This essay looks at how the “culture of nature” continues to haunt the historiography of Canadian visual culture studies and draws on a case study from the 1930s in order to complicate that history.

Normalized through selective practices of artists, critics, and collectors from the 1920s to the 1940s in English Canada, the painting of the Canadian landscape was codified through the elision of nationhood with wilderness painting in the well-known work of the Group of Seven and many of their peers.

One of those well-known peers at the time, John Wentworth Russell, painted Canadian landscapes with a near oppositional vision. This case study examines how Russell’s work overtly contradicts the practice of the Group of Seven. In situating nudes in the parkland setting of Toronto Islands, he set off a storm of controversy that reveals contemporaneous ideas about the land, nature, and the city in the 1930s.

I argue that while a culture of (wild) nature dominates the historiography of Canadian visual culture, Russell’s significant output suggests that the apparent intractability of wilderness painting did not go unchallenged. Rather, this close attention to the details of Russell’s decade- long skirmish with the Group of Seven provides further insight into an alternate culture of nature.