In July 1977, Jim and Sue Waddington set off on their own expedition to discover the places that inspired these artists. Determined to locate, document, and photograph the actual landscapes that inspired the cosmopolitan group including, A.Y. Jackson, Franklin Carmichael, Arthur Lismer, Lawren Harris, A.J. Casson, J.E.H. MacDonald and Tom Thomson. Their research is more than a course in art history, it is provenance exemplified by dogged determination travelling the back roads and waterways.
“People suggested to us that the painters would head out and paint from memory, and that these portrayals weren’t real,” Sue says. “But that is not the case.”
The Waddington’s began a 36-year journey — tracking down clues, deciphering bits of information, tracing historic portage routes, and exploring — all with the purpose of finding the very spots that gave birth to the works of the Group of Seven.
In 1976, she already had a hobby - rug-hooking. For a class project she decided to copy a Group of Seven work, an A.Y. Jackson painting called Hills. She recalls how they packed up their two kids, Nina and Michael, and actually went there. Would they be able to find the same view A.Y. Jackson rendered on canvas in 1933? And they did.
For Jim and Sue the interest in travelling and tromping through deep bush for painting sites used by the Group of Seven was a perfect hobby for a couple wanting to keep active. “Years ago it dawned on me that we never knew where the Group of Seven painted,” says Jim. “We knew they painted in the Canadian North. But where exactly? Each painting is a new puzzle. Sometimes you can get an idea where someone was from the title of a painting. But that often doesn’t help you find the exact spot.”
Some locations are easier to solve than others. Typically the Waddington’s take many miniatures of paintings known to be from an area they are heading into. And in some cases the landscape revealed few changes.
“We knew this painting” — ‘Twisted Pine’ (1939) by Franklin Carmichael — “which we were sure we’d never see the tree alive,” said Jim. Then someone in the area told them: “We know all about it. Do you want to go and see it?” They did. “It looks very much now as it did then, about two metres high; it hadn’t grown very much at all.”
In 1995, they came across a small boulder they’d seen in a photo of Franklin Carmichael sitting on a rock and sketching high above Grace Lake in the western side of Killarney Provincial Park.
“We knew we had to find and sit on that rock,” says Sue. “That was a fun thought.”
So they scoured the hills, there was a photograph and the painting — still no rock. Maybe it’s the wrong hill, they thought. Maybe they’d taken the wrong trail. The mystery was only resolved when a friend, scurrying down the hill, came across the boulder in question. The next year the Waddington’s returned to the area, and with friends hauled the rock up the hill by block and tackle. The rock is now there where Franklin once was.
“Each winter we think about our next trip and what paintings we want to hunt for,” Jim says. “Sue reads up on an area and on the artists’ attachment to it and I study the topographic maps.”
Sleuthing as an Avocation