Synopses & Reviews
The Group of Seven was prolific, and their work has proven to be lastingly popular with gallery audiences internationally. In Flowers, Joan Murray focuses on the Group of Seven's preference for painting's most intimate motif: often gorgeous flower studies as well as full scale, impressive paintings with their sideways glances towards Post-Impressionists like Vincent Van Gogh. In investigating the formal and emotional potential of the flower paintings of J.E.H. MacDonald, Tom Thomson, and the Group of Seven, Murray is quietly tilling new ground, for the subject has never been examined in depth.
The book is a small and elegant container of mostly small paintings. It will make the work of these geniuses accessible rather than simply awesome, and convey a portrait of the artists as men who painted wild or garden flowers with precision, sensuality, and incipient modernity.