Bess Larkin Housser Harris

Heffel Auction House Biography and Notes

In addition to the serene lakes and expansive forests of Northern Ontario, many Toronto artists in the 1920s and 1930s found inspiration in the province’s rural settlements, including places like the mining town of Cobalt, likely the subject of this expressive sketch. Group of Seven members Franklin Carmichael and A.Y. Jackson painted there, and Bess Harris’s close friend Yvonne McKague’s depictions of the town included a celebrated canvas in the National Gallery of Canada. Harris’s own work in this area was the subject of several canvases, and there is much in common between the composition and subject of this sketch, with its receding steep road, raised boardwalk and distinctive houses, and the circa 1928 canvas Day’s End (sold by Heffel fall 2015, lot 110, which set a record for the artist). Details of Harris’s sketching trips in the 1920s are sparse, but it is clear this subject was important to her, as Day’s End was chosen as her contribution to the 1933 inaugural exhibition by the Canadian Group of Painters, of which she was a charter member.