Study for “Lake, North Labrador”, 1930

The Yaneff Gallery, Toronto Private Collection, Vancouver

Jeremy Adamson, “Lawren S. Harris: Urban Scenes and Wilderness Landscapes 1906-1930”, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1978, page 190 Steve Martin, Cynthia Burlingham and Andrew Hunter, “The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris”, Toronto/Los Angeles, 2015, page 92

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.” The north country always had a magnetic attraction for Harris. 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”. Harris utilized these drawings to sharpen and perfect the final compositions, adding and removing elements, adjusting colour and tonality. This study in pencil for the completed canvas, “Lake, North Labrador” was inspired by the last leg of their journey - when the Beothic began her return to Sydney through the straits and proceeded southward along the Labrador coast. Harris recorded various notations in this sketch of the distant mountains and shorelines surrounding the polar sea. “In effect, the whole setting is the essential symbol,” states Jeremy Adamson, “It was the epicentre of the ‘spiritual replenishment’ of the North as he conceived it. He had reached the top of the continent, the very source of the cosmic ‘flow’ and the locus of the soul’s ‘simple vision of high things.’” This Arctic excursion of 1930 was Harris’s last trip to the north, signifying a turning point in his career towards the realm of pure form. We extend our thanks to Alec Blair, Director & Lead Researcher of the “Lawren S. Harris Inventory Project”, for his assistance in researching this artwork.