PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Calgary
Mayberry Fine Art, Winnipeg
The Collection of Torben V. Kristiansen, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Doris Mills, L.S. Harris Inventory, 1936, Lake Superior Sketches, Group 4, catalogue #50, with a drawing by Hans Jensen, location noted as the Studio Building

Lawren Harris’s fascination with Lake Superior’s north shore brought him back to the region repeatedly in the 1920s, resulting in a broad range of works that trace his artistic evolution and document his diversity of subjects. On these trips, Harris was accompanied by various fellow members of the Group of Seven. The paintings that resulted are essential contributions to Canada’s artistic history and still resonate as celebrations of the country’s cultural identity. Harris felt that spending time in the landscape was essential in his quest to capture the spirit of the country, writing:

This land is different in its air, moods, and spirit from Europe and the Old Country. It invokes a response which throws aside all preconceived ideas and rule-of-thumb reactions.

It has to be seen, lived with, and painted with complete devotion to its own life and spirit before it yields its secrets.[1]

When sketching in Algoma, Harris and his fellow artists had utilized cabins and a converted railway boxcar as accommodation in the bush, allowing some comfort from which to explore the surrounding environment. On Superior’s north shore, the same such opportunities were not available, which necessitated camping instead. Fellow artist A.J. Casson, who joined Harris, Frank Carmichael and A.Y. Jackson on their 1928 trip, described the excitement that was involved in such an endeavour:

It was the first time I had ever seen such rugged, majestic scenery and I was overwhelmed by it. We camped for two weeks near Port Coldwell, which was nothing more than a tiny fishing community of five homes and an ice-house.

Getting to Port Coldwell was an adventure in itself.… The problem was that, heading west, the train could not stop in Port Coldwell because there was a steep grade at that point. This, however, did not deter Lawren Harris. He negotiated with the conductor, some money changed hands, and the train slowed down to twenty-five miles an hour at a spot Lawren had picked out. Our equipment and supplies were thrown out of the baggage car and, at the appropriate moment, we jumped after them.…

A master of planning, Lawren had arranged for some section hands with a jigger to meet us there. We loaded our equipment onto the jigger and were transported four miles further west. We then proceeded about a third of a mile into the bush and set up camp. We chose a spot with a large number of spruce trees to act as a windbreak.[2]

In the area that is now Neys Provincial Park, the artists spent their days hiking and exploring, turning their attention to both inland subjects and the broad expanses out over the lake. Given the few details in this sketch, determining the specific location is a challenge, but the composition and position of the trees bear a strong resemblance to another, currently unlocated, oil sketch of the campsite, in which Harris includes the large canvas tent that was their temporary home. Whether Near Lake Superior—Rock, Spruce and Clouds depicts that same exact spot or another nearby location, it captures the essence of what attracted Harris to this region: the austere essentialism of the rocks of the Precambrian shield, exposing the underlying foundations of the land, and the inspiring tenacity of the spruce trees that manage to survive in harsh conditions, all under dramatic and ever-changing skies that provide rhythm and dynamics to such a timeless scene.

We thank Alec Blair, Director/Lead Researcher, Lawren S. Harris Inventory Project, for contributing the above essay.

1. Quoted in Bess Harris and R.G.P. Colgrove, eds., Lawren Harris (Toronto: Macmillan, 1969), 48.

2. A.J. Casson, My Favourite Watercolours, 1919 to 1957 (Toronto: Cerebrus/Prentice Hall, 1982), 46.

For the biography on Torben V. Kristiansen in PDF format, please click here.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars