Sold for: $187,200

PROVENANCE
A gift from the Artist to Arthur Burk, Toronto
By descent to a Private Collection, Montreal
Sold sale of Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, November 25, 2004, lot 78
Private Collection, London, England

LITERATURE
Jeremy Adamson, Lawren S. Harris: Urban Scenes and Wilderness Landscapes 1906 – 1930, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1978, page 65

This exciting work by Lawren Harris is an essay in contrasts. The graceful, vertical trees are light and airy, with thinly painted trunks that make skillful use of the wooden support panel itself. The dark green of their lifting, seemingly windblown tops contrasts with the bright green of the solid horizontal brush-strokes that Harris uses to depict the foreground. By mood, colour and direction, Harris’s brushwork shows us fine weather and poor, wind and calm, with the rainstorm on the right being a sheet of perfect, thinly-painted pale blue verticality.

The subject of this dramatic painting is possibly Kempenfelt Bay on Lake Simcoe, 60 miles north of Toronto, where Harris and his mother owned a summer home. In referring to the works Harris painted there, Jeremy Adamson states, “The majority of his Lake Simcoe sketches are studies of trees set against an expansive sky and indicate pictorial interests differing from those of his decorative studio snow scenes.” Harris’s interest here lies in the contrast between the softly-glowing pastoral foreground and the elemental forces of nature in the rainstorm washing across the lake.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars