Mountain Sketch (LSH #11) is a captivating painting, a brilliant synthesis of Lawren Harris’s fascination with mountains and his exploration of abstraction. Intense light pours across the moody composition, with rich, electric blues radiating from the bold forms. This work is a confident and assured exploration of the foundations of landscape by one of Canada’s most celebrated artists.

Beginning in 1924 with his first trip to Jasper National Park, Harris’s artistic interest in mountain shapes and forms grew rapidly, and this interest persisted throughout his long and diverse career. Repeated visits to the Rocky Mountains in the late 1920s gave him the opportunity to explore the spectacular peaks, radiant lakes and ever-changing, dramatic weather conditions this magnificent region has to offer, and he painted over 175 oil sketches of the scenes he encountered there. As his visits progressed and his style evolved, Harris increasingly began to abstract elements of his landscape paintings, a process that culminated, in the mid-1930s, with a complete reinvention of his approach to art, including the newfound conviction that non-objective abstraction was the way forward.

In 1936, writing to fellow artist Emily Carr, who had some trepidation about this approach, Harris proclaimed:

There is no doubt in my mind that it enlarges the range, the scope of painting enormously. It replaces nothing. It adds to the realm of painting. It makes possible an incalculable range of ideas that the representational painting is closed to. It increases the field of experience, enlarges it and that is surely all to the good.… As for me, there is for the present no other way.[1]

Following this epiphany, the expression of Harris’s fascination with mountains transformed from specific representations of real-world locations into increasingly abstracted depictions of the spirit and experience of being amidst these awe-inspiring landscapes.

In Mountain Sketch (LSH #11) we find Harris pushing to the far limits of his landscape work, generalizing a mountain scene to its most idealized form, though still tethered to the natural world. The result is a pristine and evocative depiction of the mountains. Highly simplified, it bears resemblance to the scenes near Lake O’Hara, one of the most awe-inspiring regions of the entire country, but Harris has pushed beyond geographic specificity, stripping the far mountains of any recognizable topography. This process of abstraction reflects the artist’s sentiment that

our spirits emerge into purer creative work wherein they change the outward aspect of nature, alter colours, intensify forms, purge rhythms of pettiness, and seek to enable the soul to live in the grand way of certain wondrous moments in the North when the outward aspect of nature becomes for a while full luminous to her informing spirit—and man, nature, and spirit are one.[2]

With deliberation and focus, Harris has transformed the inspiration of a specific time and place in the Rocky Mountains into a more universal and essential work of art. It is one of his first definite steps towards pure abstraction, which he would embrace by the mid-1930s, though the presence of mountains, now completely severed from their real-world context, would still play a central role. Masterful works including Mountain Experience (circa 1946, sold by Heffel May 23, 2024) and Northern Image (1952, sold by Heffel May 25, 2023) are a continuation of the path Harris began with his first mountain sketches in 1924, and Mountain Sketch (LSH #11) represents a critical link between these two important bodies of work in Harris’s catalogue.

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

1. Harris to Emily Carr, May 3, 1936, Emily Carr Papers, MS 2181, box 2, folder 3, BC Archives, Victoria.

2. Quoted in Bess Harris and R.G.P. Colgrove, eds., Lawren Harris (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1969), 61.

For the biography on Lillian Mayland McKimm in PDF format, please click here.