Hill, North Shore, Lake Superior is a striking early example of Lawren Harris’s works from the north shore of Lake Superior, an area that was of critical importance to the artist during his landscape period and the site of much of his artistic evolution during the 1920s. With his nearly annual visits between 1921 and 1928, we can trace Harris’s changing style through the sketches he painted there, depicting the diverse subjects that fed his inspiration for longer than any other area of the country.
Harris’s Lake Superior paintings, with their wide range of subject matter, provide perhaps the best example of his uniqueness as an artist, including within the Group of Seven. Even early on in his explorations of this region, these works became closely associated with his signature approach and style. A review from summer 1924 of the Group Exhibition of Paintings by Contemporary Canadian Artists at the Brooklyn Museum articulates this from a contemporary perspective:
Lawren Harris has the most dramatic point of view. He, more than any of the others, gets away from the idea that a picture is merely a decoration and gives us an emotional reaction. He paints the country about the north shore of Lake Superior and gives us a feeling of vastness, of starkness and of wilderness. His shapes are hard-edged and bold, simplified down to their essential forms, his color cold and clean. There is something of Rockwell Kent’s dramatic simplicity about them.[1]
Hill, North Shore, Lake Superior superbly demonstrates the writer’s observations.
While Harris’s general lack of record keeping means that uncertainty persists in knowing exactly when he traveled and painted in various locations, it is likely that this work is from the fall of 1923, during his third trip to the North Shore. That year, accompanied by A.Y. Jackson, Harris explored the hills and bays around Port Munro, situated to the north of Marathon about halfway to Port Coldwell, another significant sketching ground. A map, drawn in graphite by Harris’s hand on the verso of one of his sketching boards (Entrance, Coldwell Bay, Lake Superior, sold by Heffel November 24, 2022, lot 138), roughly identifies the pertinent features that were of interest to the artists, including the railway line and the various hills, islands and shorelines. One peak that appears on the map, and which Harris and Jackson painted from, is the central focus of this sketch, as viewed looking west across Carden Cove. Today, this has been named “Painter’s Peak” and is accessible as part of the Group of Seven Lake Superior Trail that is being built, linking together many areas in which Harris and his contemporaries worked.[2]
Many of the works done by Harris in the Port Munro area, including this oil on board, have a distinct atmospheric haze to them, and a palette emphasizing the pink and orange hues. This is recognizable as the effects of forest fire smoke, which was so prevalent and severe in the area during the fall of 1923 that it contributed to a shipwreck off the shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.[3] As a result of these conditions, Harris’s palette during this period takes on a limited, and distinctive, range and character. The effect and particular aesthetic likely encouraged the restrained and experimental colour motifs that he would use to further hone his compositions in the years that followed, another realization traceable through his broad catalogue of iconic Lake Superior works.
We thank Alec Blair, Director/Lead Researcher, Lawren S. Harris Inventory Project, for contributing the above essay.
1. Helen Appleton Read quoted in review of Group Exhibition of Paintings by Contemporary Canadian Artists, Brooklyn Museum Quarterly 11, no. 3 (July 1924): 106.
2. Group of Seven Lake Superior Trail, https://groupofseventrail.com/.
3. See Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, “Shipwreck Society Discovers a World War One Era Steel Bulk Freighter 100 Years after It Sinks,” October 11, 2023, available at https://shipwreckmuseum.com.