Why is the "Group of Seven" the most influential group of painters in Canada?

Hollywood movies and European-styled paintings were showing a false image of Canada. "Many Canadians felt a growing need to portray their land more honestly."1 The Group of Seven was a group of landscape painters who took up the challenge and transformed the misleading and stereotyped ways that Canada and its people were portrayed in. The seven founding artists of the famous Group were: Lawren S. Harris, J.E.H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley, Frank …

…of national pride and self-awareness in Canada. "They succeeded in giving Canada an art that is now accepted as distinctively Canadian, and an art that has impressed itself on the Canadian consciousness so indelibly that it has almost become a cliché."4 By the 1920s, the Group of Seven led a general reorientation of Canadian painting. The Group of Seven had achieved acclaim internationally, won their fight against the Canadian Academy, and found acceptance at home.