Sold for: $871,250

PROVENANCE
Acquired directly from the Artist, with the assistance of Lawren P. Harris, by Norah Lyle, Toronto, circa 1936
By descent to the present Private Collection, Victoria

LITERATURE
Doris Mills, L.S. Harris Inventory, 1936, Lake Superior Sketches, Group 4, catalogue #11, location noted as the Studio Building, and a drawing of the painting illustrated by Hans Jensen

Lake Superior Sketch XI, an evocative and meditative work, is a prime example of the artistic maturation that occurred for Lawren Harris on Lake Superior’s North Shore. As one of his most frequently visited sketching grounds (he would visit at least seven times between 1921 and 1928), it was the site of some of his most critical developments, and where he was able to explore new modes of expression and ways of communicating the beauty that he found in the Canadian landscape. Here, in recently burnt-over forests, and on headlands towering above the expansive lake, the sense of space gave Harris the chance to explore the landscape in ways that prior trips to the Algoma region, and its abundant, often encroaching vitality, had not.

Once again working alongside his fellow members of the Group of Seven on sketching trips to the North Shore, Harris benefited from the same camaraderie that in Algoma had supported the production of new, vigorous and exciting depictions of the Canadian North. Here, again, Harris was able to continue to push the boundaries of what his landscape art could be, and his fellow artists recognized his resonance with this place. A.Y. Jackson, Harris’s most frequent sketching companion, pointed out Harris’s desire in the 1920s for something “bare and stark,”[1] and it was certainly found here. Jackson would later write: “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.” [2]

It is in this spirit of boldness that Harris developed a series of works, of which Lake Superior Sketch XI is wonderfully representative, that moved beyond earthly subjects and into more ethereal territory. He began to directly focus on the subject of light itself, and its interplay as it reflected off the great lake. This approach was born of repeated trips to the region, during which an evolution occurred in Harris’s practice, including a process of paring down his subjects. While much of his focus early on involved the vibrant, changing autumn vegetation, on his later visits (the size of this sketching board indicates it was from one of the trips between 1925 and 1928), he became much more austere in his depictions. The works that resulted became self-contained worlds, in which the islands and headlands of Lake Superior are the stage upon which great dramas of light, cloud and water are performed.

This motif was so important to Harris that he created and exhibited multiple major canvases from his sketches, including several from the same exact perspective as this sketch, which are now in major public collections, among them Clouds, Lake Superior (collection of the Art Gallery of Winnipeg) and Lake Superior III (the Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario).

Lake Superior Sketch XI, and other similar depictions, were opportunities for Harris to explore his ideas relating to the unity between the different realms of the universe. The warm yellow light that shines from behind the cloud forms is matched by its reflection off the water, both illuminating the dark shore with the same intensity. In viewing these scenes, observing the reciprocity of these phenomena, their symmetry in patterns, we join Harris in considering the connections between our worldly experiences and those that transcend our perception. They make clear Harris’s motivations and beliefs about his work, which included the idea that “our spirits emerge into purer creative work wherein they change the outward aspect of nature, alter colours, intensify forms, purge rhythms of pettiness, and seek to enable the soul to live in the grand way of certain wondrous moments in the North, when the outward aspect of nature becomes for a while full luminous to her informing spirit – and man, nature and spirit are one.”[3]

We thank Alec Blair, Director/Lead Researcher, Lawren S. Harris Inventory Project, for contributing the above essay.

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

[2] A.Y. Jackson, “Lawren Harris: A Biographical Sketch,” in Lawren Harris: Paintings 1910 - 1948, ed. Sydney Key (Toronto: Art Gallery of Toronto, 1948), 11.

[3] Lawren Harris, quoted in Lawren Harris, ed. Bess Harris and R.G.P. Colgrove (Macmillan, Toronto, 1969), 61.

For the biography on Norah Lyle in PDF format, please click here.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars