Group of Seven

Formed in 1920, the Group of Seven was Canada’s first national school of art. Stimulated by contemporary nationalistic feelings, which embraced the northern theme recurrent in English Canadian literature, and by the northern Symbolist landscapes hung in an exhibition of Scandinavian art in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1913, this group of painters came to champion the wilderness as the strength of Canada, the north as the location of that strength, and populist, design-based techniques as preferable to “foreign-begot” methods.