Harvesting, circa 1912-13 by James Kerr-Lawson

Provenance:
Caterina Kerr-Lawson, London
Paul Duval, Toronto
G. Blair Laing Ltd., Toronto
Mr. and Mrs. Jules Loeb, Hull, Quebec
Sotheby’s Canada, auction, Toronto, 8 April 1970, lot 38
Kaspar Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection
Joyner Fine Art, auction, Toronto, 30 May 2006, lot 29
Private Collection

Exhibited:
Possibly “Paintings and Drawings by the late James Kerr-Lawson”, The Heffer Gallery, Cambridge, 27 April‒22 May 1948, lot 10 as “Haymaking in Kent”
Possibly “Exhibition of Paintings by James Kerr-Lawson 1964-1939”, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, England, October 1948, no. 24 as “Haymaking in Kent” at £35
Possibly “Exhibition of Works by J. Kerr-Lawson”, Institut francais d’Écosse, Edinburgh, March 1952, no. 54 as “Haying in Kent” (loaned by Mrs. Kerr-Lawson)
“James Kerr-Lawson: A Canadian Abroad”, Art Gallery of Windsor, travelling to Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph; Art Gallery
of Windsor; Art Gallery of Toronto; Burnaby Art Gallery; Glenbow Museum, Calgary and Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, 12 February 1983‒15 February 1984, no. 48
“Embracing Canada: Landscapes from Krieghoff to the Group of Seven”, Vancouver Art Gallery, travelling to the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Art Gallery of Hamilton, 30 October 2015‒25 September 2016

Literature:
Lawren S. Harris, ‘The Canadian Art Club’, “The Year Book of Canadian Art 1913”, Toronto, 1913, page 214
Robert J. Lamb, “James Kerr-Lawson: A Canadian Abroad”, Windsor, 1983, pages 40, 55, 58-61, reproduced as probably “a Kentish scene”, “circa” 1912‒13
Ian Thom, et al., “Embracing Canada Landscapes from Krieghoff to the Group of Seven”, Vancouver/London, 2015, reproduced page 72, caption page 201, as circa 1890

Born in Scotland in 1862, James Lawson (later Kerr-Lawson, a conflation of his parents’ family names) was brought to Canada with his family as a child. In 1880, after a year at the Ontario School of Art in Toronto, he left to further his education in Italy and Paris, where he met fellow Canadians Robert Harris and William Brymner, returning in 1885 to Ottawa, where his brother worked for the Canadian Geological Survey. At this time he met Homer Watson, with whom he painted in Pittenweem, Scotland during the winters of 1888 -89 and 1889-90. While he continued on occasion to exhibit in Canada, he would from now on pursue his career in England and Scotland, living in London and Florence from 1900. He attained an international reputation for his paintings of Italy, Morocco and Spain, for his etchings and lithographs and portraits, and, from 1903, for his mural decorations.

Kerr-Lawson reconnected with Canada in 1912 when Homer Watson nominated him for membership in Toronto’s Canadian Art Club. He exhibited two oils in the 1913 exhibition, “Boston (Lincolnshire)” and “Winter in Kent”. The scholar Robert Lamb has identified the small painting “Harvesting” as being one of several works Kerr-Lawson painted at Sandwich in Kent in 1913-14. In his article on the Canadian Art Club published in the Arts and Letters Club’s “Year Book of Canadian Art 1913”, Lawren Harris praised Kerr-Lawson’s “felicity of colour. He is exact, almost to the point of being meticulous. But the stuff is there, and his thin pigments are as delicate as a water-colour.” A similar precision and felicity of colour characterizes this luminous painting of men loading hay on a summer day.

We extend our thanks to Charles Hill, Canadian art historian, former Curator of Canadian Art at the National Gallery of Canada and author of “The Group of Seven‒Art for a Nation”, for his assistance in researching this artwork and for contributing the preceding essay.