Additional Images

Provenance:

By descent to the artist's son, Howard K. Harris, Vancouver, BC;
Sotheby's, Toronto, ON, 30 October 1985, lot 462, as, Farmstead by a Hill, Sketch No. VII;
Private Collection, London, ON

Literature:

Doris Mills, L.S. Harris Inventory, 1936, Group 5, Miscellaneous Sketches, no. 7.

Note:

Of the known sketches from the 1913 trip to the Laurentians, Farmstead by a Hill, Sketch VII is distinctly resolved and jewel-like. That it was in the collection of the artist’s son Howard, signed, and remained with the younger Harris, speaks to its quality and personal meaning. Fresh to market after nearly 40 years, Farmstead by a Hill, Sketch VII was likely number 7 among the “Miscellaneous Sketches” in the inventory of Harris’s paintings Doris Speirs prepared in 1936. In this brilliant 1913 study, using the 8 by 10 inch (20.3 x 25.4 cm) format Harris abandoned soon thereafter, we witness his early thoughts about light, space, volume, and how buildings become haunting surrogates for humans, all aspects he would continue to build upon.

The year 1913 is often singled out for what some future members of the Group of Seven saw instead of what they painted. That January, Lawren S. Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald visited Buffalo, New York, to see Contemporary Scandinavian Art at the Albright Art Gallery (now, Buffalo AKG Art Museum), and returned enthused about the possibility of painting their homeplace with more profound attachment and directness. Also that year, the artists who would become the Group exhibited locally and internationally with each other and associated artists; Arthur Lismer and Tom Thomson sold their first works to public collections; Franklin Carmichael left Toronto to study in Antwerp; and that October Harris and MacDonald took a sketching trip to the Laurentians where Harris painted Farmstead by a Hill, Sketch VIV.

In Farmstead by a Hill, Sketch VII, the influence of Harris’s years of study in Berlin that was evident in his earlier urban views dissipated in favour of more open brushwork. At the time, MacDonald was the more experienced painter and Harris surely gleaned tips and tricks. In the hillside and foreground of Farmstead by a Hill, Sketch VII, Harris used overlapping brushstrokes to similar effect as MacDonald's early masterpiece Fine Weather, Georgian Bay (1913). If Harris tried out some of MacDonald’s techniques in his Laurentians sketches of 1913, it was experimental and aimed toward deepening his craft. When he painted the only known canvas clearly related to the 1913 Laurentian sketches, Laurentians (1913-1914, AGO no. 2009/179), he extensively employed a scumbling technique unlike anything his older friend had done.