Arthur Lismer. McGregor Bay, 1923. Oil on wood, Overall: 30.3 x 40.4 cm. The Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario, 2017. Photo: Michael Cullen. 2017/167/Supplied
In 1923, Arthur Lismer travelled to the top of Lake Huron and painted this summer scene at McGregor Bay. The Group of Seven artists had been introduced to Georgian Bay by their patron, Dr. James MacCallum, who had a cottage near Honey Harbour, a mere 200 kilometres from Toronto, but soon they ventured further north and west.
Three of the original seven were not born in Canada but were new immigrants who, like millions of others before and since, helped build the contemporary nation: Lismer was an Englishman smitten by the Canadian landscape. With his colleagues, he headed further into Algoma, to the north shore of Lake Superior, and out to the Rockies, but he also spent four summers here, in the Manitoulin archipelago, where a pockmarked shoreline dissolves into islands and lakes.
From its start in 1920, the group’s work was interpreted as a patriotic project, driven by a nationalism that, much like our current brand, derived a sense of strength and distinctiveness from a hard climate and vast spaces. A half-century after Confederation, the artists had bypassed the daintier English landscape tradition, creating modernist work that offered a new style for a new land.
Of course, it wasn’t a new land for many people. Over centuries, the Anishinaabe had moved westward to the Great Lakes, and the Three Fires Confederacy, formed by the Odawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi, was established in the Manitoulin area when Europeans arrived in the 1600s. In 1850, the Whitefish River First Nation was among several groups that signed the Robinson-Huron Treaty, securing territory a few kilometres from McGregor Bay. Last year, the treaty was the subject of a $10-billion settlement with the governments of Ontario and Canada, recognizing that the $4-per-person annuities paid by the Crown had not increased since 1874.
Several artists in the group produced landscapes anchored, like this one, by a lone pine tree. The solitary pine is often seen as a metaphor for human resilience. It stands firm on its rock in wind and weather, like the many peoples of a land both harsh and giving.
