PROVENANCE
Acquired directly from the Artist
By descent to a Private Collection
Canadian Art, Joyner Fine Art, November 25, 1986, lot 32
Acquired from the above by the present Private Collection, Vancouver

EXHIBITED
Vancouver Art Gallery, Lawren Harris: Canadian Visionary, March 1 – May 4, 2014, traveling in 2017 to the Kamloops Art Gallery and Nanaimo Museum

The north shore of Lake Superior was a place for experimentation and artistic discovery for Lawren Harris, and the site of many of his most important and interesting works. Throughout the 1920s, his regular autumn visits allowed for the development and honing of his unique visual vocabulary, giving voice to a new appreciation for the Canadian landscape. For Harris, the artistic mission was to capture the underlying truth of a place, as opposed to a realistic depiction. He claimed:

Real art never seeks factual truth. It seeks to express the character and spirit of a scene in its own plastic language: not the branch of a tree, but the urge of its growth. Yet, art is not caprice; art is essentially organization and order.[1]

In Ice House, Lake Superior, we see this philosophy in practice, and the result is a sublime picture, radiating calm and serenity.

The work highlights Harris’s evolution towards simplicity and drama, even in the small format of his oil sketches. Strong volumes dominate the piece, which pairs the unadorned faces of the buildings with bold shadows under the low evening light. Harris has used a limited palette to emphasize the essential elements only. Vegetation has been stripped from the hill behind the central ice house, revealing a geometric collection of irregular blocks. This focus on form seems presage his arctic works, his future elemental landscapes, and the conclusion of his landscape focus before shifting fully to abstraction.

The austerity of Lake Superior’s landscape was critical for Harris, who was the impetus behind the many sketching trips he took to the region with his fellow members of the Group of Seven. A.Y. Jackson, who accompanied him on many of these excursions, recalled that Algoma was “too opulent for Harris”[2] and that Superior was where he would thrive in his exploration of new, modern art frontiers:

It was this country that gave Harris the motives for many of his best known canvases. There was a feeling of space, dramatic lighting, the stark forms of rocky hills and dead trees and beyond, Lake Superior, shining like burnished silver. However bold the artist’s conception of it was, it seemed inadequate.[3]

The subject of this work, Port Coldwell, was one that saw Harris increase that boldness. In a departure from his focus on the wild and rough topography and the light effects over the water, Harris developed a series of works focusing on this small fishing town that can most likely be dated from a 1927 trip with Arthur Lismer. There was precedent in these pared down depictions of working-class buildings in his previous canvases of Cobalt (Ontario Hill Town) and Glace Bay (Miners’ Houses, Glace Bay). Both of these works had seen considerable attention not only in Canada but also internationally, with the latter being exhibited in the Société Anonyme’s 1926 International Exhibition of Modern Art in Brooklyn, alongside art at the very forefront of painting and abstraction, including works by Vassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian.

This success must have been inspiring for Harris, whose new focus on the buildings of Coldwell resulted in brilliant portrayals, including this sketch and an important canvas, Ice House, Coldwell, Lake Superior (Art Gallery of Hamilton), first exhibited in the February 1928 Group of Seven show. All of these works demonstrate the artist pushing the limits of his intensified colour and simplified forms, to dramatic effect. The works inspired strong responses, and when the canvas was shown, it was considered by many at the time to be imposing and provocative, “despairingly beautiful and inhuman” as described in 1928.[4] Ice House, Lake Superior, with its deep, rich blues and confidence and clarity of expression, is a testament to Harris’s artistic vision and its resonance, for it looks as fresh and exciting today as when it was completed almost 100 years ago.

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), 14.

2. A.Y. Jackson, A Painter’s Country: The Autobiography of A.Y. Jackson (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1958), 57.

3. A.Y. Jackson, “Lawren Harris: A Biographical Sketch,” in Lawren Harris: Paintings, 1910–1948, ed. Sydney Key (Toronto: Art Gallery of Toronto, 1948), exhibition catalogue, 11.

4. Augustus Bridle, “The Group of Seven Display Their Annual Symbolisms,” Toronto Star, February 8, 1928.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars