Additional Images

Provenance:

Acquired from the artist’s family
By descent to the present owner, Toronto

Note:

In 1921, after a return visit to Algoma to sketch with his painter friends, Lawren Harris pushed on to Lake Superior for the first time. He was accompanied by A.Y. Jackson and found the trip to be a revelation. Harris would revisit the area numerous times between 1921-1928 and many believe Lake Superior and its shores to have provided him with his greatest inspiration. While this sketch is not dated, it would be fair to assume that it was painted on one of the earlier visits to Superior. A transition between the rich Algoma landscape paintings and the starker, stripped down maturer Superior works, this lot combines elements of both periods. Its lush evergreens, heavy with impasto, are set beside the bleached leafless trees that bear witness to forest fires that ravaged Superior in the years before Harris's visit. Unlike the later Superior works, this lot retains the richness of detail that would later be relinquished in order to idealize the landscape. Representing one last push to celebrate the lush textures associated with the Algoma pictures - as though Harris might be reluctant to recalibrate - here we still enjoy a classic composition. The variety of colour and variegated textures would soon evolve out of his work to be replaced by a stylized, lonely landscape which, in its own turn, would be superseded by Harris's later abstract forms.