In 1924 an exhibition in London of Canadian landscapes moved the renowned English critic C. Lewis Hind to celebrate them as “the most vital group of paintings produced since the war – indeed, this century”. These landscapes of Canada’s northern lakes and rugged backwoods, painted in a boldly Post-Impressionist style, had been produced over the previous decade by the collective of Toronto-based painters known as the ‘Group of Seven’, whose aim was to forge a national school of landscape painting. In this lecture Ross King will look at both the myths and the realities of how these painters – including their talismanic colleague Tom Thomson, who died in 1917 – stormed the conservative bastions of Canadian art to establish themselves on the international stage as practitioners of a distinctive avant-garde.