Sold for: $11,250

PROVENANCE
Collection of Bess Harris
The Art Emporium, Vancouver
Acquired from the above by the present Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Lawren Harris, Dr. M’Avoy’s Fight to Save Glace Bay from Starvation, Toronto Daily Star, Toronto, Ontario, April 15, 1925, page 12
The Canadian Forum, July 1925, Volume V, No. 58, reproduced page 303
Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr, Clarke, Irwin, 1966, page 17
Bess Harris and R.G.P. Colgrove, editors, Lawren Harris, 1969, reproduced page 34, dated 1921
Dawn Fraser, Echoes from Labor's Wars: The Expanded Edition, 1992, reproduced as the front cover

The ink drawing Glace Bay is one of Lawren Harris’ most unique and intriguing compositions, a striking example of the artist’s diversity of interests beyond the wilderness depictions he is most known for. Created in 1925, the subject originates from Harris’ visit in April of that year to the Cape Breton community, where he wrote a special report for the Toronto Daily Star on the conditions during an ongoing coal mine strike and the relief efforts in place to assist the people living there. His piece, published April 25, 1925, described the disturbing scene that he would go on to illustrate in this work. Of the miners, he wrote: “These people strain every nerve for a way out, look everywhere for a ray of hope, search all men for a solution, where perhaps there is none. They constantly face starvation, they face the sight of their wives and children suffering from squalor and privation and hunger, they face utter dejection, complete loss of faith in mankind, there is left only “the bondage of hopelessness.” We see this desperation in the image here, which Harris based upon pencil sketches from the trip.

Glace Bay is exceptional in its focus on human subjects, having much more in common with the work of Norwegian symbolist Edvard Munch than the work Harris usually exhibited with his fellow members of the Group of Seven. Munch’s 1896 lithograph “Anxiety” (click here) and the 1894 canvas it was based on display remarkable similarities to this work, including the focus on the angst-ridden, gaunt, confronting faces of the subjects. Though we do not know if Harris was familiar with these specific works, he certainly was familiar with the artist, whose work was included in the 1913 exhibition of Scandinavian art he saw in Buffalo, New York, and which had a profound influence on his artistic practice.

When Emily Carr visited Harris’ studio in December 1927, this picture was one of the works that he showed her and discussed, and one of the few she went into great detail describing in her journals:

“He showed me a black and white sketch inspired by the coal strike in Halifax. A woman, distraught, gaunt, agonized, carrying a child who was pitiful, drooping, hopeless and dumbly submissive. Half of the face of another child was cut by the bottom of the picture. The background was houses, black and desolate. There was a thunderous, stupendous horror in the air. The woman’s eyes were wild and frantic. Someday he will make a canvas of it. It will be terrific.”

This specific drawing, which is the same one that was shown to Carr, was used as the original template for a reproduction published in July 1925 in Canadian Forum, a ‘Monthly Journal of Literature and Public Affairs’ that Harris was on the publishing committee for, and which had published numerous pieces discussing the coal strike. Each month this magazine would reproduce one piece of art in its pages, and with Harris regularly contributing several each year, often based on paintings that he had completed. While he never completed (or at least, never exhibited) a painting of this same composition as Carr had envisioned, he did exhibit a related work, entitled Miner’s Houses, in the May 1926 Group of Seven show. Obviously considered an important and exceptional piece, Harris also included it as one of his two contributions, as the sole Canadian representative, to the November 1926 International Exhibition of Modern Art arranged by the Société Anonyme in Brooklyn. This canvas, while impressive, excluded the human figures from its composition, instead depicting the barren landscape and stark homes bathed in ethereal light. While this brought the canvas more in line with his other works and artistic practice at the time, it also ensured that this drawing would remain singular in his catalogue, a moving and important testament to a social consciousness and interest in the human condition that is often overlooked in his legacy.

We thank Alec Blair, Director/Lead Researcher, Lawren S. Harris Inventory Project, for contributing the above essay.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars

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