Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Montreal, QC

Note:

Doris Huestis Mills Speirs (1894-1989) may be the best known because of her friendship with Lawren S. Harris and her involvement cataloguing the works Harris left in the Studio Building in Toronto after he moved to the United States in 1934. Mills was inspired to paint after hearing Ernest MacMillan play a piece by César Franck at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church in 1920. She had never heard Franck’s music before, attended by herself and was enraptured. She recalled that on her walk home she heard a voice from up in a tree tell her, “You’re going to paint.” As soon as she got home, she began to make drawings, and soon thereafter asked A.Y. Jackson what supplies to buy.[1] Painted just three years later, Prouts Neck Sandbar (1923) is a captivating document of Mills’ intersection with Harris. The influence of the well-defined contours and feathered colours that Harris employed in his sketches of the North Shore of Lake Superior in 1922 is clear. Just as clear is Mills’ response to nature: concerned with getting to its essence instead of Harris’s rising above its materiality. With this mindset it is no surprise that two years after Mills painted Prouts Neck Sandbar, she bought Georgia O’Keeffe’s The Eggplant (1924) that is now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

[1] Charles Hill, “Charles Hill Interview with Doris Speirs” (15 October 1973), accessed ca. 2015, http://canadianart1930.gallery.ca/.