From Confederation to World War II mural painting was an important tool for Canadian nation-building. In A National Soul, Marilyn McKay shows how, in both Protestant English Canada and Catholic French Canada, these artworks were designed to promote specific civic values.

Examining their social, political, and economic contexts, McKay shows how the murals of this period glorified Canada as a modern nation state, extolled the virtues of commerce and industry, inculcated conventions of gender and race, and shared the intensity of nationalistic sentiment that led to the work of the more renowned painters of Toronto's Group of Seven. Bringing together for the first time a body of Canadian work - civic, commercial, religious, and private - that has been largely ignored by art historians, A National Soul challenges previous histories of Canadian painting.