This intimate early landscape by Lawren Harris was likely completed during a sketching trip with J.E.H. MacDonald to Haliburton in 1916–17, as noted on the verso of the work by Thoreau MacDonald. The depiction of a rural house with an attached mill structure reflects Harris’s interest in the forms and character of the built environment within the surrounding landscape. The work dates to an important period in Harris’s artistic development, when he devoted attention to the landscape of Toronto and its environs between 1910 and 1918. His artistic direction would later begin to shift following his exposure to Scandinavian modernism and subsequent sketching trips in northern Ontario.

Farm House, Old Mill may depict the same property seen in Old Mill, a painting dated circa 1911 in the McMichael Collection, offering a glimpse into Harris’s exploration of the subject and suggesting that the site may have been a recurring place within his early landscape practice.