GRONINGEN.- From 30 June to 30 September 2012, the Groninger Museum will present the exhibition Painting Canada - Tom Thomson and The Group of Seven organized by the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the National Gallery of Canada, in collaboration with the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, and the Groninger Museum, Groningen, the Netherlands. With the generous support of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and other lenders.

The exhibition provides an overview of the extraordinary work of the Group of Seven, an artists’ group that arose in Canada at the beginning of the twentieth century and disbanded in 1933. Their landscape paintings are considered among Canada’s most important cultural treasures, yet one that has never before been seen in the Netherlands. The Groninger Museum is thrilled that it has been able to find sponsors to present this exhibition.

A few years prior to the Group of Seven’s genesis in 1920, Canada witnessed the flourishing of a style of painting that focused particularly on the undeveloped and natural beauty of the country. The colourful canvases of endless forests, rolling hills and lakes can be admired express the artists’ sublime natural experiences and combined with national pride, that at the same time recall other landscape-painting traditions.

One of the catalysts for the establishment of the Group of Seven was the premature death of Tom Thomson (1877-1917). As source of inspiration for the group, he is mentioned in the same breath as the original members, Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald, A.Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, F. H. Varley and Franklin Carmichael.

The Groninger Museum will present more than 120 masterpieces by this exceptional artists’ group; these works are on loan from major museums in Canada.