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LAWREN STEWART HARRIS MOUNTAIN SKETCH (MOUNTAINS, JASPER) oil on panel signed; also signed and titled on the reverse 10.5 ins x 13.5 ins; 26.7 cms x 34.9 cms PROVENANCE:
Dominion Gallery, Montreal Private Collection, Toronto $80,000–120,000 LITERATURE:
Catharine M. Mastin et al., The Group of Seven in Western Canada, Key Porter Books, Toronto, 2002, pages 38-39, and 44. A.Y. Jackson, “Lawren Harris Autobiographical Sketch” in Lawren Harris: Paintings, 1910-1948 (catalogue), Art Gallery of Toronto, 1948, page 11.
In 1924, Lawren Harris and A.Y. Jackson travelled together to the Rockies. It was the first of five summers Harris would spend painting there that decade; he would return again between 1940 and 1957. Catharine M. Mastin notes that Harris’s mountain paintings “became increasingly abstract, spiritual and less concerned about topographical detail” in contrast to much of Jackson’s Rockies subjects(see lots 12 and 63) which were easily identifiable as actual places. Jackson himself noted that Harris’s works were “based on nature but not at all constrained by reality.” This lot, like many of his mountain pictures, has not been dated by Harris and is simply titled Mountain Sketch, although he does locate it in Jasper. Like other works of this subject and period, the composition follows a consistent format: a viewpoint that emphasizes the height of the mountain, foreground and sky that each occupy one third of the composition and the mountain form dominating the centre: impenentrable, wide-shouldered, full frontal. As Dr. Mastin further notes, unlike the panoramas of the earlier northern Ontario pictures, in the mountain pictures “We are invited to stand at the top of the world, where forms are reduced to abstraction, color to near monochrome and no vegetation remains to block our view of the distances.” Ultimately, she contends, “the mountain art paved the way for his abstractions and is the most striking of his generation. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 19,
2018
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