We found that, at times, there were skies over the great Lake Superior which, in their singing expansiveness and sublimity, existed nowhere else in Canada.

—Lawren Harris

The profound vastness of Lake Superior was an acute inspiration to A.Y. Jackson and his fellow members of the Group of Seven. From the time of Jackson and Lawren Harris’s first visit in 1921, members of the Group made near-annual pilgrimages to this locale, with its visually extraordinary but often unwelcoming weather. The dazzle across the water in this work carries with it a sense of inspiration in action, reminiscent of A.J. Casson’s Pic Island, Lake Superior (1928, sold by Heffel in December of 2021). The sketch presents a land that truly has, in Jackson’s famous words, “a sublime order to it.”

The original owner of this work was a trailblazing Canadian in her own right. Lida Bell Pearson Sturdy forged a single-minded path as one of Ontario’s important early female legal practitioners. After studying at Osgoode Hall at the University of Toronto, she was called to the bar in 1921. The first woman to set up her own legal practice in Cambridge, she would eventually be appointed Queen’s Counsel after 40 years of practising law.