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By 1832, the year it officially became a Canadian city, Montreal had been a European colony for nearly three centuries. And by 1635, the year the French explorer Jacques Cartier arrived there and named its prominent peak le mont Royal, the land had been home to First Nation tribes for at least four millennia.

For most of its recent history, Montreal has been locked in a struggle to understand its own identity—a complicated, sometimes uncomfortable mixture of First Nation, French, Portuguese, Jewish, and English influences. At times, the struggle has been violent. Throughout the early modern era, French colonialists warred with the Iroquois over the right to hunt and sell furs in the region; even in the last few decades, Montreal had been the site of separatist terrorism. But the struggle is clear in Montreal’s lively art scene too. In some form or another, its great artists and influential collectives have all asked, “What is Canadian painting?”—and, by implication, “What is Canada?”

A Golden Age? (late 18th–early 19th century)

The Golden Age isn’t always the most interesting age. Sometimes it’s the dullest. For the eminent Canadian art historian John Russell Harper, the Golden Age of Quebec art extended from the end of the 18th century into the second half of the 19th. He makes the case well: Thanks to its furs, Montreal had grown into one of the largest and wealthiest cities in North America, and travel to and from Europe was relatively safe and affordable. Many notable painters of the era had trained in the elite art schools of Paris. François Beaucourt studied in Paris as well as Bordeaux, where he encountered the work of masters like Fragonard. You can see the Parisian influence in the gorgeous Chiaroscuro of Habitant Holding a Candle (1778); later it trickled into the work of Montreal-based artists like Louis Dulongpré, who produced an astonishing 3000 portraits in oil and pastel.

The only problem was that, by and large, Montreal painting during the “Golden Age” was too Parisian, too academic, and too concerned with imitating the Old Masters. For all their talent, many of Montreal’s most esteemed early painters weren’t primarily painters at all—Dulongpré had been a teacher and a musician before he took up art to supplement his income, and many of the portraits he dashed off, to put it very kindly, wouldn’t have been nearly so popular on the other side of the Atlantic. After Canada became a self-governing country in 1867, Montreal’s art scene would veer off in new (and perhaps more exciting) directions.

Nationalisms and collectives (late 19th–mid-20th century)

In the late Romantic era, Montreal produced a handful of first-rate nature painters. One such figure, Helen McNicoll, was one of the few female Impressionists of the time. Educated at the Art Association of Montreal, McNicoll absorbed the works of the greatest Impressionist artists.

The influence of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, e.g., is visible in White Sunshade #2 (c. 1907), one of many promising works she completed before her tragic, premature death in 1915. Another painter to draw inspiration from Montreal was McNicoll’s rough contemporary, Maurice Cullen. Raised in the city and later educated in Paris, he returned again and again to the winter vistas of Quebec—see, for instance, Winter Near Montreal (c. 1891–1901).

More than most cities’ art histories, however, the history of painting in Montreal is one of collectives, clubs, and gangs. The most influential of these collectives emerged between the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, a time when much of the world was wrestling with the contradictions of nationalism.

Nationalism was a central preoccupation of the Group of Seven, founded in 1920. Though based primarily in Ontario, where English was the official language, the Group of Seven’s ambitions extended far past one province. Members’ paintings tended to be bright, expressive landscapes that went beyond strict realism to capture the majesty of Canada’s open terrain. A.Y. Jackson, one of the Group’s most important members, grew up in Montreal, and like many of the city’s greatest painters, he studied art in Paris. The influence of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists proved to be crucial to his work and that of the Group of Seven itself. Even the members who didn’t hail from Montreal, such as the Ontario-based J.E.H. MacDonald, drew inspiration from the beauty of the city and the surrounding wilderness—MacDonald’s buoyant, kinetic Falls, Montreal River (1920) is a prime example.

Not all Montreal collectives were so staunchly nationalist. The Eastern Group of Artists, founded in 1938, positioned itself as the Group of Seven’s opposite: less concerned with glorifying Canada than with the glories of painting itself. Some of the Eastern Group’s more ambitious members, like Eric Goldberg, Louis Muhlstock, and Moses Reinblatt, later founded a new group, the Jewish Painters of Montreal. It’s fascinating to see how this collective split the difference between the primarily English Group of Seven and the primarily French Eastern Group, avoiding the jingoism of one and the undisciplined aestheticism of the other—take, for example, Goldberg’s gently social realist Portrait of Regina Seiden (1928).

New art, old wounds (postwar–present)

Montreal painters have laid bare Canada’s political divisions, but they haven’t healed them. As recently as 1995, Québécois citizens came within a fraction of a percent of voting for independence from Canada. One of the most popular arguments in favor of independence cited the turmoil of the Age of Empires: With its superior military, Great Britain stole Quebec away from France and then forced the French Québécois into a new, predominantly English Canadian state. Never mind that France had already stolen Quebec from the First Nation tribes who had been living there before a place called France existed.

In 1973, a group of First Nation artists formed a collective of their own. The mainstream press called them the Indian Group of Seven (not-so-subtly implying that they were imitating a 50 year-old group of white people), but they called themselves the Professional Native Indian Artists Incorporation. The Incorporation didn’t last long, but it left its mark. Two years after coming together, in Montreal, the painters—including Joseph Sanchez, Alex Janvier, Carl Ray, Joseph Sanchez, Eddy Cobiness, Jackson Beardy, Norval Morisseau, and Daphne Odjig—had their final triumphant show.