PROVENANCE
McCready Galleries Inc., Toronto
R.A. Laidlaw, Toronto
Mitzi and Mel Dobrin, Montreal
Canadian Art, An Outstanding Collection: The Property of a Prominent Montreal Collector, Fraser Bros., Montreal, October 23, 1986, lot 86
A.K. Prakash & Associates Inc., Toronto
Estate of Walter Tilden, Toronto
Masters Gallery Ltd., Calgary
Private Collection, Vancouver

The Algoma works of Lawren Harris are among the most iconic subjects in Canadian landscape art. Situated along the eastern shore of Lake Superior, this verdant region of lakes, rivers and forests is extraordinary in its grandeur and scale, and in the early twentieth century, it provided fresh landscapes for Harris and his companions in the Group of Seven to explore and paint.

In the spirit of pioneering a distinctly Canadian approach to art, while feeling limited by the “meagreness of the material at hand”[1] for depiction in the areas around Toronto, Harris began organizing and funded sketching ventures to northern Ontario for himself and other like-minded artists, including J.E.H. MacDonald, Frank Johnston, A.Y. Jackson and Arthur Lismer. After an exploratory trip in the spring of 1918 gave him a glimpse of what Algoma had to offer, that autumn Harris arranged for the first of many sketching trips to the area. Results of these forays would catalyze the formation of the Group of Seven and generate some of the most recognizable images in Canadian painting.

Yellow Birches, Algoma is a strong and elegant example of the sketches created on these trips, full of the wild spirit and diverse natural beauty the artists found there. Here, towering white pines sway under a cool northern sky, with the colour of the changing birches first starting to appear. Behind this polychromatic foreground display, the various greens of the hillside betray the earliness of the autumn season. This backdrop is rendered confidently by Harris as a dense patchwork of trees broken up only by purple patches of an exposed cliff face.

The setting depicts the steep topography typical of the Agawa Valley, the first stop for the 1918 and 1919 “boxcar” trips, during which a customized railcar from the Algoma Central Railway served as home base for the painters. Harris described the plan to MacDonald in the summer of 1918 as follows: “We enter a Caboose which will be our home while in the North. Said caboose is hitched onto some train or other hauled to a siding in the Agawa Canyon 120 miles north of the Soo and left there for two or three days while we proceed to get a strangle hold on the surroundings.”[2] From Agawa they would move south, working their way back to Sault Ste. Marie as the fall colours progressed.

At each stop the artists would head off in pairs and explore, traveling either on foot, by canoe or by handcar along the tracks to find new subjects to paint. In the evening they would return to their simple accommodations and share the results of their efforts. It was here that they were able to confer and conspire about ways to capture the epic lands they found themselves in—and inspire one another to engage again and push forward their vision for this new form of expression, and appreciation, of the land. As Harris himself would describe, “We commenced our great adventure. We lived in a continuous blaze of enthusiasm.… Above all we loved this country and loved exploring and painting it.”[3]

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

1. Undated letter from Lawren S. Harris to J.E.H. MacDonald, written from his summer cottage Woodend near Allandale, Ontario, Collection of the Lawren S. Harris Estate.

2. Ibid.

3. Lawren Harris, “The Group of Seven in Canadian History,” Report of the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association 27, no. 1 (1948): 32.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars