in the first half of the twentieth century in Toronto were members of the Club." When Rupert Brooke visited Toronto in 1913, Edmund Morris brought him to lunch at the club, "five years old and the centre of Canadian literary and cultural life. The nucleus that would form the Group of Seven met in the club's rooms." Founding member Roy Mitchell staged a number of theatrical productions at the club between 1911 and 1915 that "introduced skeptical Toronto audience to the principles of theatrical modernism.". In 1919 he worked with fellow member Vincent Massey on the creation of the Hart House Theatre and became its first artistic director. In the 1920s the club "helped draw together Toronto's artistic and intellectual community; it was favoured by journalists, poets, musicians and bookmen, as well as by the Group of Seven and other artists." In 1927 it hosted a show of work by Bertram Brooker that was the first solo exhibition of abstract art in Canada. In the 1940s members of the club played a role in the creation of the Canadian Arts Council, which in 1958 became the Canadian Conference of the Arts. John Coulter instigated an advisory council on government support for the arts at the club in 1943, and in April 1944 he, Herman Voaden and others went to Ottawa to meet with James Gray Turgeon, chair of the House of Commons Special Committee on Reconstruction and Re-establishment. In June a group of members represented the club and went to Ottawa with fifteen other arts organizations to lobby the government. As a result, in December 1945 the Canadian Arts Council was formed, with Voaden as its first president. Involvement with Canadian arts policy continued when in 1949 Vincent Massey chaired the Massey Commission, which led to the creation of the Canada Council in 1957 when he was Governor-General. Club member Claude Bissell was its second chair. Theosophy In the club's early years several members were Theosophists, such as Albert E. S. Smythe (first president of the Toronto Theosophical Society), Lawren Harris (who later wrote articles such as "Theosophy and Art") and Roy Mitchell (whose books include Theosophy in Action). Mitchell staged plays at the Club with the Arts and Letters Players (and later at Hart House Theatre and in New York) that were informed by his Theosophist views. Early productions at the club "reveal the influence of Theosophical ideas upon