Lawren Stewart Harris 1885 - 1970

Catalogue of Arctic Sketches by A.Y. Jackson and Lawren Harris, National Gallery of Canada, 1930, no. 8

Lawren Harris, Paintings 1910-1948, Toronto/Ottawa, October, 1948, no. 134

In 1930, with A. Y. Jackson as a companion, Harris boarded the ice breaker and supply ship S.S. Beothic in Quebec City for its summer run to the remote communities in the high Arctic. The north, both as a place (Algonquin Park, Georgian Bay, Algoma, the north shore of Lake Superior, the Rockies) and as a concept (as an idea with a special spiritual dimension) had always held an allure for Harris. Jackson had already trekked into the lower reaches of the North West Territories with Frederick Banting two years earlier, and was eager to plow on further toward the North Pole.

The first stop along the way, and the second painting Harris did on the trip, was at Pangnirtung. The subject that seized his attention was this view of an Inuit tent, a construct of tarpaulin, animal skins, and stones erected on Baffin Island's rocky terrain. Harris has captured the brutal beauty of the place with his almost anthropomorphic fingers of stone, the foreground walrus-like shapes along the shore, and set them against the great hump of rock that towers above and behind the campsite. One gets an immediate sense of the vastness there, of its treeless austerity and forbidding aspect, and of its tenuous welcome to living things.

This is a painter's painting, one that relies as much or more on its aesthetic qualities than its subject matter. Harris himself liked it so much that he chose it for the exhibition of his and Jackson's work from this trip that was mounted at the National Gallery of Canada upon their return in the fall. This painting also pointed the way to Harris's future because this trip and its paintings were a turning point in his career. After his return to Toronto and after a two-year hiatus, after the disbanding of the Group of Seven, and after his divorce and second marriage, and his move to the United States because of the scandal this caused, Harris turned to abstraction – a mode in which he continued to produce some of the most powerful paintings of his entire career.