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Provenance:

Private Collection of J. Russell Harper
Private Collection, Montreal (by descent)

Literature:

Laurier Lacroix, “Writing Art History in the Twentieth Century” in The Visual Arts in Canada, Oxford University Press, 2010, page 417.

Note:

Russell Harper was the National Gallery of Canada’s Curator of Canadian Art from 1959-1963. He also held positions at the Royal Ontario Museum as well as the McCord Museum in Montreal. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1974.

Author of a number of seminal works advancing knowledge and appreciation of Canadian Art History, he is perhaps most widely recognized as the author of Painting in Canada: A History, which was first published in 1966 and, according to Laurier Lacroix was the first survey of Canadian Art “to make an effort to provide genuinely ‘national coverage’.” He is also broadly known for his monograph on Cornelius Krieghoff (1979).

While Russell Harper’s extensive library was generously donated to the National Gallery of Canada in the early 1990s, elements of his extensive collection of Canadian Art remained with the Harper family, including the following six lots.