On small, mostly twelve-by-fifteen-inch beaverboard panels, Harris additionally painted oil sketches. Many times, he also made pencil drawings of the places he visited from different vantage points, and he peppered these eight-by-ten-inch preparatory works on paper, which he referred to as notes, with comments about color, light, and shadow. During his travels, he took black-and-white photographs that became tiny, two-by-four-inch prints. Trained in Berlin, where this scion of a wealthy family studied art for three years at the beginning of the 20th century, Harris arrived at his final compositions of Northern climes after working his way through a number of different stages. Harris’s vision, film buffs will realize, corresponds to the lost kingdoms depicted in the movies Lost Horizon and She from the mid-1930s. Yet there’s also an otherworldly character to these distant sites that’s enhanced by the artist’s unusual palette-blends of ivory, chilly blues, and a range of browns and grays-as well as the way landmasses, bare trees, icebergs, and other geological formations are backlit or bathed in a celestial glow. The desolate, inhospitable nature of Harris’s locales is underscored by the absence of people. HARRIS/COURTESY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON/MCMICHAEL CANADIAN ART COLLECTION, PURCHASE 1975 The paintings at the MFA Boston belong to a continuum of impressive vistas stretching from Frederic Edwin Church’s 1861 The Icebergs to Torben Giehler’s more recent, colorful, and massive mountains. Easel-sized, they feature stylized mountains, lots of snow, reflective lakes and rivers, and expansive skies with dramatic clouds that give William Blake a run for his money. Thirty paintings, resulting from multiple trips Harris made to Lake Superior, the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and the Northwest Passage region of the Arctic Ocean, are on view in the exhibition and date from between 19. Harris is now the subject of a compact, focused survey, “ The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris,” organized by the multi-talented Steve Martin, a Harris aficionado, that is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Born in 1885 in Brantford, Ontario, the sort of place found in short stories by the Nobel Prize-winning writer Alice Munro, this preeminent Canadian artist was a founding member of the modern-minded Group of Seven in 1920 and an active member until it disbanded in the early 1930s. How quickly can you name five Canadian artists? If you had some difficulty, don’t despair. HARRIS/COURTESY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON/HART HOUSE PERMANENT COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, PURCHASED BY THE HART HOUSE ART COMMITTEE WITH INCOME FROM THE HAROLD AND MURRAY WRONG MEMORIAL FUND, 1946 Alan Shestack, ed., Yale University Art Gallery Selections (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 1983).©FAMILY OF LAWREN S.Wyeth and Robgert Louis Stevenson," The Art Bulletin 88, No. Davidson, Frederic Church Winslow Homer and Thomas Moran (New York: Bulfinch Press, 2006), 65, fig.
Cooper et al., Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery, exh. Christie's New York, New York, Christie's Important American Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures, sale cat.John Wilmerding, Maine Sublime: Frederic Edwin Church's Landscapes of Mount Desert and Mount Katahdin (Seattle: The Olana Partnership, 2012), 45, fig.Carl Little (China: Down East Maine, 2013), 31, ill. David Little, Art of Katahdin: The Mountain, the Range, the Region, ed.(North Adams, Mass.: Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015), 51, fig. David Anfam et al., Seen and Imagined: The World of Clifford Ross, eds.Whitcomb, Penobscot East Branch Lands: A Journey Through Time (Portland, Maine: Elliotsville Plantation, Inc., 2016), 28, ill. American Art: Selections from the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 2023), 132–33, no.
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