Appraising the bucolic scenery of Étaples, France in 1912, as a painter among the artist collective there, A. Y. Jackson could hardly have imagined the transformation that the peaceful village would soon undergo. When he returned in 1916, a soldier wounded at the Battle of Sanctuary Wood, Étaples had transformed into a Commonwealth hub behind the lines, with British and Canadian hospitals tending their wounded. The pastoral setting as seen through Jackson’s 1912 painting Studio at Étaples, featuring the artist’s studio with a premonitory profusion of red poppies would, like the rest of France, suffer the violent upheaval of a stagnant war so often characterised by the futile inching forward, each mile measured in the lost souls of squandered youth. The impacts of lived experiences in the totality of misery and death along the Western Front were enduring and consequently reflected in their art. Douglas Hunter’s biography Jackson’s Wars: A. Y. Jackson, the Birth of the Group of Seven, and the Great War explores the impacts of World War I on A. Y. Jackson and the Group of Seven in shaping their vision of a distinctly Canadian School of painting.
Starting with the pre-war years, Hunter sets a strong foundation by exploring the developing careers of the artists who would form the Group of Seven, including Tom Thomson. Like many Canadian artists of the time, Jackson worked as a lithographer while trying to establish himself as an artist. Fighting against the narrow tastes of a bourgeois Montreal still enamoured of its dark and brooding Dutch masters, Jackson was already pushing the boundaries, painting scenes of Quebec that showed the luminescence that would come to mark the landscapes of the Group of Seven. A career by no means guaranteed, Jackson, discouraged by poor sales and criticism nearly gave up a number of times. Eventually, leaving Canada for France to study at the Académie Julian in Paris, he would be influenced by the Impressionists, and would embrace the form’s broken brush strokes and vivid colours. Back in Canada, he would find no shortage of suitable subjects in Algoma, Georgian Bay, and Algonquin Park, where he painted with friend Tom Thomson and future Group of Seven members, already coalescing in those pre-war days and contemplating how “A national vision in art had to be more than something that reflected the components of the country’s gross domestic product.” and how “Hard, clear sunlight, not the murk of European schools, would illuminate the new approach.”
“A national vision in art had to be more than something that reflected the components of the country’s gross domestic product.”
War breaks out at a time where Jackson is experiencing some success through commissions. However, with the country distracted and the call for art reduced, he will enlist in April, 1915 and eventually find himself in the trenches near Ypres and wounded in the Battle of Sanctuary Wood in 1916. While convalescing in Britain, fortuitous circumstances presented themselves through Max Aitken’s (subsequently Lord Beaverbrook) fledgling art program, where Jackson will paint portraits and landscapes as documentation of war. Aitken’s Canadian War Memorials Fund, the precursor to the Canadian war-art program, would employ such notable artists as Jackson, Frederick Varley, and Arthur Lismer in the First World War and Alex Colville and Molly Lamb Bobak in the Second.
While in the art program, Jackson chose to break with more traditional 18th and 19th century re creations of battle scenes, eschewing the romantic for an approach that would more faithfully depict the new realities of modern warfare. “Jackson would come to conclude that the better artist would not paint war but the effects of war.” Favouring stark battlefields over the people entrenched there “… Jackson found a way to express an overwhelming human presence through the violence that people had inflicted upon the landscape.” “Jackson succeeds in depicting… the destruction that war had wrought, while the war exists as an almost atmospheric presence on the horizon, where it is still churning, still mangling.” His choice, in contrast to such paintings as Richard Jack’s “The Taking of Vimy Ridge, Easter Monday 1917,” reflects a desire to not overly romanticise nor glorify the events of WWI. Frederick Varley, would come to similar conclusions in his own work for the art program, as demonstrated in his emblematic and understated work “For What?” Max Aitken’s Canadian War Memorials Fund would serve as a catalyst to further the development of Canadian artists, where they were actively sought out in order to depict events and people more directly connected to the Canadian experience of war.
After the war, Jackson and other Group of Seven members were galvanized to create a distinctly Canadian School around the idea that “It was not a young nation’s capacity for laying railway track or building factories, houses and modern cities that energized them. It was a mystical, untamed wildness, buried in snow much of the year, that would provide the foundation of a national identity shaped in oils on board and canvas.”
It is often proposed that Canada grew up in the Great War, forging a new identity, increasingly distinct from that of England. It is appropriate then, that Canada’s first school of art would also rise from the tumult, drawing upon the pre-war avant-garde movement, and other abstractionist movements. The work of the Group of Seven is sometimes seen as overly romantic or sentimental, but through the lens of World War I, the desire to paint a different kind of world, one with softer edges, bolder colours, and deep, open skies is understandable and provides a deep contrast to the sharp edges of broken trees and shelled houses, the sucking mire of putrid grey-green clay and rot, and traitorous skies. In a letter to Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley was quoted as saying “I want to paint sunshine & burning golden leaves & blue waters and laughing faces. In truth I’m aching to be surrounded with normal things.”
Douglas Hunter succeeds not only in presenting the impacts of the Great War on A. Y. Jackson’s life, but also in establishing the direct effects upon the Group of Seven in the post-war period. Hunter writes, “[Jackson] emerged as a different human being – a better human being – and as a better painter.” Jackson’s Wars is well-researched and thorough in its presentation. Additionally, the epistolary nature of Hunter’s work, featuring numerous letters written between Jackson and other Group of Seven members, his family, and other prominent artists of the time allows for a particular insight into Jackson’s world and his shifting perspectives. The strength of Hunter’s work is not only in his depiction of Jackson and the Group of Seven, but also that of the Canadian war-art program and of other rising Canadian artists; he successfully captures a time in Canadian art and social history where Canadian artists stepped forward with new confidence and resolve.
“To the devil with money. Get back to the woods. Put on your snowshoes and go when the shadow of the pine makes its image on the snow. The country is glorious but its beauties are unknown and but waiting for a real live artist to splash them on to a canvas.”
A.Y. Jackson
Douglas Hunter is the author of numerous books including Beardmore: The Viking Hoax That Rewrote History, a finalist for the Wilson Prize for Canadian History. He lives in Port McNicoll, Ontario.
Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press (May 2022)
Cloth 6.5″ x 9.5″ | 544 pages
ISBN: 9780228010760
Christina Barber is a writer and educator who lives in Vancouver. An avid reader, she shares her passion for Canadian history and literature through her reviews on Instagram @cb_reads_reviews. She has most recently been committed to writing and staging formally innovative single and multi-act plays.
- Christina Barberhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/christinab/
- Christina Barberhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/christinab/
- Christina Barberhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/christinab/
- Christina Barberhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/christinab/
- Christina Barberhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/christinab/
- Christina Barberhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/christinab/
