Prins Eugen, “Clear Night after the Rain,” 1904, oil on canvas. 39 3/8" x 63" (photo by Lars Engelhardt, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde)
They were bowled over back in 1913. Two future members of the Group of Seven, J.E.H. MacDonald and Lawren Harris, visited an exhibition of 165 landscapes by 44 contemporary Scandinavian artists at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York.
The two Canadians suddenly saw their own future. Canadian art was about to enter a new nationalistic era inspired by Scandinavian art.
“This is what we want to do with Canada,” MacDonald said of the Scandinavian paintings. And that is exactly what the Group did.
Art historian Charles Hill is one of Canada’s leading Group of Seven experts. He says the kind of decorative painting favoured by some Scandinavian artists for their rugged, largely unpopulated landscapes was already in vogue among some Toronto artists early last century.
“MacDonald was already there by January 1913,” says Hill. “I think Harris was more influenced by the show than MacDonald and moved from a more realist approach to nature to a decorative treatment, whereas I feel the show confirmed MacDonald in the direction he was already going.”
The works of some of the same influential Scandinavian artists are returning to Buffalo this summer for an exhibition entitled Northern Lights at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright Art Museum.) There will be 71 paintings from 13 artists.
But this time, landscape painters from Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia from the years 1880 to 1930 will be joined by Canadians Emily Carr, Thomson, Harris and MacDonald.
Tom Thomson, “Snow in October,” 1916-1917, oil on canvas, 32 5/16" x 34 9/16" (photo courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada)
The similarities between many of the Nordic and Canadian paintings of the Boreal forest are striking, especially when tackling snowy scenes. It seems one must be a Northerner on either side of the Atlantic to paint truly magical snowdrifts. Winter Moonlight, 1895 by Sweden’s Gustaf Fjaestad is particularly magical and easily mistaken for being Canadian.
The biggest global art star making a return engagement in the 2025 show is Norway’s Edvard Munch of The Scream fame. Some of his swirling semi-abstract trees, including Vampire in the Forest, 1924-25, look like first cousins to Carr’s B.C. forest paintings, including Dancing Sunlight, 1937. Canadian classics in the show include Harris’s majestic, semi-abstract Mountain Forms, 1926, and Thomson’s moody Northern River, 1915.
Other European artists in the Buffalo show include Askell Gallen-Kallela and Helmi Biese of Finland, Fjaestad, Anna Boberg, Prins Eugen and Hilma af Klint of Sweden, Harald Sohlberg of Norway and Ivan Shishkin of Russia. The only Nordic painting in both the 1913 and 2025 shows is A House by the Coast (Fisherman’s Cottage), 1906 by Sohlberg.
The exhibition curator, Hilda Christoffersen, is struck by the similarity of Sohlberg’s painting to that of Tom Thomson’s Northern River: “The use of the dark forest as a kind of mesh or filter or screen through which you see the landscape is so similar in these two works.”
The Buffalo exhibition is a joint project of the Buffalo gallery and the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland. The show ran in Basel before the scheduled Aug. 1 opening in Buffalo.
Alas, there is no Canadian venue scheduled.
“The works featured in Northern Lights embody a visual and stylistic spirit that appears original to the landscape traditions of Canada, Finland, Norway and Sweden,” according to the exhibition catalogue. “In each of these nations, the emergence of Northern modernism was closely aligned with the politics of national identity construction.”
That was certainly the case in Canada, which emerged from the First World War in 1918 more of a nationalistic, confident country than a subservient colony. Canadians were ready for a home-grown style of art early last century and the Group of Seven filled that niche.
Anna Katarina Boberg, “Northern Lights. Study from North Norway,” n.d., oil on canvas, 37 3/8" x 29 1/2" (photo by Anna Danielsson / Nationalmuseum Stockholm)
Katerina Atanassova is the senior curator of Canadian art at the National Gallery of Canada. She is one of the essayists in the exhibition catalogue. In describing the influence of the 1913 Buffalo exhibition, Atanassova says Harris and MacDonald gravitated afterwards to a more “mystical and Symbolist” approach to landscapes that were present in the Scandinavian works.
“The contrast between the geography and culture of their Canadian homeland and those of northern European countries was of central relevance,” Atanassova writes. “The differences resonated with him (MacDonald) and Harris, evoking specifically the climate in Scandinavia, where people lived in sparsely populated areas, as was often the case in Canada, and in rural environments that were frequently more pristine than more densely populated urban centres in the rest of Europe.”
MacDonald and Harris also concluded that to capture landscapes properly, they must paint outdoors, writes Atanassova.
Edvard Munch, “Vampire in the Forest,” 1924-1925, 78 1/8" x 53 1/8" (photo courtesy of Munchmuseet, Oslo and 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)
“This newfound quest resulted in winter paintings done in the regions of Muskoka and Algonquin Park in Ontario that pay homage to the paintings and tapestry work of (Sweden’s) Gustaf Fjaestad they would have seen at the Buffalo exhibition. The resonance between the snow-laden branches in his paintings Winter Moonlight and Frozen Trees at Dusk and Harris’s and MacDonald’s scenes is palpable, especially in the Canadians’ use of decorative patterning in rendering the twigs in a tapestry-like manner.”
The Scandinavian and Canadian painters in the Buffalo exhibition never had the opportunity to meet each other. Nevertheless, their paintings, when seen side by side, carry on a lively and harmonious conversation still resonating across Canadian art. ■
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Northern Lights is at Buffalo AKG Art Museum from Aug. 1, 2025 to Jan. 12, 2026.
PS: Worried you missed something? See previous Galleries West stories here or sign up for our free biweekly newsletter.