Beaverbrook Art Gallery extending latest exhibition due to high demand

N.B. art gallery extends exhibition due to overwhelming demand.

For those who thought they may have missed out on the Beaverbrook Art Gallery’s latest exhibition, you now have a few days left to see it before its gone.

The “Tom Thompson: North Star” exhibition has been extended by an extra week and can now be viewed by art lovers until Sunday, March 30. Since first opening in mid-November, the exhibition has seen over 15,000 New Brunswickers come through with no signs of slowing down.

“The Beaverbrook is thrilled to extend this extraordinary exhibition and give more New Brunswickers the opportunity to see the extent of Thomson’s legacy in capturing the great Canadian landscape,” says Bernard Doucet, executive director of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.

“I can’t think of a more important time to come celebrate and feel proud of the art of Canada.”

Doucet says it has been seven years since the gallery extended an exhibition showing like this. He says guests were eager to take advantage of the showing’s extension with a line-up formed outside the gallery before its doors opened Tuesday morning.

The exhibit features over 120 of Thomson’s acclaimed landscapes and oil sketches, which the gallery says sheds light on his mastery and enduring legacy in Canadian art.

Thomson mysteriously died in 1917, but his influence remained strong in the art community. He is widely regarded as a big influence leading to the creation of the “Group of Seven.”

“Tom Thomson paved the way for so may artists to follow and this show explains why,” says Doucet.

“Each work feels uniquely Canadian, and in this moment, we are proud to be able to continue to share it all with New Brunswickers.”

The majority of the works featured in the Beaverbrook display are of the Canadian wilderness, which Doucet says are easy to relate to even if you aren’t a big art fan.

Doucet says this exhibition is “as big as it gets” and would consider the display a Canadian blockbuster. Those words seem to be true as the exhibit is just drawing in art lovers from all over the region.

After hearing her friends rave about the exhibition, Lorraine Lewis feared she had missed the chance to see the collection that likely won’t return to the region in the foreseeable future. Once she heard she had an additional week to check it out, she got in her car and made the three-hour drive from Five Islands, N.S.

“I haven’t seen very much but so far it’s well worth the drive, and that’s just being here for a half an hour or something,” Lewis says. “I was going to tie it into another trip to New Brunswick and those plans didn’t kind of come to fruition, so I was either come now before it closes, or just admit that you’re not going to get to see it.”

Once the exhibition wraps up at the end of the weekend, the gallery will prepare for their next showcase, “River of Dreams: Impressionism of the St. Lawrence,” which opens on March 29.

The Beaverbrook Art Gallery first opened in 1958 and has a permanent collection that includes over 5,000 pieces by British, Canadian, Indigenous and Atlantic artists.

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