Picturesque Ruins: Cobalt’s Modern Artists, 1900-1940

At one time, the mines in Cobalt, Ontario provided 90% of the world’s silver, before resource extraction left the area largely depleted by the end of the First World War.

By the time the earliest artists arrived in Cobalt to sketch, the lakes and hills were polluted, and barely a blade of living grass stood upright. Yet, between the thrill of discovery and remains of excavation, the artists found numerous reasons to be engaged. Yvonne McKague Housser and her circle of female artist friends, Group of Seven founders Franklin Carmichael and A.Y. Jackson, and their predecessors, contemporaries and successors, developed a remarkable visual legacy of art that sustained Cobalt’s presence on the international stage until the end of the 1930s.

In this curatorial talk Dr. Catharine M. Mastin will take you through a visual journey of the artists’ works, showing how they adapted the British Picturesque movement to a site of industrial ruins.