signed lower right
signed and titled River and Mountain to panel verso
on label titled Algoma Sketch CIV
inscribed with Doris Mills Inventory #2/104
stamped with the artist’s symbol
Provenance
Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, Montreal;
Private collection
In the spring of 1918, Lawren Harris visited Algoma as part of his recuperative process after a breakdown and discharge from the army during WWI. A sensitive individual, Harris could not reconcile what he had experienced overseas while in Toronto: nature was the only answer. His friend Dr. James MacCallum took him north of Sault Ste. Marie, and into some of the most picturesque country in eastern Canada. Wild and inaccessible, Algoma’s rivers, lakes, canyons, and waterfalls were exactly what Harris needed.He embraced the scenery, letting the atmosphere of the forest wash over him. The experience re-engaged him with his art, and allowed him to conquer his demons.
Back in Toronto, he boasted of the area’s endless subject matter to his fellow artists, and J.E.H. MacDonald, A.Y. Jackson, and Frank Johnston. Johnston and MacDonald joined Harris and MacCallum when they returned again that fall. These trips were the beginning of a long association with Algoma and the famous boxcar trips using the Algoma Central Railway car, outfitted with bunk beds and a stove, and moved from siding to siding, serving as home base for daily painting excursions and evening critiques. It was thus that Algoma gave rise to some of Canada’s finest art.
Lawren Harris met the other artists who were to form the Group of Seven through the Arts and Letters Club. He had been a founding member of the Club and had a background very different to the other members of the Group. Harris was born in Brantford, Ontario and was an…
Lawren Harris met the other artists who were to form the Group of Seven through the Arts and Letters Club. He had been a founding member of the Club and had a background very different to the other members of the Group. Harris was born in Brantford, Ontario and was an heir to the Massey-Harris fortunes, which supplied him with an independent income. A wealthy, conservative and religious upbringing in Toronto provided him with many privileged experiences. His education included St. Andrew’s College at the University of Toronto. At age nineteen, he travelled to Europe to study art in Germany for three years. In 1908, he toured through the near East with a writer and had the illustrations he made there published in “Harper’s Bazaar.”
Harris was an enthusiast and organizer. The idea of the Studio Building, where all Group members could work, originated with Harris, who paid three quarters of the cost, while Dr. McCallum contributed the rest. After his discharge from the army, where he taught musketry at Camp Borden, Harris persuaded the Algoma Central Railway to lend him a boxcar and so began the first trips to Algoma. Harris invited artist friends – all expenses paid – and outfitted the boxcar as a studio on wheels with bunks, tables, chairs, a stove, shelves, a canoe and a 3-wheel jigger for short runs up and down the tracks. The last Algoma trip was in 1921. At this time, Harris and Jackson travelled to the North Shore of Lake Superior. Harris became widely known for paintings of this area. Here, the starkness and bareness of the landscape corresponded with the direction in which his paintings were moving.
Lawren Harris was convinced that art must express spiritual values as well as portraying the visible world. To him, the role of the artist and the function of art was to reveal the divine forces in nature. He gradually moved toward greater abstraction and thus more complete expression of his philosophical views. Harris was doing much more than trying to paint the northland as he saw it. His goal was to incorporate his spiritual feeling for the landscape into his work. After 1924, he no longer dated or signed his works because he did not want them to be tied to a specific artist or place. While Lawren Harris continued to explore new ideas, he also continued to be a driving force behind the Group of Seven.
