The McMichael Canadian Art Collection, situated near the village of Kleinburg in Ontario, is widely regarded as one of the most frequently visited public art galleries in the entire country. Each year several hundred thousand people wander through its spacious galleries and take part in its many educational programs. These include guided tours, documentary screenings, artist talks, outdoor concerts, and practical workshops for schoolchildren. The gallery does more than welcome the visiting public, for it also serves as an active institution for scholarly research and conservation. Its staff carefully preserve fragile canvases and regularly lend notable works to comparable institutions elsewhere. The gallery began quite modestly, as the private residence and personal collection of a single married couple, yet today it is formally recognized as an official agency of the Government of Ontario.

The gallery owes much of its distinctive character to two very different individuals: Robert McMichael, a commercial photographer, and his wife Signe, a keen gardener and collector. Robert set out to gather the landscape paintings of the Group of Seven, the celebrated artists who had wandered through the northern forests and lakes with their easels. Signe, by contrast, was personally captivated by the intricate crafts and carvings produced by the land's original inhabitants. Although the couple at first confined themselves to hanging only Canadian wilderness landscapes on their walls, they gradually came to treasure First Nations and Inuit artwork with equal enthusiasm. As a result the institution remains genuinely one of a kind, displaying images of the wilderness directly alongside the creations of the peoples who had inhabited that same wilderness for thousands of years.