Event Details

The McMichael Canadian Art Collection offers its visitors a unique experience. From the art on its walls to the surrounding landscape, the McMichael provides an introduction to Canada’s art, art making and artists.

Renowned for collecting only Canadian art, the McMichael permanent collection consists of almost 6,000 artworks by Tom Thomson, the Group of Seven, their contemporaries, and First Nations, Métis, Inuit and other artists who have made a contribution to the development of Canadian art.

The gallery welcomes on average 100,000 visitors annually. On average, 30,000 students and educators from more than 40 school boards and private schools visit the McMichael during the school year. In addition, the McMichael welcomes adults, families, and youth to programs and activities from lecture and film series to studio classes and summer art camps.

Designed in a modernist idiom, and built of fieldstone and hand-hewn logs, the McMichael houses thirteen exhibition galleries where floor-to-ceiling windows enable visitors to enjoy views of the densely wooded Humber River Valley. Beyond the galleries the McMichael provides 100 acres of forested land, from a ridgetop ‘wilderness garden,’ planted by the McMichaels to echo the northern forest beloved of the Group of Seven, to the heritage waterway important to Aboriginal peoples.

Through a network of outdoor paths and hiking trails, visitors can explore the newly installed Sculpture Garden as well as the unique McMichael Cemetery where six Group of Seven members and gallery founders Robert and Signe McMichael have been laid to rest.

The McMichael displays a wide range of exhibitions each year, curated from the collections or borrowed from other major institutions. The McMichael is a Category A gallery, and adheres to the highest standards of environmental and security norms for the protection of the works of art on display.

This application is for "Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven", the McMichael Canadian Art Collection's new major temporary exhibition that will be on display from November 1, 2012 to January 6, 2013.

"Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven" is a major exhibition of Canadian art (and the largest in history to travel to Europe), featuring 122 paintings as well as Tom Thomson’s sketch box. The exhibition is organized by the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the National Gallery of Canada, in collaboration with the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo and the Groninger Museum, with the support of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and other institutional and private lenders, who have lent some of the country’s most iconic paintings, and a significant number of rarely seen works. The exhibition is currently on a European tour and The McMichael Canadian Art Collection’s presentation of it will be the only Canadian engagement.

Curated by Ian Desjardin from the Dulwich Picture Gallery, "Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven" presents the work of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven as a journey, from Tom Thomson to Lawren Harris, from woods to sky, from close‐up to endless vista, from sketch to finished work, from Algonquin to the Arctic.