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. “We camped at the south end of Maligne Lake on a wide delta of gravel,” Jackson wrote in the January 1925 issue of The Canadian Forum. “Round about were vast piles of crumbling mountains that crowded in the cold green, silt-coloured water of the lake… we decided that mountains have to be roughly handled – big rhythms running across and in, paintings built up architecturally, forms considered as abstract in determining their relationship and the creative faculty given free rein.” While the mountains weren’t to Jackson’s taste, this trip initiated Harris’ lifelong love of the mountains.

Soon after his return to Toronto, Harris began work on a canvas based on this sketch. Maligne Lake, Jasper Park (fig. 1) is dated 1924 and marks a crucial turning point in Harris’ art. In no previous work had he reduced nature to such geometric forms. Severely abstracted clouds echo the forms of the rocks and peaks. Colour is reduced to a restricted palette of grey-greens, browns and off whites. While the foreground rocks provide a sure, if off centre, foothold for the viewer, one is immediately drawn into the vast coldness of the panoramic, “stereoscopic effect.” As one reviewer wrote when the painting was shown in England in 1926, “Maligne Lake … is eerie to a degree, Nature, gaunt and grim, viewing her image in a flawless mirror amid a silence that may be felt.”

The painting is all the more fascinating when compared to the oil sketch painted on the spot. Whereas in the canvas all is clarity and light, in the study forms are diffuse, the lake and mountains are partially obscured by a soft mist, the green reflection at the left creates a bright accent, and the eye focuses on the reflections in the water rather than on the sharp angle of the Samson Narrows where the left and right peaks intersect. While the basic components are already present in the sketch, a radical transformation has taken place between sketch and canvas, a transformation that launched a new direction in Harris’ art.

The canvas was included in the January 1925 exhibition of the Group of Seven. Critics expressed their surprise at this “jangle of angles and triangles in grey-green” and Hector Charlesworth wrote in Saturday Night, “In [Harris’] large canvases … he twists the contours of nature into hard and turgid outlines… Angles and spirals abound as in mechanical drawings; and the rigid outlines enclose untoned masses of crude colour.” Augusts Bridle enthused in the Star Weekly, “[Harris] does not give you a mountain but the platonic idea of a mountain, a mathematical infinite series of mountain impressions, something gigantically pyramidical, if not veridical, a real brainstorm among the mountains.”

That same exhibition included, for the first time, ink drawings by Group members that were also reproduced as photolithographs in a portfolio titled Canadian Drawings by Members of the Group of Seven published by Rous and Mann. Harris’ contributions included a severe ink drawing after the canvas of Maligne Lake. The drawing was purchased by the National Gallery of Canada.

This sketch was one especially chosen by Bess Harris for her collection of exceptional Harris sketches.

Charles C. Hill