Defiant Spirits by Ross King Read Free Book Online Page A

most German of Germany’s painters.” 24
    Much later, Harris would claim that when he returned to Toronto from Germany, “my whole interest was in the Canadian scene. It was, in truth, as though I had never been to Europe. Any paintings, drawings or sketches I saw with a Canadian tang excited me more than anything I had seen in Europe.” 25 To a friend he later wrote that he “forgot the indoor studio-learning of Europe” virtually as soon as he returned to Canadian shores. 26 Years after the fact he would claim that MacDonald’s little display of works in the Arts and Letters Club affected him more than “any paintings I had seen in Europe.” 27
    These were retrospective constructions that greatly overstated the case. Harris was eager, later in his career, to shake the dust of Europe from his shoes, to cover his artistic tracks and present himself as a wholly indigenous talent who was (as his letter put it) “simply dictated to by the environment and life I was born and brought up in.” 28 He would make no public acknowledgement of his debt to the modern styles and movements, or important teachers such as Skarbina, to which his years in Berlin had exposed him.
    But Harris took away from Berlin, when he finished his studies there in 1907, considerably more than his arduously acquired techniques in drawing and painting. He was exposed, in particular, to the contrast between the urban alienation painted by Skarbina and the more sacred life of the countryside, where both a stronger sense of belonging and (as Friedrich had shown) an idea of the supernatural could be discovered and cultivated. His two years in Berlin had also revealed to him the bitter rivalry between the “new, young and forceful” artists—exemplified by Skarbina’s Group of Eleven—and the “lazy and stupid trust in the conventional” that so many young German artists wished to overturn. They were lessons that, acknowledged or not, he would carry forth in the years ahead.
    BY THE END of 1911, when he first met J.E.H. MacDonald, Harris had been back in Toronto for three years. By this time he too was a family man struggling to earn a reputation as a painter. In 1910 he married an heiress named Trixie Phillips (“a nice, gay little thing,” according to a friend). 29 Their son, also named Lawren, was born within the year. Determined to make his way as an artist, he was renting a studio above a grocery store at Yonge and Cumberland.
    Harris went on sketching expeditions to the Laurentians, the Haliburton Highlands and Lac Memphrémagog in Quebec. But his true passion after he returned from Berlin was cityscapes—images of urban poverty of the sort painted by Franz Skarbina. Toronto certainly had plenty of scenes of ugliness and destitution. Residents and visitors alike deplored the unsightly appearance of its poorer neighbourhoods. The lack of parks and the ill-favoured streets and buildings, together with the winter slush and summer dust, made Toronto, according to various observers, “squalid” and “contemptible.” The English-born landscapist F.M. Bell-Smith called it “third-rate” and “quite out of the race of modern cities.” 30
    Bell-Smith, ironically, had done one of the few compelling Toronto cityscapes. Better known as a painter of the Rockies, in 1894 he created his marvellous Lights of a City Street, a snapshot of the rain-slicked and newsboy-clamouring corner of King and Yonge. First shown to high acclaim in 1897, it was purchased by Simpsons and placed on display in the Palm Room of their department store at Queen and Yonge. For the most part, however, Toronto scenes were rare. Visitors to the city’s art exhibitions could feel they had closed the door behind them on their mundane urban world and entered a pleasingly rural wonderland of Muskoka shorelines, English cottages and Quebec sugar camps.
    Harris found artistic