Artist: Franklin Carmichael (Canadian 1890-1945)

Carmichael, Franklin Biography

Carmichael was born in Orillia, Ontario. He studied at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto in the 1911-1912 academic year. Carmichael attended the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts (Royal Academy of Fine Arts) in Antwerp, Belgium, in the 1913-1914 academic year. He then returned to Toronto working as a commercial artist.

In 1920 Carmichael banded together with other Toronto landscape painters to form the Group of Seven. He worked largely around Toronto until 1925, when he first painted on the north shore of Lake Superior with other members of the group, Lawren Harris and A. Y. Jackson. After 1924 Carmichael's favorite painting site was the rocky La Cloche Hills, south of the mining town of Sudbury, Ontario. The rounded contours of the region are seen in In the Nickel Belt (1928, Ottawa Art Gallery, Ontario).

Carmichael's artwork is characterized by delicate design and subtle color effects. His early oil paintings featured decorative arrangements of the landscape, showing the influence of Tom Thomson, a Toronto landscape painter. Before his death in 1917, Thomson worked with and inspired the artists who formed the Group of Seven. By 1926 he had begun to simplify form and to give his luminous landscapes a rhythmic quality.

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