23 Facts About Lawren Harris

Lawren Harris played a key role as a catalyst in Canadian art and as a visionary in Canadian landscape art.

Lawren Stewart Harris was born on October 23,1885 in Brantford, Ontario.

Lawren Harris was the son of Thomas Morgan Harris and Annabelle Stewart.

Lawren Harris stayed in Berlin for three years, learning about Impressionism and Post-Impressionism as well as seeing exhibitions of German and European modern art.

Lawren Harris brought back an influence not only from his teachers but from the Secessionist movement he had encountered in Berlin.

In Toronto, to which he returned in 1908, Lawren Harris found friends through the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto which he joined in 1909, making friends with journalist Roy Mitchell, another early member.

In 1915, Lawren Harris fixed up a shack behind the Studio Building for Thomson whose art and dedication to his career proved inspirational for Lawren Harris.

In 1918 and 1919, Lawren Harris financed boxcar trips for the artists of the later Group of Seven to the Algoma region, traveling along the Algoma Central Railway and painting in areas such as the Montreal River and Agawa Canyon.

Lawren Harris's work showed the effect of such trips: he began sketching in oil en plein air as a regular practice and used the sketches as a guide in constructing his major canvases.

Lawren Harris conveyed the spiritual side to the scene through a more austere, simplified style, with a limited palette.

In 1930, Lawren Harris went on his last extended sketching trip, travelling to Greenland, the Canadian Arctic and Labrador aboard the Royal Canadian Mounted Police supply ship and ice breaker, the SS.

Lawren Harris was the only member of the Group of Seven to align himself with European and American forms of Modernism.

Lawren Harris always had been deeply interested in developments in modern art.

Lawren Harris wrote about the path an abstract artist took from representation to abstraction to become fully abstract in an Essay on Abstract Painting published in 1949.

In 1946, Lawren Harris was awarded an honorary degree from the University of British Columbia.

Lawren Harris has been designated as an Historic Person in the Directory of Federal Heritage Designations.

The couple had three children: Lawren P Harris, Margaret Anne Harris, and Howard K Harris, all born in the first decade of their marriage.

Lawren Harris eventually left his wife of 24 years, Trixie, and his three children, and married Bess Housser in 1934.

Lawren Harris was threatened with charges of bigamy by Trixie's family because of his actions.

In 2015, a travelling exhibition of Harris' work, The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris, curated by Steve Martin, opened at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California.

In 2005, Lawren Harris's painting, Algoma Hill, was sold at a Sotheby's auction for $1.38 million.

On May 23,2007, Pine Tree and Red House, Winter, City Painting II by Lawren Harris came up for auction by Heffel Gallery in Vancouver, BC.

In May 2010, Lawren Harris's painting, Bylot Island I, sold for $2.8 million at a Heffel Gallery auction in Vancouver, British Columbia.