Sep 17, 2024

Houses, Richmond Street 

A visitor favourite by Lawren S. Harris captures a familiar fall scene in Toronto

By Khadra Ahmed
An image of Lawren S. Harris' painting Houses, Richmond Street. It features a block of town houses in fall. The trees in front of the houses have turned yellow and the leaves are falling to the ground

Lawren S. Harris. Houses, Richmond Street, 1911. Oil on canvas, Overall: 61.1 x 66.6 cm. The Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario. © Family of Lawren S. Harris, Photo: Michael Cullen. AGOID.103941

When you hear the name Lawren S. Harris (1885-1970), you may think of sharp blue and white depictions of the Canadian North. But before this artist’s monumental works of northern landscapes came to be, Harris was enamoured with urban scenes, including this AGO fall-favourite, Houses, Richmond Street (1911). 

Harris was a founding member of the Group of Seven and one of the group’s best-known artists. Heavily regarded for his simplified compositions of Canadian landscape, Harris was first preoccupied with painting urban scenes in Toronto, including detailed cityscapes, streets, and houses. In fact, some of the first paintings Harris showed in Toronto were scenes depicting urban life in The Ward, a former neighborhood in Toronto that was home to many new immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries.  

 On view on Level 2 in the Thomson Collection of Candian Art, Houses, Richmond Street reflects Harris’s early interest in painting street scenes of the older and lower-income parts of the city. The painting captures a string of townhouses on a crisp fall day. The tree canopies have turned yellow, and the leaves have begun to fall, scattering the sidewalk and road with the signature sign of the season. Harris was painting urban scenes like this around the time he met Group of Seven founding member J.E.H. Macdonald. He continued to paint similar subjects in Toronto and other small Ontario towns into the 1920s. 

 As Harris travelled North, he developed his stylized approach of only painting the basic structures underlying lakes, trees, the sky, and mountains. This simplified approach to painting landscapes held symbolic significance to the painter. Viewing art as a bridge between the material world and the spiritual realm, he aimed to portray common truth and eternal unity in his paintings. He once told fellow Canadian artist Emily Carr, “I am in great need of losing my littleness and sharing completely in the life of the universe, in water and skies and land and light.” 

Get in the fall spirit by visiting Lawren S. Harris’s Houses, Richmond Street is on view on Level 2 of the AGO in Gallery 218 of the Thomson Collection of Canadian Art.  

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