PROVENANCE
Collection of the Artist
Brownlee Walker Haydon, New York and then Los Angeles
By descent to the present Private Collection, Los Angeles

LITERATURE
Doris Mills, L.S. Harris Inventory, 1936, Lake Superior Sketches, Group 4, catalogue #18, with a drawing by Hans Jensen, location noted as the Studio Building

For Lawren Harris, no body of work more readily demonstrates his rapid artistic development than the sketches done on the north shore of Lake Superior. Drawn to the austere and imposing landscape found there, Harris arranged for at least seven visits to the area between 1921 and 1928, exploring locations between Marathon and Rossport while accompanied by a rotating cast of fellow members of the Group of Seven. These years were an exciting and productive period for Harris, and his style underwent significant and rapid changes, easily seen when comparing the earlier, more textured and dense sketches of Algoma against the stark and simplified forms of his later trips to the Rockies. Yet it is with Lake Superior subjects alone that we truly get to appreciate this process of change with the exact same subjects, providing valuable insight into his process and catalogue.

Lake Superior Sketch XVIII was painted on the Coldwell Peninsula, in present-day Neys Provincial Park, a favourite sketching ground for Harris. Here, dramatic hills and headlands tower over the lake, and the artists found abundant subject material in the region’s topography, a mix of lakes and forests, much of it recovering from the impacts of wildfire. Where the land’s underlying architecture was left exposed and vegetation limited, they were able to navigate through the bush to find fresh outlooks and to create novel and intriguing representations of the Canadian landscape.

The central subject of this fine sketch is Mount Premier—the highest point in the Coldwell area. Following a habit from the Algoma expeditions of naming lakes and landscape features after friends or acquaintances in Toronto, this hill acquired the nickname “Old Bill” (perhaps after fellow artist J.W. “Bill” Beatty). It would be a regular subject painted by Harris over the years as well as the location from which many other paintings would be sketched. The hill itself is documented in one major canvas (48 x 60 inches), Lake Superior Hill XV, a work based on an oil on board sketch from the early 1920s (both in private collections). While the earlier sketch and canvas portray details of mid-ground forests and vegetation interwoven into the texture of the foreground rocks, Lake Superior Sketch XVIII presents a much more abstracted interpretation of the scene, eschewing much of the detail and simplifying forms. Comparing the works allows us to appreciate the artist’s shifting approach.

After 1925, Harris increased the size of his sketching boards to 12 x 15 inches, and accompanying this change was a tendency to place more of an emphasis on volume and space. Interestingly, while the size of Harris’s sketching support increased, the level of detail in his work seemingly decreased, replaced with bolder simplifications, expertly rendered with subtle and nuanced colour treatments.

The straightforward and direct depiction of the scene in Lake Superior Sketch XVIII showcases Harris’s skill at distilling the landscape to its fundamentals. Gone are the extraneous details, replaced with only the essential elements that convey the strength and majesty of such a remote and beautiful area of the country. In his writing, Harris summarized the pathway of his artistic evolution, noting that after a period of more decorative works, he “became more vigorously selective, and sought to have no element, no line or colour in the picture that did not contribute to the unified expression. This led to the utilization of the elements of the North in three dimensions—an organization in depth, giving a still fuller meaning, a still deeper significance to every form and to the relationship of all the forms in the picture.”[1]

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), 51.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars