ALC BCSFA CGP FCA G7 OSA RPS TPG
1885 - 1970
Canadian
Laurentian Monadnock in Autumn
oil on board
on verso titled on the labels variously and inscribed variously
7 1/2 x 9 in, 19.1 x 22.9 cm
Estimate: $25,000 - $35,000 CAD
Sold for: $28,125
Preview at: Heffel Toronto – 13 Hazelton Ave
PROVENANCE
A gift from the Artist to Doris Huestis Mills Speirs, circa 1928
Private Collection, Toronto
EXHIBITED
Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, October 12 - 31, 1971, as part of the collection of Doris Huestis Mills Speirs
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Lawren S. Harris: Urban Scenes and Wilderness Landscapes 1906-1930, January 14 - February 26, 1978, catalogue #30
Inscribed on verso: "by Lawren Harris Laurentians 1913 / sketch given by Lawren Harris to Doris Huestis Mills at the Studio Building Severn Street Toronto when DHM was cataloguing the Harris sketches about 1928" and "Painted by Lawren Stewart Harris October 1913, on a sketching trip with JEH MacDonald. La Touge, P.Q." and "28709-(c)".
Bright and joyous, this Lawren Harris oil sketch expresses the excitement the artist must have been feeling at this point in his career in 1913. Two years earlier, he had met J.E.H MacDonald, in whom he found a comrade-in-arms. Together, the two artists began to explore the idea of how best to express the resonance of Canadian landscape in their paintings. Those ideas were galvanized by their viewing of an exhibition of contemporary Scandinavian landscape painting in Buffalo in January of 1913, and put into practice on a sketching trip to Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains later that year, where this painting was produced.
As noted on verso, Laurentian Monadnock in Autumn hung in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s major 1978 Harris exhibition Urban Scenes and Wilderness Landscapes, loaned from the collection of Doris Speirs. Often referred to now by her previous married name of Mills, she was a poet, ornithologist and painter who exhibited alongside the Group of Seven. When Harris left Toronto for New Hampshire in 1934, he asked her to undertake an inventory of his paintings, which remains a key scholarly resource for Harris’s work
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