This somewhat unassuming on-site oil sketch by Lawren Harris could, in fact, be considered a key early work in the genesis of Modern painting in Canada. This panel, along with lots 309, 311, and 312 in this sale, was produced in 1908 on Harris’s first Canadian sketching trip in Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains after his time in pre-WW1 Germany. In his then studio space above the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce on the north-west corner of Toronto’s Yonge and Bloor, he used this sketch as the basis for one of his very first major landscape paintings, Deserted Barn, Laurentians. The canvas was exhibited in the 1912 Ontario Society of Artists exhibition alongside The Drive, which was purchased by the National Gallery of Canada, Harris’s first painting to be purchased by a public gallery. In that same studio from another sketch from this 1908 trip, Harris produced another key early work in Canadian Modernism, Laurentian Landscape, 1913 (sold by Heffel in May 2016). From these small, romantic, earth-toned sketches, some of Harris's most essential early breakthroughs emerged, setting the stage for the Group of Seven and their transformative impact on painting in Canada.

The four early Lawren Harris sketches in this sale were once part of the collection of William Allan Manford (1913-2009). Co-founder, CEO, and chairman of the Canadian-based global asset management firm AGF, Manford was considered one of the important collectors of Canadian art of his time. His collection once included masterpieces such as Emily Carr’s Sunlight in the Forest, J.E.H MacDonald’s After Sunset, Georgian Bay, and Arthur Lismer's Bon Echo Rock.