Alfred Joseph Casson (1898 - 1992) Canada. Oil on Board. Measure 9 1/2"in H x 7 1/2"in W and 13 3/4"in H x 11 3/4"in W with frame. Known for: Landscape and portrait painting, graphics. Name variants: A J Casson. When he joined the Group of Seven in 1926, A.J. Casson (1898-1992) was strongly influenced by the work of its established senior members. This influence gradually diminished as he turned to watercolour as a favoured medium (he was a founding member of the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour in 1925) and chose the villages and houses of rural Ontario as his primary subject matter. Looking back on his career from the 1970s, he called it his â€Å“Ontario quest.” Casson felt that his particular contribution to Canadian art lay in the preservation of rapidly vanishing rural villages by painting them. Working as a commercial artist for the firm Sampson-Matthews Limited from the mid-1920s until his retirement in 1957 (stepping down from the position of vice-president and art director), Casson was a very talented designer. Integrating domestic structures with their regular shapes and lines into the natural environment engaged his keen sense of design. Cassonâ€â„¢s choice of rural villages as a subject also fulfilled his desire to inject some humanity into Canadian painting, which had been dominated by landscapes devoid of figural content throughout the 1920s. Casson would repeatedly return to the subject of the rural village, featuring different types of buildings, often the country store. As his artistic priorities shifted, Casson altered the formal treatment of his paintings, applying greater or lesser degrees of abstraction.