Group of Seven Artist Biographies

Franklin Carmichael

Carmichael, the son of a carriage maker, was born in Orillia, Ontario on May 4, 1890. He arrived in Toronto in 1911 with some training in commercial art, and soon found himself the associate of Tom Thomson and a number of other commercial artists who were teaching themselves to be serious painters.

In 1913 he went to Paris to study painting but was soon back in Ontario to participate in the founding of the Group of Seven. In 1932 he was appointed Head of Graphic and Commercial Art at the Ontario College of Art. He died in Toronto in 1945.

A.J. Casson

Alfred Joseph Casson was born in Toronto on May 17, 1898, and for more than eight decades his life was centred in Southern Ontario.

He was a young commercial artist, assistant to Frank Carmichael, when the Group of Seven (of which Carmichael was a member) was finally formed. This connection helped to lead A.J. Casson to fame.

In 1926 the Group of Seven consisted of only six, because of the withdrawal of Frank Johnston, and the group turned to Casson in order to re-authenticate its name.

Casson differred from the rest of the group, not only through his late enrollment, but also in the fact that he continued to work as a commercial artist until the age of sixty, when he retired as Vice President and Art Director of Samson-Mathews in Toronto. Casson's subjects also differ somewhat from those of the rest of the group, for he has never shown much interest in the North Woods landscape of which the others were so fond. His favorite subjects have consistently been rural scenes of Southern Ontario.

L.L. Fitzgerald

FitzGerald lived from 1890-1956. He was a late arrival to the Group of Seven Artists, and was invited to become a Member in 1932.

In 1921, he was honoured by putting on a one-man show at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. After that success, he studied in New York, and returned to Winnipeg in 1922.

Lawren Harris

Lawren Harris was born on October 23, 1885, in Brantford, Ontario, to a wealthy family - The Harrises of the Massey-Harris industrial fortune.

He took up painting at an early age and studied in Germany from 1904 to 1907. He worked briefly with Norman Duncan, illustrating several of Duncan's stories, but Harris was in fact the only member of the Group of Seven who was free all his life from monetary pressures and temptations of commercial art and advertising designs.

Harris is also the only member of the Group who kept pushing his painting, never resting for long with one style or one species of subject matter. Long after the Group disbanded, Harris continued to grow and change as a painter, moving eventually into art deco and pure abstraction. He was also a talented ceramicist, and in 1922 he published a volume of poems.

His affection for Scandinavian landscape painting was one of the key factors in the formulation of the Group of Seven's approach to the Ontario woods, which Harris himself painted with gusto and attention.

It was Harris who led the way toward painting the high Arctic, the Rocky Mountains, Gaspe and other unique and powerful parts of the Canadian earth.

A.Y. Jackson

"A.Y.", as he is fondly known, was born in Montreal on October 3, 1882.

Like other members of the Group of Seven he was trained as a Commercial Artist and for many years made his living by that means. He apprenticed to a Montreal lithographer at the age of 12, and though he later spent two and a half years in France studying painting, he was soon back in Canada paying his rent by designing cigar labels.

In 1920, with Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer, Frank Carmichael, Fred Varley, James MacDonald and Frank Johnston, he formed the most famous exhibitors' group in the history of Canadian painting: the Group of Seven.

In the following years he painted the Arctic, the West Coast, the Prairies, and the North Woods, as well as his beloved St. Lawrence, where his countless sketching expeditions earned him the nickname Pere Raquette- Pappa Snowshoe.

Frank Johnston

Frank (Franz) Johnston lived from 1888-1949. He was an original member and only showed in the Group's first exhibit.

Frank Johnston painted very much differently than the other Group of Seven members. He chose close-up views that often seemed crowded. Other works showed more simple landscapes, with subtleties like clouds reflecting on water.

Arthur Lismer

Arthur Lismer celebrated the powerful beauty of the Canadian landscape in his own expressionist style. His paintings are characterized by vivid colour, deliberately coarse brushwork and a simplified form.

Lismer was born in Sheffield, England. At the age of 26, he immigrated to Canada seeking work as a commercial illustrator. It was at the Grip Engraving Company in Toronto that he met a group of other talented young artists and formed the Group of Seven. Together, they organized trips to explore and sketch the wilderness - capturing the spirit of Canada in their work, and setting Canadian art on a bold and original new course.

Although Lismer painted throughout his life, he devoted the majority of his time to art education. A gifted teacher, Lismer pioneered the field of child art education across Canada and around the world.

J.E.H. MacDonald

A founding member of the Group of Seven, J.E.H. MacDonald challenged and vastly broadened the scope of Canadian Art. MacDonald believed that art should express the "mood and character and spirit of the country", and he portrayed his vision in vast panoramas using dark, rich colours and a turbulent patterned style.

MacDonald was born in Durham, England and moved to Canada at the age of fourteen. He trained as an artist in Hamilton and Toronto, pursuing a career in commercial art.

In 1895 he joined the Grip Engraving Company in Toronto where he met and encouraged other staff members, including Tom Thomson, Frank Carmichael, Arthur Lismer and Fred Varley, to paint with him on weekends - laying the groundwork for what would later become Canada's famous Group of Seven.

Tom Thomson

Tom Thomson lived from 1877-1917. He died in 1917, at one of the places he loved most, Canoe Lake. His death occurred under "suspicious" circumstances.

Although he died before the Group formally formed, he is almost always included as a member of the Group of Seven.

Frederik Horsman Varley

Frederick Varley was born in 1881 in Sheffield, England. He studied painting at Sheffield and Antwerp and went to work in London as a commercial illustrator.

In 1912 he came to Canada, where he found himself working in the same commercial studio as Tom Thomson. With Thomson and the others he took to painting Northern Ontario landscapes, and also began to do considerable work as a portrait painter.

In 1926 Varley moved to Vancouver to become Head of Drawing, Painting & Composition at the newly formed Vancouver School of Decorative & Applied Arts. In 1933 he founded his own school, the AB College of Arts, but this venture led to his bankruptcy in 1935. In 1938 his marriage also collapsed.

The next years were difficult for Varley, most of them spent suffering from alcoholism in Montreal. In 1945, however, he returned to Toronto and slowly began to work again. He died in Toronto in 1969.