Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, Dulwich Picture Gallery

Alastair Sooke applauds Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, a new show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery devoted to pioneering painters who changed the face of Canadian art.

Tom Thomson wasn’t even 40 when he died in mysterious circumstances in the summer of 1917. Whether the Canadian artist was murdered, committed suicide or accidentally bashed his head while falling out of his canoe when drunk, we don’t know: what’s certain is that his body surfaced nine days later in Algonquin Park’s Canoe Lake, around 185 miles north of Toronto.

Thomson only started painting in his thirties (he had little if any formal training as an artist). Yet in the years leading up to his death, a talent for capturing the great outdoors of his homeland emerged. Between 1912 and 1917, he painted around 300 oil sketches of the lakes and woods he encountered during expeditions into the Canadian wilderness. These vigorous works consist of dabs and jabs of vibrant pigment painted on to unprimed board so hurriedly that in places the wooden backing is still visible.

Thomson didn’t appear to value his sketches very highly (he gave many of them away to friends and admirers), but they transformed Canadian art.

Shortly after his death, galvanised by his pioneering efforts, a band of like-minded artist friends formed an alliance called the Group of Seven. Their work provides the focus of an exhibition of more than 120 paintings at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London.

Thomson and the Group of Seven are household names in Canada; here, however, they are almost unknown. The Dulwich show is the first exhibition devoted solely to them ever mounted in Britain. Accordingly, Ian Dejardin, the gallery’s director, who fell in love with the artists after stumbling across a book about them in the library of the Royal Academy in the late Eighties, should be congratulated for adventurous programming.

Their work can be easily characterised: they specialised in expansive vistas full of tempest-lashed pine trees, dense woods of maple, birch and tamarack, wind-whipped lakes, and awesome skies illuminated by the Northern Lights — all painted in a high-keyed palette reminiscent of Post-Impressionists such as Gauguin and Van Gogh. Their canvases radiate rugged authenticity (the British painter and critic Wyndham Lewis once observed that “they chopped out their paintings as if they had been chopping wood”), and appear animated by an almost mystical reverence for Mother Nature’s sublime immensity.

Most of the group worked as commercial artists, and this inflected their paintings. Franklin Carmichael and JEH MacDonald, for instance, both employed bold and graphic compositions, as though designing ready-made posters for the Canadian tourist board. Poster-like immediacy also defines the work of Lawren Harris, who painted icebergs and mountain peaks with an austere, almost surreal presence.

In general, though, those paintings completed in the studio feel stilted compared with the spontaneous oil sketches completed out in the wilds. Moreover, while many of the landscapes in this exhibition have a pleasingly “modern” feel (thick, expressionistic brushwork; intense, apparently unnatural colours), one senses that this styling is little more than skin-deep.

It’s hard not to compare these Canadian artists communing with nature with their avant-garde contemporaries in the cities of Europe, and conclude that the former’s concerns were retrograde – a byway of modern art, rather than an important thoroughfare. Their misty-eyed love of nature was ultimately a

19th- rather than a

20th-century preoccupation: though perfectly pleasant, the pantheistic paintings they produced express nothing of the new era of metropolises and mechanised conflict.

Significantly, none of the artists visited the notorious Armory show of 1913 in New York, which introduced the work of Picasso, Duchamp and other members of the European avant-garde to North America: offered the opportunity to engage with modern art at first hand, the Canadians passed it up.