The first sign of a really popular interest in our more original landscape painters, the first indication that the reading public had a taste for descriptions of new trends in Canadian painting, came about two years after F. B. Housser had published his book A Canadian Art Movement(1926). The book sold slowly at first, then more rapidly and was soon being widely read. Mr Housser, who was a financial editor, had written an account in an easy, journalistic style of how Lawren Harris and A. Y. Jackson and the others in the Group of Seven, scorning the dullness of academic painting, had launched an art movement in which bright colours and decorative patterns replaced the gray skies and naturalist landscapes favoured by the Dutch and Barbizon schools. This story of the Group of Seven had many facets to attract the layman. There was romance in the life of Tom Thomson, who had been a ranger in Algonquin Park and had painted the wilderness with an intense concentration upon its bolder aspects. Also, A. Y. Jackson had expressed the gospel of nationalism; Jackson who, in letters and in an occasional public address, had insisted that Canadian painters in their work must understand that the atmosphere, the colours, the four changes of season, were different in this country from elsewhere.
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Sep 1, 1974
Lillian B Miller 
