Group of Seven touring route reveals inspirational scenes

As if the drive along the north shore of Lake Superior wasn’t gorgeous enough, now there’s another reason to love it: Group of Seven easels and stools marking spots that inspired our quintessentially Canadian painters.

We first stumbled upon these Moments of Algoma displays in Wawa, Ontario at Sandy Beach on Lake Superior. Instead of a painting, the easel held an information board about A.Y. Jackson, who spent time at a cottage there in the 1950s. He and other fellow Group of Seven members immortalized the rugged beauty in many paintings.

Then we found that this easel-and-stool display was part of a touring route, sponsored by the Algoma region in northern Ontario, and stretched along Highway #17, the Trans-Canada Highway, from Nipigon to Bruce Mines. I love the Group of Seven so was thrilled with this discovery. After picking up the brochure, we had a map and were all set to hunt down the other easels.    

And it did indeed turn into a hunt because the map doesn’t have many directions and no signs from the highway point towards the easels. Every time we tracked one down, we had a satisfying “a-HA” moment.

After Wawa, we sought the displays along our drive west in August 2020 and again on our drive east in May 2021. We were delighted to read stories and discover more about my favourite artists. Here’s what we saw and learned along the route, from east to west.

Bruce Mines

Tom Thomson, who inspired the Group of Seven but wasn’t technically a member since it formed after he died in 1917, is known for his explorations and paintings of Georgian Bay and Algonquin Park. But in 1912, he made his first foray into Algoma with William Broadhead, a fellow commercial artist he worked with in Toronto. The pair spent two months northeast of Sault Ste. Marie, paddling the Mississagi River and camping at Aubrey Falls.

When their canoe overturned near Forty Mile Rapids, they lost their canoe, gear, and nearly all of Thomson’s paintings and photographic negatives. They got a ride on a hay wagon into Bruce Mines, on the northern arm of Lake Huron, where they waited for the steamboat City of Midland to take them to Owen Sound. While waiting, Thomson painted so he could return home with at least some paintings, creating “View over a Lake Shore with Houses” in the aftermath of a record-breaking storm. 

One of the paintings that survived the spill is called, ironically, “Drowned Land” and shows a grey lake with dead trees poking through. It reportedly marked a turning point in Thomson’s style: he no longer tried to paint the land as picturesque, but rather as candid and authentic.  

Sault Ste. Marie

Under the headline “Artists Gone Mad?” the easel display showed J.E.H. MacDonald’s “The Wild River,” which initial art critics described as “a large colour riot” and “everything is equally wild and… badly in need of sorting out and tidying up.” However, one headline read “Seven Painters Show Some Excellent Work” so reviews weren’t all bad. The group artists were controversial for their time; they rebelliously experimented with colour, brush strokes and design that departed from European traditions.

One thing I love about Group of Seven paintings is how they reflect the artists’ many moods: stormy, pensive, riotous, sedate, cheerful, awed, challenged, spirited, melancholy. Arthur Lismer’s “Isles of Spruce” projects calm – not often depicted in northern scenes. The warm colours he used for the tall spruce trees on an island reflect in the waveless lake.

Like his fellow members, Lismer did field sketches on small thin boards, later used as references to create big paintings in their studios. Dozens of those boards are displayed in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

Along with the easel-and-stool displays, the Moments of Algoma route highlights related sights, especially in Sault Ste. Marie where you can visit the Art Gallery of Algoma, the Agawa Canyon Tour Train, and the Ermatinger-Clergue House National Historic Site, where you could (pre-Covid) see a theatrical monologue about Lawren Harris. Now, you can watch the performance on YouTube. The performance explains why Harris, the driving force behind the Group of Seven, was inspired to bring fellow artists to the Algoma region in May and September 1918.

Chippewa Falls

The rugged pink and black granite of the Canadian Shield – described as the roots of ancient mountains – takes centre stage as you head north of Sault Ste. Marie. Water flowing down to Lake Superior and Lake Huron trickles, spills, and lunges over countless waterfalls, including Chippewa Falls. MacDonald’s “Batchewana Rapids” is the central image on the easel display there.

“MacDonald painted many waterfalls and as you can see, was known for his use of rich colours, sweeping brush strokes and balanced designs,” said the display. “They were in search of Canadian wilderness, which they felt held the key to finding the spirit of this very young nation.”

(The Chippewa Falls picnic area also has a monument noting that spot as the midpoint of the Trans-Canada Highway.)  

Pancake Bay Provincial Park

Tom Thomson died in 1917 on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park, MacDonald had suffered a stroke, and Lawren Harris’ brother had died while fighting in Europe. They were understandably dispirited, couldn’t go back to Algonquin, and needed a new landscape for inspiration. The Algoma wilderness fit the bill for their first trip in 1918.

When the artists first travelled north of Sault Ste. Marie, there was no highway, so they took the Algoma Central Railway. Harris arranged for them to stay in a red boxcar fitted with windows, bunks, furniture, and a stove – an early RV. Parked on sidings, the boxcar was home and studio while they painted.

Harris painted “Montreal River” in a style similar to that of his fellow group members. Later, once he ventured further north and west along Lake Superior, his style became more spare, more elemental.

Lake Superior Provincial Park

In a 1919 exhibit of their Algoma paintings, the artists pointed out that “Canada consists of 3,500,353 square miles, mostly landscape.” They wanted to show the ruggedness and beauty of all that land, and they experimented with new techniques to achieve their goal. In 1920, they formally called themselves the Group of Seven.

“The Little Falls” reminded us of MacDonald’s “Tangled Garden” – the yellows and reds, the busyness, the dappled light, and the energy made both paintings sunny and cheerful, not sombre like many Group of Seven paintings.

Wawa

A.Y. Jackson joined MacDonald, Harris and Frank Johnston on the 1919 boxcar trip and returned many times afterwards, especially to Wawa where he rented the small sleep cabin on Sandy Beach in the 1950s. We wandered down Sandy Beach to the end, where the piled driftwood and rocks really did look like his “Shoreline” painting.

While Harris tended to paint lake scenes, Jackson painted more of the land, especially the glorious reds and golds of autumn. He wrote: “I know of no more impressive scenery in Canada for the landscape painter… in autumn the whole country glows with colour.”

Pukaskwa National Park

After painting in Algoma for several years, the artists continued north and east along the shore of the biggest freshwater lake in the world. In the years after the First World War, Canada’s growing sense of nationalism bolstered the artists’ search for a uniquely Canadian style of art and also helped their popularity grow.

“They camped along the Lake Superior coast, following their belief that art should rise from the fabric of the land and come from contact with nature,” said the Pukaskwa (pronounced PUCK-a-saw) easel. “When you stand along this shore, you can sense some of that special character that helped define our horizon as Canadians.”

Terrace Bay

The artists camped and sketched the forests, hills, lake and sky along the north shore when it was accessible only by train and only a few tiny communities, such as Terrace Bay, existed.

“The artists had to jump off a slow-moving train in order to set up tents in bitter weather. Despite these conditions, the shoreline offered such dramatic and stunning scenery that they came back year after year.”

Lawren Harris’ iconic “North Shore, Lake Superior” reduced the landscape to its essential elements: a sinewy fire-blackened pine tree, rounded rocks, water and sky in blues, blacks and white. It won a prestigious award at the Pan-American Exhibition of Contemporary Painting in Baltimore in 1931. The field sketch sold for $3.5 million in 2011.

Does it symbolize the spirit of Canada? Yes. I like to think that, despite never having been a superpower, we still stand tall and proudly in the spotlight of the world stage.

Rossport

In late 1921, Harris and Jackson hopped off the train just west of Schreiber and hiked along the tracks to Rossport. This pretty village had flourishing commercial and recreational fisheries, plus gorgeous offshore islands crying out to be captured in oil paints. According to the easel we found in a small park, the Prince of Wales and Ernest Hemingway also visited Rossport. (Hemingway grew up not too far away in Chicago’s Oak Park suburb.)

I had never paid much attention to the Canadian Group of Painters, considered the successors to the Group of Seven. Formed in 1933, the group included women! The easel introduced us to Yvonne McKague Housser. She painted “Rossport, Lake Superior” in 1929, with rounded humps of islands behind streaks of stripy land – clearly in a style similar to Lawren Harris. Ditto for Charles Comfort, another founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters, and also director of the National Gallery of Canada from 1960 to 1965.  

Nipigon

Frank Johnston, who later changed his name to Franz, went on the Algoma boxcar trips and was particularly inspired in the Nipigon region, taking a naturalistic approach to painting, rather than expressionistic. He continued to travel in northern Ontario even after the Group of Seven dissolved in 1933.

Other Moments of Algoma locations

We missed several spots along the touring route, but that just means we’ll have to visit these inspirational Group of Seven places another time: Marathon, Neys Provincial Park with its fine view of Pic Island depicted by Harris, and Aubrey Falls on the Mississagi River. I’ve long wanted to take the Agawa Canyon Tour Train, which leaves from Sault Ste. Marie and takes you over towering trestles, around lakes and by ancient granite outcroppings before descending into the canyon. If only I could stay in a red boxcar on a siding…

“The beauty of the land proved to be a powerful regenerative force on these men, especially on their war-weary and embattled souls,” said the Moments of Algoma website. “They repaid the debt they owed this land by memorializing it through their iconic paintings.”

We drove the Group of Seven touring route in August 2020 and May 2021. Find out where we are right now by visiting our ‘Where’s Kathryn?’ page.