PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
The Art Emporium, Vancouver
A Distinguished Private Collection, Vancouver, 1968

LITERATURE
Doris Mills, L.S. Harris Inventory, 1936, Mountain Sketches, Group 7, catalogue #56, with a drawing by Hans Jensen, location noted as the Studio Building

Lawren Harris first visited the Canadian Rockies in 1924, when, alongside A.Y. Jackson, he spent weeks sketching and exploring Jasper National Park. The experience resulted in the discovery of a source of inspiration that would become central to his artistic legacy. Though initially underwhelmed by the mountains, he later recalled, “After I became better acquainted with the mountains, camped and tramped and lived among them, I found a power and majesty and a wealth of experience at nature’s summit which no travel-folder ever expressed.”[1] In the years to follow, he would return to explore more regions, including Banff and Yoho National Parks. These trips gave him the chance to discover the dramatic scenery around Lake Louise and Lake O’Hara, providing him material for some of his most celebrated canvases.

While many of his early mountain works utilized a lakeshore perspective, looking up towards soaring mountain peaks, Harris soon found that he preferred to sketch from a height, which allowed him to place the viewer amongst the spectacular topography, as seen here in Mountain Sketch LVI. As with his other exciting mountain sketches, this work brings us out of the everyday and into the rarified air of the alpine. The lively depiction manages to capture the grandeur of the rugged Rocky Mountain peaks and the brilliant light found at high elevations. In doing so, it transcends its worldly subjects, and yet despite the fantastical nature of the composition, the sketch is remarkably faithful to the geography it depicts.

The composition highlights the steep slopes of Pinnacle Mountain and Eiffel Peak in the centre, as viewed from the summit of Saddle Mountain, located just to the southeast of Lake Louise. Deltaform Mountain is seen between these central peaks, with Neptuak and Wastach Mountains receding in the distance to the right. Framing this picturesque scene are the slopes of Sheol Mountain on the right and the impressive Mount Temple on the left, one of Harris’s favourite subjects.

Given the subject and the atmospherics of the scene, it can be suggested that this work originates from Harris’s 1926 trip to the Rockies. His second overall visit, this was his first time in the area near Lake Louise, and in many works known to be from this trip there is a recognizable smoky haze that gives a certain softness to his colours. He worked up one such sketch of Mount Temple into an impressive canvas, now in the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. That work was seen in 1927 by Emily Carr, who was so taken by it she “wished [she] could sweep the rest of the wall bare” to enjoy its serenity.[2]

Mountain Sketch LVI has the same ethereal light and evokes the same otherworldly atmosphere. The dating is further supported by a pencil drawing in the Vancouver Art Gallery of the same subject and from the same perspective, which originated from a 1926 sketchbook.

Harris believed that “a picture can become for us a highway between a particular thing and a universal feeling.”[3] In Mountain Sketch LVI, he utilizes the landscape to portray the awesome and intense experience of being high up in the mountains, distilling this power through his mastery of composition and selection into a tangible and contained physical depiction. Using a limited palette of colours, dominated by purplish blues, and simplified yet accurate forms, he is expertly able to convey the magnificence found in the Canadian Rockies, celebrating the land that he was so drawn to and inspired by.

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

1. Quoted in Lawren Harris, ed. Bess Harris and R.G.P. Colgrove (Toronto: Macmillan, 1969), 62.

2. Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1966), 13.

3. Quoted in Harris and Colgrove, Lawren Harris, 78.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars