Lawren Harris was the driving force behind the Group of Seven, and the establishment of a legacy of artistic expression that sought to paint “the Canadian scene on its own terms.”[1] Though he spent several years as a young man studying art in Germany, followed by collaborating with Harper’s Magazine journalist Norman Duncan to illustrate a journey across the Middle East and logging camps in Minnesota, his return to Canada found him immediately dedicated to the pursuit of a creative approach that was inspired by, and representative of, this land.

Harris quickly found kindred spirits including the likes of J.E.H. MacDonald, A.Y. Jackson and Tom Thomson, and these artists began to develop a style of their own, responding to the diversity of their surroundings. Of the works that were created, Harris wrote: “These pictures … were painted in quite a different manner, technique, arrangement, and spirit from any work I had done before. I was far more at home in them than any place else and naturally forgot the indoor studio-learning of Europe, being simply dictated to by the environment and life I was born and brought up in!”[2]

The enthusiasm Harris felt for depicting Canada resulted in the exploration of many subjects, representing various facets of the country’s identity. These works include a small but important series done around his family’s summer home at Kempenfelt Bay, Lake Simcoe. House Near Allandale, Ontario, a charming and bright portrait of a Victorian-era home, is a brilliant representative of this rare and intriguing component of Harris’s catalogue, a series that contrasts with his more well-known urban scenes and wilderness landscapes.

Harris spent several years sketching in this region near Barrie, honing his skills and planning for future sketching trips north into more wild and rugged landscapes. Just over two dozen known sketches have been catalogued, with many of them likely coming from the summer of 1918, when Harris wrote to MacDonald: “I still sketch a bit in my spare time.… I have a few that are worthy, though I hanker after fall colouring.”[3] These works, including several portraits of old country homes such as this sketch, represent their own unique segment of Canadian culture.

F.B. Housser, early Group associate, friend and biographer, described Harris’s treatment of “rural Ontario homesteads” in his 1926 book:

Here Harris picks a type of dwelling expressive of the cooky-making, pie-baking farm atmosphere which many Canadians associate with their grandmothers. And the painter does not omit a certain note of puritanical respectability felt at country church socials, a world, the confines of which are the township’s concession roads. All this is suggested by treating a characteristic old Ontario farmhouse in a decorative way.… And there is that most characteristic old Ontario touch, the white curley-cues [sic] at the top of verandah posts with which the old English ship carpenters who cleared the land and settled the province decorate their homes.[4]

As with his works in Toronto’s St. John’s Ward, Halifax’s Elevator and Black Courts, and Cape Breton’s Glace Bay, Harris manages to depict a unique aspect of Canadian society in the early twentieth century.

Harris and the Group of Seven movement inspired many subsequent generations of Canadian artists, and it is most fitting that this work was in the collection of Carl Schaefer, who, in 1936, joined Harris and other prominent landscape painters in the Canadian Group of Painters. Bold and confident in its execution, this small sketch would have been of particular interest to Schaefer, who acquired the work in 1933. In 1934, Schaefer painted his own version of this subject in one of his most celebrated works, the canvas Ontario Farm House, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, demonstrating with poetic resonance the new paths that works like House Near Allandale, Ontario were able to forge for Canadian art.

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

1. Lawren Harris quoted in Lawren Harris, ed. Bess Harris and R.G.P. Colgrove (Toronto: Macmillan, 1969), 48.

2. Quoted in Fred Housser, A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1926), 36.

3. Lawren Harris to J.E.H. MacDonald, August 1918, LSH Estate Archives.

4. Housser, Canadian Art Movement, 184.