Arctic Tent, Pangnirtung, Baffin Island

Estate of the artist Lawren P. Harris, Jr. Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, Montreal Sotheby Park Bernet (auction), Toronto, May 27-28, 1980, Lot 48 Private Collection, Toronto

Joan Murray & Robert Fulford, The Beginning of Vision: The Drawings of Lawren S. Harris, Toronto, 1982, page 26 Steve Martin, Cynthia Burlingham and Andrew Hunter, The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris, Toronto/Los Angeles, 2015, pages 83-85

In 1930 Lawren Harris and A.Y. Jackson boarded the Royal Canadian Mounted Police supply ship and ice breaker, the S.S. Beothic, for its 9,000-mile expedition to the remote communities of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. This two-month trip allowed the artists to visit various sites in the Arctic, with a few excursions to sketch on land. For Harris, the Arctic was the epitome of the north. The allure of the landscape provided infinite inspiration. As Cynthia Burlingham notes, “The more than thirty oil sketches and six canvases that he created from this voyage marked a very influential time in his painting career.” While roaming the land on their excursions from the Beothic, Harris brought his sketchbooks to document his environs. The drawings that Harris executed on this trip reflect the artist’s technical process of direct observation, as much as the development of “a more symbolic mode of representation”. Burlingham writes: “Harris’s drawings were central to his process of simplifying nature ‘to its fundamental and purest form’ as they captured elements of an actual place that were later used to create the essence of place.” Harris referred to these pencil drawings as ‘notes’ and would annotate the drawings with details regarding colour, light and form - observations to inform his later compositions. The location of this sketch is Pangnirtung, Baffin Island, which would have been visited within the last third of their trip on the Beothic. The subject that captured Harris’s attention on this excursion was the view of an Inuit tent, constructed of animal skins, tarpaulin and stones. Harris has rendered with broad strokes and shading, the stark beauty of the brutal landscape - the austerity of the tent erected on Baffin Island’s rocky terrain amidst the vastness of the mountains. Harris produced a number of preparatory drawings from this trip that focus on an Inuit tent, all included in what is known as “Sketchbook 7”, while only three oil sketches of an Inuit tent within the landscape were later painted. Joan Murray remarks that “Harris was not preparing these drawings for viewing by the public; he was working his way toward paintings. His drawings take us some distance into the artistic life of Lawren S. Harris. In that way they resemble the diary entries of a writer which later provide the material for novels or poems.” This tent, representing the existence of humanity within the haunting Arctic landscape was significant to Harris. He chose to display the three oil sketches depicting the Inuit tent in the National Gallery of Canada’s 1930 exhibition of he and Jackson’s works from their Arctic voyage. The artworks created from this influential trip marked a turning point for Harris in his career, pointing the way to abstraction. We extend our thanks to Alec Blair, Director & Lead Researcher of the Lawren S. Harris Inventory Project, for his assistance in researching this artwork.