Later in and , Lawren Harris with J. MacDonald financed boxcar trips for the artists of the Group of Seven to the Algoma region. Harris was so passionate about the North Shore and fascinated by the theosophical concept of nature, he returned annually for the next seven years.
There he developed the style he is best known for. Harris paintings in the early s were characterized by rich, decorative colours that were applied thick, in painterly impasto. He painted landscapes around Toronto, Georgian Bay and Algoma. His first trip to the Rockies in soon became annual, too, for the next three years.
In , Harriss landscape paintings became simplified as he sailed with A. Jackson aboard a supply ship. Harris finally left his wife of 24 years, Trixie, and his three children, and married Bess Housser in Harris was threatened with charges of bigamy by Trixies family because of his actions. Later that year he and Bess left their home and moved to the United States. Soon after meeting and becoming friends with J. MacDonald in , they together formed the famous Group of Seven.
He financed the construction of a studio building in Toronto with friend James MacCallum. The studio provided artists with cheap or free space where they worked. In and , Harris financed boxcar trips for the artists of the Group of Seven to the Algoma region, travelling along the Algoma Central Railway and painting in areas such as the Montreal River and Agawa Canyon. While his Algoma and urban paintings of the late s and early s were characterized by rich, bright colours and decorative composition motifs, the discovery of Lake Superior subject material catalyzed a transition to a more austere, simplified style, with limited palettes — often jewel colours with a range of neutral tones.
In , a sketching trip with A. In , Harris went on his last extended sketching trip, travelling to the Arctic aboard the supply ship SS. Beothic for two months, during which time he completed over 50 sketches. They founded the Studio Building, a meeting and working point which enabled the artists to feel like members of a community. They enrolled in the troops fighting in World War I in Harris was never sent out of Ontario, but he went through two tragedies.
In his brother Howard died overseas, and then Thompson drowned or was murdered during a boat excursion on Canoe Lake. These events brought Harris to a mental breakdown. In May he was advised by his doctor to move to the Algoma region to find peace and mental rest.
Soon, Harris fell in love with nature and wrote: " There was a wild richness and clarity of colors in the woods. I became conscious that the spirit of the land has to be discovered through its character. He restarted work and travel in the wilderness.
The sketches that Harris produced in that season caught the eye of Sir Edmund Walker, a financier, and patron who was also president of the Art Gallery of Toronto. Walker exposed some of Harris artworks at the gallery in In May , Harris and his friends again exhibited at the gallery: the Group of Seven was born. The more Harris worked in the North, the more direct, forceful, and original his relationship with nature became. He painted the Algoma country from to , and his technique evolved: trees became bare columns, remote forests turned into simplified masses, the light became more spiritual.
In the autumn of , Harris and A. Jackson decided to travel westwards. Harris was awestruck, discovering Lake Superior Country. That smooth glimmering infinity of waters was like a glimpse of God himself. His Pic Island is a perfect example of his formal terms, where he would express his profound spiritual vision — an austere landscape, in which the natural world has been transformed into a symbol. During the s and s, Harris increased his tendency to reduce forms to their essence: mountains, water, islands, forests, and trees became more and more idealized, and the human presence disappeared entirely from his paintings.
Harris was also an adherent of theosophy, a movement representing a unique blend of Oriental and Western mysticism. Since his first exposure to theosophy, Harris had been attracted by the theosophy's message of "oneness": the necessary interdependence of all things. For theosophists, the only spirit was present in the universe: a life essence manifested in the light of the Sun.
This influenced his art. He was convinced that " art is a realm of life between our mundane world and the world of the spirit, between the infinite diversity of manifested life and the unity or harmony of the spirit, or between the temporal world and the realm of enduring and incorruptible ideation. Harris's North Shore, Lake Superior is the work that best embodies this philosophy.
The artist had a new inspiration during a trip into western Canada, which began in His painting became colder, and the form of the subject even more austere than before: mountains became symbolic hands, turned in prayer towards Heaven, struck by light. Isolation Peak represents a late climax in Harris's struggle to translate his religious ideas into the paint. The subsequent artistic production of Harris was focused on the top of the world: the Arctic.
In , Harris and Jackson sailed to Baffin Island. The icebergs were the last revelation of nature for Harris: they were transfigured into austere and powerful monuments.
The painter pushed his landscape's study to the limit. He was 45 years old, and he faced a moment of truth. In a letter written to a friend, he sensed the ending of an era: " I feel as if my painting days are over. I'm at a crossroads, and I have no vision to know what to do, what road to take. Those abstractions were among the first in Canadian art. Harris settled in Vancouver in and continued to paint until his death in By Maddalena Mongera.
He was born in Brantford, Ontario, and is best known as a member of the Group of Seven who pioneered a distinctly Canadian painting style in the early twentieth century.
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