Lawren Stewart Harris 1885 - 1970

Collection of Bess Harris

Isaacs Gallery, Toronto

Private Collection, Toronto

Lawren Harris, The Story of the Group of Seven, Toronto, 1964, p. 14

This work has been viewed under UV light and it is in pristine condition. Part of the signature has possibly been reinforced, especially portions LAW and HAR. We would like to thank "In Restauro Conservart Inc." for examing this painting and their original notes are available upon request to Sotheby's.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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When Harris discovered the grand landscape of the Algoma district in the spring of 1918, he immediately decided to take his painter friends there. While he was making the trek there to recover his own sense of balance and normalcy after the deaths of his brother and Tom Thomson, there must have been, in the back of his mind, a plan, a grand plan, to enlist his friends to a great purpose. The vast raw country of Algoma inspired him to get them to portray Canada's north as Thomson had. This was to be their goal and their national grail.

When he saw the first harvest of the trip in the fall of 1918, he knew that he had been right.  He wrote:

Here were paintings of northern lands created in the spirit of those lands. Here was a landscape as seen through the eyes, felt in the hearts, and understood by the minds of the people who knew and loved it. Here was art, bold, vigorous and uncomprimising, embodying the direct experience of the great north.

Harris's own contributions to this discovery of the northern soul of Canada lead by example. This painting is one of the many that embodied the direct experience of that part of the world. From his high vantage in this painting, Harris's view encompassed an unspoiled and virgin topography. From its endless forests, winding rivers, deep canyons, and myriad lakes, he began to extract a strong sense of the way nature had shaped and then ruled this ancient Pre-Cambrian shield. By urging himself and his companions to look intensely into the essential character of the land here, he and they were able, in time, to find a form of expression in which, in Northrop Frye's words, "the created world and the world that is really there become the same thing."

Through landscape, the artists around Harris formed a sort of religion: "a commitment to painting as a way of life, or, perhaps better, as a sacramental activity expressing a faith", to quote Frye again. It was this elevation of the act of painting to its highest level that raised their work to a spiritual level that helped to define the character of a nation.