Lawren Stewart Harris

North Shore, Lake Superior is an evocative and striking canvas, radiating with the dramatic northern light and bold forms that one immediately associates with Lawren Harris. It is a prime example of the artist at the peak of his landscape career, depicting one of his most important subjects. Full of confidence and assuredness, the composition’s undulating rhythms in the water and sky emphasize the celebration of the morning sun rising over pared-down landforms, reduced to their most essential architecture, emphatically demonstrating Harris’ quest for the discovery of underlying truths in the natural world.

On sketching trips between 1921 and 1928, Lawren Harris visited the north shore of Lake Superior seven times, providing abundant inspiration for his rapidly evolving artistic practice. There he found a landscape that resonated deeply with his artistic vision, providing austere and stark subjects situated within an openness where light and space could be explored more fully than in the abundance of the Algoma’s densely vegetated forests and lakeshores. It is an area of impressive beauty and dramatic atmosphere, as fellow artist and common accomplice A.Y. Jackson attested to, writing “I know of no more impressive scenery in Canada for the landscape painter. There is a sublime order to it, the long curves of the beaches, the sweeping ranges of hills, and headlands that push out into the lake…. In the autumn the whole country glows with colour.”[1]

On these trips to the north, Harris and other members of the Group of Seven would create oil sketches and pencil drawings, gathering material to work up into canvases back in their Toronto studios over the winter. North Shore, Lake Superior is based on an oil on panel sketch (Lake Superior Sketch XXIII) that dates from sometime between 1925 and 1928, the period when Harris was using 12”x15” boards for his sketches. Harris painted this scene from a hill on the Coldwell Peninsula, now present-day Neys Provincial Park, looking east towards the town of Marathon with Detention Island bathed in the morning light in the middle ground. This subject was a favourite of Harris’, and, as with other subjects that he was drawn to including nearby Pic Island, he produced multiple sketches and eventually multiple canvases of it. This was an especially productive period for Harris as evidenced by a late 1928 letter he wrote to Katherine Dreier, the co-founder of the Société Anonyme (along with Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp), which stated he had “more things to paint than I ever had, which is a happy state.”[2] Working from the dozens of completed sketches from each of his trips to Lake Superior, the exact date of when Harris painted the canvas is not clear, but the style is in line with works done in late 1927, including the magnificent canvas Lake Superior (The Thomson Collection at the AGO) which Emily Carr recorded him working on in December 1927.

Lake Superior resulted in some of Harris’ most celebrated works, including Above Lake Superior in the Art Gallery of Ontario (ca.1924), North Shore, Lake Superior in the NGC (ca. 1928), and Pic Island in the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (ca. 1926). Among other major works from this region, there are two very similar canvases depicting the same scene as the work offered here: Morning, Lake Superior in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Morning Light, Lake Superior (ca.1927) in the University of Guelph collection.

This work, North Shore, Lake Superior, acquired directly from the artist shortly after it was painted and passed down in the family, emerges as a welcome and important addition to this lauded catalogue of the artist, contributing another striking work that allows us to appreciate the influential of legacy of this subject, and this period, in Harris’ career.

This essay was contributed by Alec Blair. Blair is the director of the Lawren S. Harris Inventory Project, working with the estate of the artist to put together a catalogue of the artist’s works. He is based in Vancouver, BC.

[1] A.Y. Jackson, A Painter’s Country: The Autobiography of A.Y. Jackson (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1958) 57.
[2] Letter from Lawren Harris to Katherine Dreier – Nov. 17, 1928, Yale University Library Digital Collections.