Later in his career, Lawren Harris turned to painting purely abstract forms. Occasionally, he would scrape earlier landscape and abstract sketches painted in various periods of his career from their original panels, re-painting his abstract works on the almost bare surfaces. This work, LSH 183, is an example of this practice that was common for him in the mid-1950s.

This painting is related to two other abstract paintings by Harris - LSH 85 (a large oil on board painting) and LSH 101 (a larger oil on canvas painting). The former is dated 1958 and the latter is dated circa 1962. The canvas, LSH 101, is a significant work and was included in the Canadian Group of Painters show in 1962 as catalogue #13. Similar to his use of remnants of scraped off landscape panels, the colours found in the larger versions of this work noted above, suggest that he followed the same method here – utilizing the incidental colours of the scraped off work to shape his later iterations. The blue and yellow pigments found in both of the larger works are clearly derived from the abstract underneath. This work is an interesting and important link to the cerebral methods of Harris, and is a striking example of his abstract forms.

We thank Alec Blair, Director/ Lead Researcher, Lawren S. Harris Inventory Project, for assisting with the research on this lot.