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DETAILS AND REGISTRATION:
Douglas Hunter will introduce the audience to the critical formative years of one of Canada’s most renowned landscape painters, Alexander Young Jackson, one of the co-founders of the Group of Seven, the Beaver Hall Group in 1920 and of the Canadian Group of Painters in 1933. Doug will delve into Jackson’s first experiences of Georgian Bay, 1910 to 1913 and his time as a soldier and war artist, 1915 to 1919.
Participants will also enjoy a preview of “Jackson’s Wars,” an exhibition opening at the McMichael Canadian Art Centre on June 29th, for which he is co-curator with McMichael’s executive director and chief curator, Sarah Milroy. The McMichael exhibition draws on his book of the same name, published to acclaim by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2022. Ross King, the author of ‘Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven and ‘Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of Water Lilies,’ called ‘Jackson’s Wars,’ “a wonderfully immersive read and a huge contribution to the study of Canadian art and history.”
Georgian Bay Books will have copies of Doug’s book to purchase, which he will sign.
More info: https://www.questart.ca/art-talks
Registration required (Quest Art member: $25.00 Non-member:$35.00): https://www.questart.ca/service-page/a-presentation-by-douglas-hunter?utm_medium=page_links&referral=service_list_widget
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.
A captivating account of the formative years of one of Canada’s best-known artists, Jackson’s Wars follows A.Y. Jackson’s education and progress as a painter before he was a well-known artist and his time on the battlefield in Europe, before he cast his lot in with a group of like-minded Toronto artists.
Jackson fought many battles: he was a feisty and opinionated combatant when he crossed swords with critics, collectors, museums, galleries, and fellow painters as an emerging artist. Moving from Montreal to Toronto in 1913, he became a key figure in a landscape movement that was determined to depict Canada in a bold new way, only to have a war dash the group's collective ambitions. Alone among his close associates, Jackson enlisted to fight with the 60th Infantry Battalion. Wounded at Sanctuary Wood in 1916, he returned to the field of combat as an official war artist - the first Canadian artist appointed, the only infantryman in the program - and militated for other Canadian appointments to what is now a storied moment of creation for such artists as F.H. Varley and Arthur Lismer. Jackson produced some of Canada’s most memorable depictions of the world’s first industrial-scale conflict, even as he reckoned with the anguish caused by the mysterious death of his close friend Tom Thomson. A life-changing event for soldiers, families, and nations alike, the First World War has been understood as a moment of stasis in the visual arts in Canada - the dead ground from which the Group of Seven emerged in the early 1920s. Douglas Hunter shows how Jackson’s war was a moment of intense transformation and artistic development on the canvas as well as an experience that tempered a young man into a constructive elder statesman for Canadian art. On his return home he was not only instrumental in the formation of the Group of Seven in Toronto, but a key figure for the Beaver Hall Group in Montreal.
Jackson’s Wars is a story of brotherhoods of painters and soldiers, shot through with inspiration, ambition, trauma, and loss, on the home front as well as on the battlefield. Hunter widens and deepens A.Y. Jackson’s world of friends, family, and colleagues to capture the life of a complex man and the crucial events and relationships behind the creation of Canada’s best-known art collective.