Lawren Harris Winter Woods 1915 Giclee Print | Group of Seven | Snow I Canvas | Scandinavian Influence | Canadian Winter Art

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**ETSY LISTING TITLE:**
Lawren Harris Winter Woods 1915 Giclee Print | Group of Seven | Snow I Canvas | Scandinavian Influence | Canadian Winter Art

**DESCRIPTION:**

In January 1914, two young Toronto artists stepped off a train in Buffalo, New York, walked into the Albright Art Gallery, and encountered paintings that would alter the course of Canadian art forever. Lawren Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald stood before 165 Scandinavian landscapes — works by Gustaf Fjaestad, Anna Boberg, and other Nordic painters who had transformed their northern forests and frozen waterways into decorative compositions of breathtaking power. MacDonald later recalled the revelation: "Except in minor points, the pictures might all have been Canadian, and we felt, 'This is what we want to do with Canada.'"

Winter Woods, painted in 1915 and originally exhibited as "Snow I," represents Harris's response to that epiphany — his first sustained attempt to create a distinctly Canadian visual language from the decorative principles he discovered in Scandinavian painting. Five years before the Group of Seven would formally organize, Harris was already forging the aesthetic vocabulary that would define Canadian modernism.

The painting emerged from winter expeditions close to home. Harris identified the subjects for this series as having been painted from studies made at York Mills, in the Don Valley, and in the Toronto ravines — wooded areas within tramping distance of his Severn Street studio. These were not remote wilderness landscapes but accessible urban-edge woodlands where a wealthy man could spend an afternoon sketching without venturing far from civilization. Yet Harris transformed these modest locations into something transcendent.

Working in an almost square format — an unusual choice that enhanced the decorative effect — Harris arranged a screen of snow-bound trees across the foreground, their branches heavy with accumulated snow. The composition features sharply focused receding planes with photograph-like illusionism, tranquil hues of pink, mauve and pale blue, and the curving, flowing lines characteristic of Art Nouveau. The brushstrokes are precise and controlled, creating what National Gallery director Eric Brown would describe as work "uniting poetic truth with decoration."

This painting marked a profound shift in Harris's artistic focus. Gone were the urban street scenes, the portraits of impoverished immigrant houses, the social commentary embedded in depictions of Toronto's Ward district. Winter Woods was among Harris's first examples of pure landscape painting since his return from European study — wilderness presented for its own aesthetic and spiritual qualities rather than as backdrop for human drama.

The creative process itself was unusual. Few oil sketches exist that directly relate to these larger decorative canvases. Harris worked primarily in his studio from memory and from preparatory drawings, synthesizing observed details into idealized compositions. In 1947, he informed Art Gallery of Toronto director Martin Baldwin that he had made numerous preparatory drawings for these winter paintings but destroyed them once each canvas was completed — a practice suggesting he viewed the drawings as scaffolding rather than art objects, dispensable once they had served their purpose.

The Swedish painter Gustaf Fjaestad proved particularly influential. His Winter Moonlight and Frozen Trees at Dusk featured snow-laden branches rendered in decorative patterning that resonated deeply with Harris and MacDonald. The resonance between Fjaestad's tapestry-like manner of rendering twigs and Harris's approach in Winter Woods is unmistakable. Both artists distilled northern winter experiences into idealized decorative compositions that transcended mere naturalism.

Yet Harris was painting from distinctly Canadian experience. The "cold crispness of snows" that he loved, the particular quality of winter light filtering through Toronto ravines, the specific weight of Lake Ontario snow on pine boughs — these were not Scandinavian phenomena transplanted but Canadian realities given appropriate visual expression. Harris had found in Scandinavian decorative principles a vocabulary adequate to Canadian wilderness, a way to render northern landscape that honoured both its physical presence and its spiritual resonance.

Between 1914 and 1918, Harris created an extended series of snow paintings that would preoccupy him for five years. Winter Woods — part of this crucial developmental period — shows the artist working through ideas about simplified forms, decorative patterning, spiritual content, and the relationship between observed nature and studio synthesis. These experiments laid groundwork for everything that followed: the Algoma boxcar trips, the Lake Superior masterworks, the mountain mysticism, the Arctic austerity.

The painting arrived during personally difficult years. In March 1916, Harris enlisted in the Canadian Army, serving as a Musketry Instructional Officer at Camp Borden until his 1918 medical discharge following a nervous breakdown. His brother Howard died overseas in 1917. Tom Thomson drowned that same summer. Yet even as personal tragedy mounted, Harris continued developing this decorative winter series, finding in artistic discipline and aesthetic problems something to sustain him through darkness.

Winter Woods now resides in the Art Gallery of Ontario's Thomson Collection, recognized as a pivotal work in the emergence of Canadian modernism. It represents the moment when a wealthy Toronto painter, influenced by Scandinavian exhibition and grounded in close observation of Ontario woodlands, began articulating a visual language that would define how Canadians see their own landscape. The decorative screen of snow-laden trees, the careful colour harmonies, the marriage of observed detail and idealized composition — all would echo through decades of Canadian painting.

This is Harris before the Group of Seven, before the wilderness boxcar adventures, before the spiritual abstractions — but already Harris the visionary, already the artist convinced that Canadian landscape demanded new visual vocabulary, already the painter willing to synthesize international influence with local observation to create something unprecedented.

**WHAT SETS ICHORPRINTS APART:**

✓ Giclee ink pigments ensure 100+ year fade resistance
✓ Colour accuracy that rivals the original masterpiece
✓ Advanced digital reproduction technique captures Harris's precise brushwork and decorative patterning
✓ Investment-grade artwork for serious collectors
✓ All Gallery Mount Prints include Certificate of Reproduction Authenticity and artist biography affixed au verso

**ICHORPRINTS PRODUCT OPTIONS:**

**Gallery Mount** (Image: 12"x16" | Frame Exterior: 19"x23")
- Giclee Fine Art Print on archival paper
- Protected by 16"x20" glass with acrylic glaze
- 2" heavy Snow White Mount with .5" fine white/grey margins
- Choice of Burnished Gold, Bombay Mahogany, or Obsidian Black hardwood frame
- Ready to hang

**Float Frame Canvas** (Canvas: 16"x20" | Frame Exterior: 19"x23")
- Giclee pigment canvas stretched over hardwood
- Set within Obsidian Black float frame
- Creates stunning dimensional depth
- Ready to hang

**Studio Canvas** (16"x20")
- Stretched over premium hardwood bars
- Perfect minimalist presentation
- Ready to hang or custom frame
- Gallery-wrapped edges

**Loft Poster** (Image: 12"x16" | Paper: 16"x20")
- Fine Art Paper with 2" pure white margin
- Perfect for custom framing
- Affordable museum-quality option
- Ready to display

Bring home the painting that bridged Scandinavian influence and Canadian vision — where a Buffalo exhibition sparked the decorative revolution that would define the Group of Seven.