Additional Images

Provenance:

Dominion Gallery, Montreal, QC;
Dr. Kathleen Swallow, Red Deer, AB;
Chapman Galleries, Red Deer, AB;
Private Collection, Alberta

Literature:

Doris Mills, L.S. Harris Inventory, 1936, Group 7, Rocky Mountain Sketches, one of nos. 103-118.

Note:

From the moment Lawren S. Harris returned to Canada in 1907 after his fine art studies in Berlin, his art was in a constant state of transformation. Painted in the middle of his nearly 25-year period in Toronto that coincided with the formation, ascent and dissolution of the Group of Seven, Athabasca River, Jasper (1924) is pivotal.

With a stripped-down palette, Lawren S. Harris distilled the vast view across the Athabasca River valley from the east with viridian, ultramarine and white. His view from the east captures the Pyramid Bench on the left in the middle-ground with Chetamon and Esplanade Mountains in the centre and right. [1] Building on the skills honed with his Algoma sketches that spring, Harris saw the Rockies in terms of their expanse and volume. Departing from earlier European and Canadian painting traditions where the aim was to capture the majesty of the terrain, Harris’s views of the Rockies deal with something more difficult to render, and one that would never entirely disappear for the remainder of his career: space and light. The mid-summer warmth melts the snow-cap and creates the Rockies’ unique summer atmosphere of veils of vapour between ranges of mountains kilometres apart. Athabasca River, Jasper reverberates with the excitement of Harris’s artistic growth in a new sketching ground, one that would redefine his art and with which he would write a new chapter of Canadian art.

The dimensions of Athabasca River, Jasper confidently places it among the very small group of 10 by 14 inch (25.4 x 35.5 cm) Rocky Mountain sketches recorded by Doris Speirs in her 1936 inventory of Lawren S. Harris’s paintings (numbers 103-118 among her “Group 7: Rocky Mountain Sketches”).

[1] Lisa Christensen, A Hiker’s Guide to the Rocky Mountain Art of Lawren Harris, (Calgary, AB: Fifth House Ltd, 2000): 75.