Portrait of Miss Georgina Smithers with Her Pet (circa 1904), circa 1904

Private Collection

“The Group of Seven: Revelations and Changing Perspectives”, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, 22 May‒20 September 2010 “Canadian Art: A Child’s World/Art canadien: L’enfant et son univers”, Galerie Eric Klinkhoff, 28 October–11 November 2017, no. 3 “Our Children: Reflections of Childhood in Historical Canadian Art”, Varley Art Gallery, Markham, 13 April–23 June 2019

A painter of the social and political elite in Toronto and Montreal, Robert Harris is considered Canada’s most renowned historical portrait artist. Born in Wales in 1849, Harris grew up on his father’s farm before moving to Prince Edward Island in 1856. He developed an interest in art at a young age, often sketching images he saw in magazines. During a trip to Liverpool in 1867, Harris visited the local museum, where he independently learned anatomy and proportion by sketching from plaster casts. Already working as an artist, he decided to pursue formal artistic instruction in 1873 in Boston, London, and Paris. Harris’ main rise to prominence occurred in 1883, when he was commissioned to produce a painting illustrating the 1864 Quebec conference “Meeting of the Delegates of British North America to Settle the Terms of Confederation”. The resulting canvas, “The Fathers of Confederation”, became very famous but was destroyed during the fire in the Parliament buildings in Ottawa in 1916. This work made Harris the most important portrait artist in Canada, which led to many further commissions. He painted portraits of more than two hundred major figures of his times, including Sir John A. MacDonald and Lord Aberdeen. Here, the artist has depicted Georgina Smithers with her pet dog, likely the child of one of Harris’ Canadian elite clients. Posing in a formal white dress with intricate lace finishings, a brown-haired girl holds a King Charles spaniel in her arms in front of a moody forest landscape. The majority of Harris’ mature career was spent in Montreal. A teacher at the Art Association of Montreal and founding member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1880, he was one of the first advocates for the distinctiveness of Canadian Art. As president of the RCA for thirteen years, Harris took on the mission of promoting young Canadian artists by making sure that they were represented in all the major exhibitions of the time.