James Edward Hervey MacDonald
(1873-1932)

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Born in Durham, England, MacDonald moved to Canada with his family in 1887. In the 1890s he studied art at the Central Ontario School of Art and Design while working as a graphic designer in Toronto. As a designer, MacDonald was greatly influenced by the art and ideas of the English designers William Morris and Walter Crane, who championed the adaptation of natural forms to handmade objects. After working in London, England, from 1903 until 1907, he returned to Toronto, where he worked at Grip Limited, a commercial art firm. There he met Tom Thomson, an artist whose raw landscapes later inspired MacDonald and the other painters who would form the Group of Seven. 

MacDonald began painting in 1908, focusing on winter scenes around Toronto and logging and camping scenes in northern Ontario. Determined to reproduce the mood and feeling of the rugged landscape, MacDonald used intentionally rough brush strokes and stylized forms, so well exemplified in this painting from 1922.  

• Canada 1973.  Centenary of the birth of James E. H. MacDonald.  Mist Fantasy.  Painted 1922.  Scott # 617.  The card is a picture postcard, serving as a kind of Maximum Card, franked with the same stamp on the front side.  It is FDC-cancelled on 8th June 1973 at the Stamp Exhibition in Toronto.  The painting is oil on canvas, and measures 21 * 26 inches.  It belongs to The Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), who acquired it in 1927 as a gift of Mrs. S.J. Williams in memory of F. Elinor Williams.  

He explained his vision of art and society in numerous articles and poems, inspired by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Leo Tolstoy. MacDonald associated with other Toronto landscapists, and from 1918 to 1920 he went on sketching trips with painter Lawren Harris to the Algoma region of Ontario, north of Lake Superior. 

In 1920 the Toronto landscape painters, who had been scattered by World War I (1914-1918), reunited and formed the Group of Seven.  They began displaying their paintings in almost annual exhibits. In the group’s early years, MacDonald was the most public figure, and his work was the focus of critical attacks in the press.  He responded to these attacks in letters to the editor both for himself and for the other artists.

• Canada 1967.  The Solemn Land.  Scott # 465.  

• Canada 1995   Falls, Montreal River.  Painted 1921.  Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada. Scott # 1560c. 

MacDonald is best known for his paintings of Algoma between 1918 and 1922. These paintings -- vast, richly colored panoramas painted with patterned brush strokes -- include Falls, Montreal River (1920, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto). He painted in the Canadian Rockies from 1924 to 1930. In 1921 MacDonald began teaching decorative and commercial design at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, where he was appointed principal in 1929. 

Sources and links: 

• "The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson", issued by The McMichael Canadian Collection. 
• Canadian Art at the McMichael

Other Realist artists on this site: 

Emily Carr (Canadian female painter) Jean Paul Lemieux (Canadian painter) Jan Matejko (Polish painter)  Frederic Remington (United States) Jógvan Waagstein (Faeroe Islands)

H.C. Andersen (Denmark - link opens a new window) Frederick Douglass (American author) Mark Twain (American Author)

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