Tom Thomson’s oil sketches were almost all painted in front of the motif and worked up into canvases during the winter in Toronto. The change of scale between the small sketch and large canvas posed new challenges and as sketches fed his canvases, the painting of the canvases also brought...

Emily Carr was one of Canada’s most innovative artists of the first half of the twentieth century. After periods of study in San Francisco, England and France, in 1912 Carr made a major trip to Alert Bay, the Skeena River and Haida Gwaii visiting Kwakwaka’wakw, Gitxsan and Haida villages. The...

In spite of his all too brief career (approximately five years), Tom Thomson’s paintings left an indelible mark on Canadian art of the first half of the twentieth century. The remarkable history of his life and early death and the myths that developed around him inspired a whole generation of...

The lovely pink house and leaning tree in the foreground frame the barns and sheds and the yellow and white houses on the left. The muddy road, still surrounded by the receding snow, is highlighted with pools of blue water. In the distance a wayside cross overlooks the distant white...

Unpublished and not seen in public since acquired from Carr by Dr. Max Stern of the Dominion Gallery in August 1944, Totems, Tanoo is in exceptional condition, its colour and vivacity as fresh as the day Carr painted it. Emily Carr 1871-1945, Totems, Tanoo 1912, watercolour on paper 29 ½...

In 1924 Lawren Harris and A.Y. Jackson spent August and early September sketching in Jasper Park in the Rocky Mountains. They first walked from Jasper Lodge to Maligne Lake. By horse they went on to the Colin Range, before hiking over the Shovel Pass to the Athabaska and Tonquin valleys....

In the fall of 1921 Lawren Harris and A.Y. Jackson painted in Algoma then travelled on to Rossport on the north shore of Lake Superior. In the autumns of 1922 and 1923 the two artists returned to Lake Superior, painting at Port Coldwell in 1922 and at Port Munro and...

As Rocks and Hill Rock and Hill may depict the same hillock as Morning Sun over Hill, Lake Superior , though here the light is clear, the foreground rocks more assertive and the lighter colours are darkly outlined asserting their sculptural form. The naked trunks reach up to the top...

When Lawren Harris returned to Toronto in 1908 following his studies in Germany, he painted the streets of the older areas of the city in an increasingly impressionist palette as well as landscapes of northern Ontario and the Laurentians. In January 1914, he and J.E.H. MacDonald travelled to Buffalo, New...

In May 1918, following his discharge from the army, Lawren Harris travelled to Manitoulin Island and up the Algoma Central Railway with Dr. James MacCallum, co-financier of the Studio Building. They returned to Algoma in the fall of 1918 with Frank Johnston and J.E.H. MacDonald and, in the fall of...

Harris painted in Algoma every year from 1918 to 1921, new travelling arrangements being made in 1919. 'The Algoma Central converted an old box-car into suitable living quarters, put in a few windows, four bunks, a stove, water tanks, sink, cupboard, two benches, and a table. We carried a one-man...

From correspondence, we know Harris painted around Banff in 1926 and around Lake Louise in 1928, yet there is little contemporary documentation about Harris’ trips to the Rockies after 1924. Nonetheless, it is clear from the volume of mountain paintings he exhibited in the late twenties that he frequently returned...

The first subjects Lawren Harris painted following his return from Germany in 1908 were street scenes in the older areas of Toronto. Harris explained that in his painting of Georgian houses, A Row of Houses, Wellington Street of 1910, “the endeavor was to depict the clear, hard sunlight of a...

LAWREN S. HARRIS, C.C., LL.D. (1885-1970) Sun, Fog and Ice, Smith Sound (Arctic Painting IV) , 1931 Oil on canvas 40 x 50 in. (101.6 x 127 cm.) Inscriptions: verso: top stretcher bar: in ink, by artist, “SUN, FOG AND ICE / SMITH 3865SOUND” / LAWREN HARRIS / 25...

It is not clear which of the two canvases, both identical in size, was shown in the April 1930 Group of Seven exhibition as Mountains, Moraine Lake, Alberta but they differ considerably. In both canvases the mountains, identified by Lisa Christensen, author of A Hiker’s Guide to the Rocky Mountain...

Tom Thomson and the future members of the Group of Seven were the most influential artists working in Canada in the first decades of the twentieth century. Their bold experimentation and engagement with Canada’s many landscapes were the tools to foster a uniquely Canadian art that would, in turn, further...