Bored and cold, two women were hiking beside Lake Superior on a painting trip when they came across a fallen tree. They decided to create a Lawren Harris kind of still life. So they dragged the dead trunk over to some rocks. Snow began to fall. After drinking some gin, the pair began to sketch. The sketches led to paintings that sold well in the 1930s.

Lawren Harris was, of course, one of the founders of the celebrated Group of Seven, who first exhibited as a group in 1920. The female painters were Rody Kenny Courtice and Yvonne McKague Housser.

Harris and Courtice are but two of the great Canadian artists in Around Seven: The Group of Seven and their Contemporaries, an exhibit of about 30 works at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.

In the early 20th century, Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven wanted to create a distinctively Canadian art, so they painted images of the northern wilderness.

But women were told not to tackle landscape, especially the wilderness. It was supposed to be too intellectually demanding for them. This was at a time when pundits worried that women's ability to bear children could be harmed by too much sport and study.

One of the women who shook off these constraints was Ann Savage. Her Still Life (1948) combines a floral theme -- deemed to be most appropriate for women painters -- with a rural landscape. She places a vase of flowers on a table in front of a window through which we see a view.

Courtice, a Toronto artist, goes for a soothing rural setting in Woman Sweeping Leaves (1930s), balancing human with nature. The theme is traditional by the 1930s, but Courtice's loosely lifelike style is quite up to date.

She places the small figure of a woman, a white apron wrapped around her, near the foreground. Some foreground shrubs add a lively burst of red, which sets off the whiteness of the apron. The woman's smallness contrasts with the tall bare trees, one on either side of her. Making a person look small in relation to the setting is a way of emphasizing humans' insignificance and nature's vastness.

The woman stands in front of a large house and barn. Architecture represents human accomplishment and civilization.

Courtice treats the sky as a lively series of horizontals where light areas alternate with dark and lend a sense of transitory movement to the scene.

Grace Coombs, another Toronto painter, opts for a more rugged landscape in Fireswept (circa 1939).

Jagged rocks dominate the composition, their shapes modelled with bold diagonal brush strokes loaded with greens, blues, some white and a bit of orange. White clouds, massed in the top left corner, contribute a contrasting set of lively patterns; these ones look delicate and ethereal.

A lone branchless tree serves as a reminder of the fire that gutted the landscape. A touch of red paint in the left foreground hints at the earlier conflagration. But Coombs's message is not about destruction, but nature's ability to renew itself.

Regina Haggo, a former professor of art history at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. dhaggo@thespec.com

Showtime

What: Around Seven: The Group of Seven and their Contemporaries Where: Art Gallery of Hamilton, 123 King St. W. When: Until Sept. 3 Phone: 905-527-6610