Beautiful James Edward Hervey MacDonald oil board. Frame: 19 x 15 inches. Provenance: private owner from Canada.
Biography: 1873 - 1932. The oldest member and a vociferous defender of the Group of Seven, Canadian artists dedicated to creating art work that focused on Canadian subjects, James MacDonald became an important Canadian landscape painter and was also a teacher, muralist, and poet. He spent much of his career earning money as a graphic artist for the Toronto design firm of Grip Ltd.He was born in Durham, England to Canadian parents, and at age 14, went to Hamilton, Ontario where he studied at the Ontario School of Art and Design and also at the Toronto Art Students League.Although he primarily worked for Grip Ltd., he spent the years 1904 to 1907 in London employed by Carlton Studios.In Canada, he painted landscapes near Torono as well as farther north in Georgian Bay. A major influence on his determination to create a nationalistic art was his association with painter Lawren Harris through the Arts and Letters Club and a trip they shared in 1913 to the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo, New York. There they saw an exhibition dedicated to uniquely Scandinavian art and to a freer, looser style of art, which they then adapted for their similar landscape in Canada. As a result, Harris and MacDonald became the primary organizers of the Group of Seven.

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