Sold for: $8,750

PROVENANCE
Collection of the Artist
By descent within the Harris family to the present Private Collection

The pencil works of Lawren Harris played a critical role in his creative process, usually representing the artist's most direct and immediate responses to the landscapes that he explored. While present throughout his career, the importance of pencil drawings in his process increased as the locations for his sketching activities became more austere and remote. Particularly in his trips to the Rockies of the late 1920s, as he climbed to higher and more daring viewpoints, working in pencil on site allowed him to capture more of the dramatic scenes more quickly, and work in exposed and unwelcoming alpine environments, freed of the encumbrances of oil painting materials.

Rocky Mountain Drawing comes from a sketchbook Harris brought with him to the Mount Robson area in 1929, and it depicts the view south from around Titkana Peak and Tatei Ridge, looking out over Robson Glacier towards Resplendent Mountain, with the distinctive Extinguisher Tower in the lower left corner. These same features are also visible from a slightly different angle in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Thomson Collection canvas Mountains in Snow: Rocky Mountain Paintings VII, whose origins are found in the same sketch book. Harris would use these pencil notes created on site while mountaineering to later work up oil on panel sketches, either at his camp or back at his studio. He did exactly that with this pencil drawing, as it is the basis for a 12 x 15 inch oil on panel sketch, numbered 7/42 in the 1936 Doris Mills inventory (noted as located in the studio building in 1936, present whereabouts unknown).

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

All prices are in Canadian Dollars

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