When fellow artist Emily Carr visited Lawren Harris’s studio in 1933, she described it as “wonderful, all quiet and grey, nothing unnecessary.… It is a place to invite the soul to come and gather the riches of thought, and ponder over them and try to express them, an orderly place of an orderly mind.”[1] This description of Harris’s methods is one of the few contemporary insights we have into his practice but provides excellent context for how the artist was able to translate the complex richness of the Canadian landscape into immediately recognizable and poignant visions of solitude and beauty, such as seen here in Lake Superior Sunrise (Lake Superior Sketch XXIII).

The north shore of Lake Superior was fertile ground for Harris’s artistic vision, and between 1921 and 1928, he visited the area almost every autumn to sketch in both oil and pencil, capturing the enthralling scenes he encountered where the dramatic headlands met the Great Lake. For many of those trips, he camped, alongside various fellow artists from the Group of Seven, in the region that is present-day Neys Provincial Park. Here they explored lakeshores, hilltops and fishing villages to find the subject matter that would seed the development of a new artistic movement and an expanded appreciation for Canadian landscape painting.

Given the size of this work, this oil sketch can be dated from one of Harris’s later trips, between 1925 and 1928, as before then he worked on slightly smaller boards (about 10 ½ x 13 ½ inches). In these final trips to Lake Superior Harris was at the pinnacle of his landscape period, with his artistic ideals harmonizing with the abundance of material he found before him. This particular scene, looking down from a hill on the Coldwell Peninsula over Detention Island, bathed in the morning light, was especially resonant for the artist. He painted at least six sketches of it and further worked up several of them into full-scale canvases. These sketches include Lake Superior Sunrise (Lake Superior Sketch XXIII), which was the direct source for the canvas North Shore, Lake Superior (31 ¼ x 40 ½ inches), recently sold at auction. Oil panels that served as sources for canvases are always of particular importance in the artist’s catalogue, as they often represent the compositions Harris himself felt had the most potential and impact. This sketch is an excellent example of this, as its cohesion of form and colour and the elegant simplicity of the composition align perfectly with Harris’s pursuit to refine his works to their most foundational elements. Of his artistic journey Harris wrote:

My work was founded on a long and growing love and understanding of the North, of being permeated with its spirit.… It was an unfolding of the heart itself through the effect of environment, of people, place, and time. No man is profound enough to explain fully the nature of his own inspiration—he generally attributes it to a thousand and one extraneous things. To the artist, his art is adventure in which he seeks to regain unity with nature and the knowledge of his own immortal being.[2]

In viewing works like Lake Superior Sunrise (Lake Superior Sketch XXIII), we are privileged to accompany Harris on this adventure and glimpse the illumination he found in this austere yet abundant landscape.

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

1. Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1966), 78.

2. Quoted in Bess Harris and R.G.P. Colgrove, eds., Lawren Harris (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1969), 7.

For the biography on Lillian Mayland McKimm in PDF format, please click here.