Sold for: $32,175

PROVENANCE
Collection of J.E.H. MacDonald
A gift from J.E.H. MacDonald to Carl F. Schaefer, 1928
By descent to the present Private Collection, Ontario

Inscribed on verso by Thoreau MacDonald "With J.E.H. MacD., Mattawa, April 1913 / Gift to Carl Schaefer from J.E.H. MacD., 1928" and by Carl Schaefer "Collection Carl Schaefer, 117 St. Clements Ave., Toronto, 12, Ont."

The year 1913 was a turning point for Lawren Harris. In the previous year he had made his first major sale to the National Gallery of Canada, and it was with increasing confidence that he set off with fellow artist J.E.H. MacDonald in the spring of 1913 to sketch the northern wilderness near Mattawa. This new confidence can be seen in Harris’s application of the thick brush-strokes in the sky and foreground and in his characteristic handling of the lone tree – techniques for which he would come to be known in the decades ahead. Few sketches from this trip have appeared on the market, yet they form an invaluable insight into the beginnings of the artist’s new style of painting. Mattawa is a small settlement on the Ottawa River, just north of Algonquin Park, where the transition between northern coniferous forest and southern deciduous forest occurs. Harris and MacDonald presumably exchanged sketches from the trip, because this work was in MacDonald’s collection until it was given to the artist Carl Schaefer in 1928.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars