Franklin Carmichael (1890-1945) was a Canadian painter who was very into being Canadian and painting things that seemed especially Canadian to him. This led him to paint a lot of mountains and lakes but also mines and logging operations.
Carmichael was born into a middle class family in Ontario. His father owned a carriage shop, and he honed his youthful artistic skill painting decorations onto carriages. His parents sent him to art school in Toronto and he then got a job as a illustrator. Frustrated with Canada's small artistic horizons he went to study in Belgium, but he hadn't even been there a year when the Great War chased him back home.
Back in Toronto he joined a group of other young artists forever known in Canadian art history as The Group of Seven. (None of the rest are any more famous in the US than Carmichael.) They did a lot of sketching outdoors, and a lot of bemoaning that the European artistic tradition was unsuitable for dealing with Canadian landscapes.
They eventually, took inspiration, Carmichael said, from Scandinavian art (I assume this means Harald Sohlberg and others of that sort), which seemed to embody a greater appreciation of wild mountains.
As you might suspect from looking at these, the Group of Seven were also influenced by Theosophy and other spiritual movements of the time.
Anyway I think these are very fine.
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