin Carmichael, and seven other colleagues.

Marcus Gee: It was only an old building, but the pain of losing a historic Toronto church runs deep

The Group is known for its landscape painting – although Varley was also recognized as a portraitist and did create two paintings of Christ emerging from the tomb in the 1930s and 1940s – but the biblical scenes MacDonald designed are unlike the rest of their work. They are gone now, but you can still see them on St. Anne’s YouTube videos, where tour guide Robin Sewell explains the art.

Varley contributed the Nativity, a charming scene with familiar farm animals and a very human baby. For halos, Mary and the child sport flat gold discs, the only aspect of Byzantine art that Varley reproduced faithfully, making his figures far fleshier and less stiff than their medieval predecessors. He also included a witty self-portrait as a handsome young shepherd, kneeling at Mary’s right.

Carmichael, meanwhile, painted a more stylized version of the Adoration of the Magi and the Entry into Jerusalem, while MacDonald reserved the Crucifixion for himself, as well as painting the Transfiguration and the Tempest.

Open this photo in gallery:

Raised in various Christian denominations, all three artists would have been familiar with the images of Christ’s life that MacDonald proposed, as well as knowing the detailed iconography from their art studies. But there is no reason to think this project was driven by religious conviction: MacDonald was an advocate for using local artists and wanted the work. He was also remarkably ecumenical for his generation. His father was an Anglican but married a Catholic, while MacDonald himself married a Christian Scientist. Varley had grown up in Sheffield, U.K., in a non-conformist family – they were Congregationalists – while Carmichael had been raised Anglican in Orillia, Ont.

The members of the Group of Seven were more spiritual than religious in outlook – you could say nature was their religion – and were interested in transcendentalism, the 19th-century philosophy based on the belief in the unity of all creation. MacDonald named his son Thoreau (he also worked on the church paintings) after the leading American transcendentalist and nature worshipper, Henry Thoreau.

Varley, always a believer in individual paths to enlightenment, eventually studied Eastern religions, while Carmichael shared Lawren Harris’s interest in theosophy, linking its call for spiritual renewal to northern landscapes. In short, the artists weren’t churchy.

But then Skey wasn’t very high church himself. Because it was a short square rather than a long rectangular, his Byzantine-style sanctuary broke from Anglican tradition, purposefully placing the preacher nearer his flock. Skey had met MacDonald at the Arts and Letters Club, a hotbed of bohemianism by Toronto standards, and his democratic instincts sat nicely with the artist’s commitment to the Arts and Crafts movement, with its belief in making beautiful things accessible to ordinary people.

Arts and Crafts, a movement theorized by the British art critic John Ruskin and practised by such artists as William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, had spread to Canada. George Reid, who had been MacDonald’s teacher, was heavily influenced by it. Arts and Crafts didn’t advocate a particular style but sought to elevate the handmade over the industrial and promote artisanal design. So it was often best expressed in the decorative arts and tended to what we now think of as its recognizable style: flat patterning, floral and bird motifs and a strong graphic line.

Open this photo in gallery:

Carmichael’s Adoration of the Magi was a prime example. This was much closer to what MacDonald practised in his commercial art. He had worked at the Grip design studio, as did Carmichael and Varley, before the First World War and was now teaching design, not fine art, at the Ontario College of Art. The St. Anne’s murals were more in keeping with his posters and ads than his landscapes, which were looser, more painterly and more impressionist in feel. Only in the storm-tossed waters of the Tempest did you get a small taste of his wilder side.

So there were no jack pines or tangled gardens at St. Anne’s, but there was an accessible and, most importantly, local approach to church decoration that marked a fertile period in Toronto’s cultural growth. Often, we only recognize what we have when it is lost. Both Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow and St. Anne’s rector Don Beyers have vowed the church will be rebuilt. It is a big ask in an era when the Anglican Church is shrinking, but no doubt schemes will come forward to make smart use of the shell that is left. Maybe new art will replace what was destroyed in the flames.