Literature
Paul Duval, “Lawren Harris: Where the Universe Sings”, Toronto, 2011, page 26
Jeremy Adamson, “Urban Scenes and Wilderness Landscapes, 1906-1930”, Toronto, 1978, page 25
In 1910 Lawren Harris returned to Toronto after completing his artistic training in Berlin and travelling in the Middle East. His first studio was located above Giles grocery store, north of Bloor and Yonge Streets. He now saw his hometown with a new perspective. His colourful “house portraits” were considered out of the ordinary and even controversial at the time. Paul Duval writes that “[Harris] had been fascinated with drawing houses since his teenage years when he first showed an interest in becoming an artist. “I suppose I just liked the shapes, the architecture of different houses and their colour,” Harris later recalled of his early fascination with the subject.
From 1910 to 1918, Harris painted the buildings and streets of Toronto. In 1913, an exhibition of modern Scandinavian painting at the Albright Gallery in Buffalo had a profound effect upon him, due to its bold expression of the raw northern landscape. After this, the artist began to broaden his subject matter to include the landscape that surrounded the urban and suburban houses. The early 1920s, arguably the most important years of Harris’ career, brought much critical success and changes to his artistic output.
Author Jeremy Adamson remarked that in the period from 1919 to 1921, Harris exhibited more house paintings than any other theme. In the 1925 Rous & Mann portfolio, Canadian Drawings by Members of the Group of Seven, two of the four images by Harris were of Toronto street scenes, indicating the importance of this imagery to the artist. His depictions of houses and urban scenes continued alongside his landscape paintings during this key period in the early 1920s as well as intermittently throughout the next two decades. Harris painted urban scenes in locations such as Hamilton, Grimsby Park, Glace Bay, Halifax, and in this case, Barrie.
In 1924’s “Red House, Barrie”, a large pine tree, weighed heavily by glistening snow, occupies the foreground and partially covers a red house. Only glimpses of the foliage is visible on the boughs, which cast blue shadows onto the house and snow-covered ground. This gouache by Harris possesses strong aspects of Harris’ continued stylization of the Canadian wilderness toward his eventual arrival in abstraction. The trees in the centre and background are blanketed in heavy snow, creating sinuous cloud-like forms in blue and white. “Red House, Barrie” also embodies the artist’s fascination with light’s effect on colour and his experimentation with colour scheme. Contrasting with the palette of blue and white snow, the bright red facade and yellow trim of the house exemplify Harris’ use of bold colour that was not traditionally witnessed in earlier palettes of Canadian painting.
The process that Harris and his Group of Seven colleagues developed was to paint or draw en plein air and later develop the preliminary work into a canvas. “Red House, Barrie” is a preparatory work for a major 1924 canvas entitled “Pine Tree, Red House, Winter, City Painting II”. There are only minor differences between the gouache and the oil version: Harris added one pine bough to the tree and changed the colour of the house trim from yellow to mint green.
