Sold for: $193,250

PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Private Collection, Ontario
By descent to the present Private Collection, Ontario

LITERATURE
Doris Mills, L.S. Harris Inventory, 1936, Lake Superior Sketches, Group 4, catalogue #129, location noted as the Studio Building

The stark and dramatic edges of Lake Superior’s North Shore were areas of abundance for Lawren Harris, filled with opportunities for new and exciting depictions of the Canadian landscape. Entrance, Coldwell Bay, Lake Superior, an oil from one of the artist’s early visits to the lake, is a superb example of the energizing potential that Harris found here. The work radiates inspiration, and its assured, bold forms and strong chromatic contrasts remain striking and fresh a century after its creation. It is evidence of the rich rewards that were to be discovered by the intrepid artist amongst the many challenges of Lake Superior’s austere and wild topography, and carries with it the important legacy of the Group of Seven’s reimagining of landscape art in this country.

Painted in either 1922 or 1923, this painting is filled with the same vibrancy of colour that so effectively animated Harris’s Algoma works just a few short years before. Here, the golden cadmium yellows and brilliant crimson of the deciduous fall foliage are arresting in their intensity, a crystalline depiction of this annual display of northern beauty. Yet, despite the connection to earlier wood interiors, there is a novelty found as well, a grandness that characterizes Harris’s experience on the North Shore. An epic sense of space is emphasized by a haze that is found in the distance – an atmospheric phenomenon common in his works from this time, and used to great effect to highlight the vibrancy of the foreground and the striking contrast with the electric-blue water and the muted violet greys of the far shore’s rocky cliffs.

As Harris emerged from the density of the Eden-like paradise that was Algoma, the expansiveness of the inland sea had a profound effect on his work, and trips to Lake Superior in the early 1920s marked a critical turning point in his artistic journey. Before he found his way to the Rocky Mountains, and eventually to the realms of abstraction, the austerity and vastness of Lake Superior presented an opportunity for transition, a shifting of attention away from the corporeal interests of the tangible world to the ethereal spaces that resonated with a greater spiritual significance. The composition of this work symbolically captures this shift, with the foreground crisp and clear, and the far shores across Coldwell Bay appearing eerie and seemingly from another realm. Several years later, Harris would paint a similar composition from the same vantage point (North Shore, Lake Superior, in the McMichael Canadian Art Collection), which continues along this trajectory. In the later picture the foreground has been reduced to a mere platform to position the viewer, and attention is solely focused in the distance. In light of this, the confident experimentation in Entrance, Coldwell Bay, Lake Superior can be viewed as a marker on the artist’s journey, a waypoint that allows one to follow the path of his evolution.

Poetically, the verso of this work also contains its own significance for Harris’s explorations. Underneath the various inscriptions and gallery labels there is a pencil-drawn map of the North Shore in Harris’s own hand, delineating the various bays, lakes and hilltops that were the sketching grounds between Marathon and Coldwell. The railway, and presumably the stop at Mile 69, is indicated, giving rare insight into the logistics and experiences that Harris and his fellow artists (in this case, he was accompanied by A.Y. Jackson) had a century ago, exploring these spectacular landscapes. This work was completed a little to the east of the region depicted in the hand-drawn map, looking west along the shore towards the hills from which he would later paint views of Pic Island, in present-day Neys Provincial Park.

The “Hogarth” inscription on the verso, also in Harris’s hand, likely refers to Donald M. Hogarth, a mining financier and member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, who represented the North Shore’s Port Arthur constituency at the time this work was painted and was a contemporary of Harris’s. The two men likely knew each other, for Hogarth had a summer home on Lake Simcoe’s Kempenfelt Bay, near the Harris family’s own Woodend estate. As a brilliant and powerful representation of a region that both men had significant and deep connections to, this work was likely set aside by Harris for Hogarth’s consideration.

We thank Alec Blair, Director/Lead Researcher, Lawren S. Harris Inventory Project, for contributing the above essay.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars