Brushes with Death: The Great War and the Group of Seven

By 1914 a group of young artists had come together in Toronto to form a school of painting dedicated to capturing what they saw as the savage beauty of the Canadian landscape. After the outbreak of WWI interrupted their assault on the conservative bastions of Canadian art, one of the painters, J.E.H. MacDonald, prophesied that his friends and fellow artists would soon return from the battlefields of Europe to finish the job they had begun: “They will interpret for us with deeper insight the distinctive beauty of the land they have served.” This free lecture by Dr. Ross King will examine how their varied experience of war allowed the painters who first exhibited as the Group of Seven in 1920 to interpret the landscape with a “deeper insight,” and how images of the Western Front continued to haunt their paintings. This lecture is one in a series of Centenary Reflections Lectures the University of Regina is hosting to mark the 100th anniversary of the Great War.

More information at: http://www.uregina.ca/events/brushes-with-death-the-great-war-and-the-group-of-seven