“To the Waters and the Wild”

This exhibition, which is a celebration of the joys of nature as depicted by members of the Group of Seven, their contemporaries and others, is divided into three broad and overlapping sections. “The Waters” focuses on typical cottage country; “The Woods” offers images of cool and quiet shade; and “The Wild” presents more distant and panoramic landscapes.

The exhibition title derives from a poem by William Butler Yeats called The Stolen Child. Its haunting verse involves the luring of a solemn boy away from his usual environment and a world “full of weeping” into a joyous, if eerie, parallel universe (“Come away oh human child/To the waters and the wild”). Equally familiar to Canadians is the lure of nature, the impulse to flee the stresses of the workaday world to find solace and regeneration at the cottage, camp or cabin, preferably located by water or in areas remote from the city.