McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Ontario

The McMicheal Museum Gallery is a rustic showcase for the early twentieth-century painters known as The Group of Seven. The Seven devoted their art to exploring the rugged characteristics of the Canadian landscape. The McMicheal pays homage to their vision with its floor-to-ceiling narrow windows at the end of each gallery, which look out onto a babbling brook and wooded area.

A.J. Casson, perhaps my favorite of the fabulous Seven, takes us into a world of voluptuous trees, whose form and motion are created by flat shades of olive hues, and framed by ominous darks. Unlike the impressionist, whose colors compete to bring sunlight into a space, Casson allows his colors to be subdued – it is a forest with minimal light, sullen and introspective.

Casson died at the age of ninety-four, and is buried alongside other Group members in the cemetery on the McMichael grounds.