Orillia (1915), 1915

Family of the artist By descent to the present Private Collection, Ontario

J.E.H. MacDonald Fonds, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

The youngest original member of the Group of Seven, Franklin Carmichael was born in Orillia, Ontario in 1890. As a teenager interested in the arts, he worked in his father’s carriage-making shop as a striper. In decorating the carriages he practiced his design, drawing, and colouring skills. Carmichael apprenticed at the commercial art firm Grip Limited in Toronto in 1911, while taking night classes at the Ontario College of Art with William Cruickshank and George Agnew Reid. During this time, he also took classes at the Toronto Technical School, where he studied alongside Gustav Hahn. From 1913 to 1914 Carmichael studied in Antwerp, Belgium at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, however he shortly returned to Canada due in part to the war. On his return, he began painting on weekends with colleagues Tom Thomson, J.E.H MacDonald and Arthur Lismer. During the fall of 1914, he moved into the Studio Building where he shared a space with Thomson over the winter. “Orillia” was painted during these seminal early years of his career prior to the formation of the Group of Seven, while Carmichael was sharing a studio with Thomson. He completed the work in the winter of 1915, before his twenty-fifth birthday. A peaceful and delicately- rendered painting, “Orillia” demonstrates Carmichael’s talent from a young age. The artist uses a monochromatic colour palette of muted blues and greys to depict the winter forest scene, with the fir trees partially covered by snow serving as the only area of contrast. His painterly approach shows the influence of European Impressionism and former teacher George Reid. The background is composed of loose and separated brushstrokes and is nearly abstract, creating a screen of trees dappled with light and shadow. Orillia held a special place for Carmichael, for it was his birthplace (and where he is buried) and the subject of numerous sketches, watercolours and oils throughout his career. The town provided him with picturesque forest and lakefront scenery that served as endless inspiration. The year 1915 was also an important one for Carmichael because it was when he married his wife, Ada Lillian Went. Tom Thomson invited Carmichael on a sketching trip to Algonquin Park in the fall of that year, but he was unable to attend due to his wedding. During this time, Carmichael was balancing his personal life with his passion for art and eagerness to bring change to the Canadian art tradition. He and the future members of the group were frustrated by their initial attempts to capture the untouched “savage” land of Canada, with the particular characteristics of the land difficult to capture in the then-dominant European tradition. It would be once the group discovered the paintings of the Scandinavian landscape that they would begin to move in a coherent direction. According to J.E.H. MacDonald, the Scandinavian painters “seemed to be a lot of men not trying to express themselves so much as trying to express something that took hold of themselves. The painters began with nature rather than with art.” “Orillia” demonstrates Carmichael’s early efforts at showcasing the ‘untouched “savage” land’ of his hometown, foreshadowing the groundbreaking movement that was soon to come.