Lawren Stewart Harris LL. D. (October 23, 1885 – January 29, 1970) was a Canadian painter, best known as one of the founding members of the Group of Seven. He played a key role as a catalyst in Canadian art, as a visionary in Canadian landscape art and in the development of modern art in Canada.
Harris was born on October 23, 1885, in Brantford, Ontario. He was the son of Thomas Morgan Harris and Annabelle Stewart. His father was secretary to the firm of A. Harris, Sons & Company Ltd., merchants of farm machinery, which merged with the Massey firm in 1891, forming the Massey-Harris Company, later known as Massey Ferguson. Lawren Harris's share of the fortune that resulted made him free from financial cares the rest of his life. Although born to wealth, he was an individual who made his own path in his own individual way. In 1894, his father died and the family moved to Toronto. In 1899, he began to board at St. Andrew's College, which was located in Rosedale in Toronto at the time, then in 1903 attended University College at the University of Toronto.
From 1904 to 1908, he studied in Berlin under Adolf Schlabitz, Franz Skarbina, and most likely Fritz von Wille, gaining an academic foundation similar to that which was offered by the Paris academies. Harris stayed in Berlin for three years, learning about Impressionism and Post-Impressionism as well as seeing exhibitions of German and European modern art. Among these exhibitions were several of the Berlin Secession and a comprehensive review of 19th century German art. In 1908, he travelled to Austria, Italy, France, and England before returning to Toronto. He brought back an influence not only from his teachers but from the Secessionist movement he had encountered in Berlin. Through his reading and teachers, he may also have learned about Theosophy.
In Toronto, to which he returned in 1908, Harris found friends through the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto which he joined in 1909, making friends with journalist Roy Mitchell, another early member. In 1910, he became interested in philosophy and Eastern thought, likely through Mitchell, and began discussing Theosophy seriously (although it was not until 1924 that he formally joined the Toronto Lodge of the International Theosophical Society). From 1910 to 1918, he focused in his painting on the urban landscape of Toronto, featuring a significantly brightened palette, an attention to light, and a layered development of space in order to convey a sense of place. In 1911, he met and became friends with J. E. H. MacDonald who was exhibiting sketches in the clubroom of the Club. Harris and MacDonald went on sketching trips and together visited the exhibition of contemporary Scandinavian art in Buffalo at the Albright Gallery (today, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum) in 1913. Seeing it, they realized that they too could create a landscape art that was distinctly Canadian and modern.
In 1913, Harris took the first step that would cement a group of like minded artists together in Canadian art, by inviting A. Y. Jackson, then in Montreal, to Toronto. The following year, he and his friend Dr. James MacCallum, financed the construction of a Studio Building in Toronto which provided artists, among them Tom Thomson, with an inexpensive space to work. In 1915, Harris fixed up a shack behind the Studio Building for Thomson whose art and dedication to his career proved inspirational for Harris.
In March 1916, Harris enlisted in the Canadian Army for service in the First World War. He was appointed a Lieutenant attached to the 10th Royal Grenadiers and served as a Musketry Instructional Officer at Camp Borden until May 1918 when he was medically discharged, suffering a nervous breakdown.
In 1918 and 1919, Harris financed boxcar trips for the artists of the later Group of Seven to the Algoma region, traveling along the Algoma Central Railway and painting in areas such as the Montreal River and Agawa Canyon. His work showed the effect of such trips: he began sketching in oil en plein air as a regular practice and used the sketches as a guide in constructing his major canvases.
Formation of the group in 1920
In May 1920, Harris, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Franklin Carmichael, A. Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, and Frederick Varley, formed the Group of Seven.
In the fall of 1921, Harris in the company of Jackson ventured beyond Algoma to Lake Superior's North Shore, where he would return annually for the next seven years. They took the Algoma Central Railway north to Franz, where they caught the Canadian Pacific train travelling west.
Harris would return to paint and draw on the north shore of Lake Superior almost every October until 1928. While his urban and Algoma paintings of the late 1910s and early 1920s were characterized by rich, bright colours and decorative compositional motifs, the discovery of Lake Superior as a source of subject material meant the depiction of features of the landscape in light over a vast body of water to compose a "sublime order", as described by Jackson. Harris conveyed the spiritual side to the scene through a more austere, stylized style, with a limited palette.
In 1924, a sketching trip with Jackson to Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rockies marked the beginning of Harris' mountain subjects, which he continued to explore with annual sketching trips until 1929, exploring areas around Banff National Park, Yoho National Park and Mount Robson Provincial Park.
In 1930, Harris went on his last extended sketching trip, travelling to Greenland, the Canadian Arctic and Labrador aboard the Royal Canadian Mounted Police supply ship and ice breaker, the SS. Beothic, for two months, during which time he completed over 50 sketches. The resulting Arctic canvases that he developed from the oil panels marked the end of his landscape period.
Harris's artistic career was one of constant exploration. He was the only member of the Group of Seven to align himself with European and American forms of Modernism. He always had been deeply interested in developments in modern art. In 1926, he represented Canada in the International Exhibition of Modern Art organized by the Société Anonyme (of which he was a member) and shown at the Brooklyn Museum in New York: he helped bring the show to Toronto in 1927. In 1934, he painted his first abstract pictures, which depended partly on his desire to express ideas of the spirit, partly on his earlier landscapes of Lake Superior, the Rocky Mountains and the Arctic. In these years, he moved to Hanover, New Hampshire in 1934, then Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1938 and finally, Vancouver in 1940. After a period of experimentation, from 1936 on, Harris enthusiastically embraced abstract painting.
When asked in 1937 by Emily Carr to describe his recent work, Harris wrote: Well, they are all different and yet alike—some more abstract than others—some verging on the representational—one never knows where the specific work in hand will lead. I try always to keep away from the representational however—for it seems the further I can keep away and into abstract idiom the more expressive the things become—yet one has in mind and heart the informing spirit of great Nature.
In time, he left all reference to landscape behind, and his work underwent changes towards a more organic form. He wrote about the path an abstract artist took from representation to abstraction to become fully abstract in an Essay on Abstract Painting published in 1949. In the 1950s, he painted his version of abstract expressionism. In 1954, in a separate publication that developed from his earlier essay on abstraction, he praised abstraction, writing:
...(in abstract art), we have a creative adventure in harmony with the highest aspiration and search for truth, beauty and expressive evocation and communication in our own day".
Memberships in art organizations