Lawren Harris

A founder and leading member of the Group of Seven, Lawren Harris is possibly the best-known Canadian artist of all time. His importance was underscored in 2015 when collector Steve Martin curated the retrospective “The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, which traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario in summer 2016. Born in Brantford, Ontario, an heir of the Massey-Harris industrialist family, Harris studied in Berlin before befriending J.E.H. MacDonald in 1911 and eventually founding the Group of Seven. He financed a Toronto studio building where artists could live and work for free and paid for boxcar rail trips to the Algoma region for the group to paint together. His goal was a homegrown Canadian art born of the land; his style matured into a simplified, abstracted treatment of mountains and coasts, with some of his most important works deriving from a two-month Arctic visit in 1930. He focused on abstraction from 1940 until his death in Vancouver in 1970 and is buried at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg. His works repeatedly set auction records for Canadian painting; in 2015 “Mountain and Glacier” sold for $3.9 million. He produced five works with Sampson-Matthews, including “Maligne Lake” (1944) and “Algoma Country” (1947).