Thanks to a gift of the Class of 1944, George Thomson’s painting of a northern Ontario landscape has quietly graced the Common Room of Wallingford Hall for decades, bringing pleasure to many McMaster University students.

Though less famous than his younger brother Tom Thomson (1877 – 1917), whose now iconic paintings of Algonquin Park inspired the Group of Seven, George Thomson was an accomplished painter in his own right.

It seems fitting that students should now gather, for conversation, music making, and the study of many disciplines beneath a painting by a man who embraced all of these things in his lifetime. So too is it fitting that the Class of 1944, whose University years coincided with those of WWII, should choose a gift that is both serene and distinctly Canadian.

While the George Thomson painting is a treasure privately shared by the residents of Wallingford Hall, McMaster’s painting of Algonquin Park by Tom Thomson will be on view in Conservation related exhibition at the Museum this summer.