A grand Lawren Harris oil painting of Lake Superior that hung for many years in a Toronto doctor’s office — a gift after the doctor declined payment for an appendectomy on the Group of Seven artist’s young son — is up for auction Thursday in Toronto, where it is expected to fetch as much as $3 million.
North Shore, Lake Superior, ca. 1927, might even attract the attention of comic actor Steve Martin, probably the best known contemporary Harris connoisseur, who once curated an exhibition of his work.
The painting depicts the view southeast over the shimmering lake toward Detention Island from the Coldwell Peninsula near Marathon, Ont., where Harris often painted on a hill known as “Old Bill.”
“This is prime Harris,” said Liz Edwards, director of Canadian Fine Art at Waddington’s.
It is from the same period and place as Harris’s masterpiece, North Shore, Lake Superior, 1926, which hangs in the National Gallery of Canada, and depicts a tree stump in sunlight and shadow rising like a church steeple against the sky.
Both were produced in the golden age of Canadian landscape painting, which began about a decade previously, after the 1917 death of Tom Thomson. The painters who became the Group of Seven, inspired by Thomson’s pioneering Algonquin scenes with clouds and waves that seem to move with the wind, took railway boxcars in summer up to Ontario’s northland, financed partly by Harris’s family fortune from farm machinery. They produced sketches on small wood panels that were expanded into full canvases back in Toronto, in the famous Studio Building that still stands in Rosedale as a National Historic Site of Canada.
Harris would go on to push further north, beyond Algoma to the North Shore of Lake Superior, returning for several years and producing some of his most famous and recognizable work, focused on what Edwards described as the “openness of space and play of light.” Soon after, Harris shifted his primary attention west to the Rockies.
It was around this time that one of Harris’s sons, understood to be his youngest, Howard, fell ill and was helped by William Edward Gallie, a Toronto physician who removed the boy’s appendix but refused to send a bill.
The story, as reported by the Gallie family, which has owned the painting since Dr. Gallie’s death, was that Harris invited Dr. Gallie and his wife Louise to the Studio Building and offered to make them a canvas based on their choice from Harris’s sketches.
The full canvas, oil on linen about 40 inches by 31 inches, is estimated to sell for between $2 million and $3 million. It never actually hung as intended over the fireplace in Dr. Gallie’s home, because its distinctively stark modern style was not to Louise’s taste. Instead, it hung for many years in Dr. Gallie’s office in the Medical Arts Building at St. George and Bloor Street, until he died in 1959.
It has remained in the family ever since. The auction is online through Waddington’s and closes Thursday night. Brenda Gallie, grand-daughter of William Edward Gallie, is an ophthalmologist at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and expert on retinoblastoma, a cancer of the eye. Some of the proceeds of the sale will go to the International Retinoblastoma Consortium, a non-profit that promotes research and treatment guidelines.
The original small wood panel sketch for this canvas is also in a private collection, and was last auctioned in 2008, when it sold for nearly $700,000.
“The painting that we have is quite faithful to that sketch, but there are slight differences, including the burst of red sumach at bottom,” Edwards said.
The sketch, likewise, is true to the landscape where it was painted, at the easternmost corner of Lake Superior’s North Shore. Stylized as it is, it is plainly recognizable in real life, Edwards said.
There are very few Harris canvases like this in private collections. Most are in museums and galleries. This one is particularly rare for having never been offered for sale. It also has the ineffable charm of having been produced as a reward for saving a child’s life.
“Sometimes when people buy a work at auction they’re also buying the story,” Edwards said.
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