Lawren Harris Mitchell Lake Batchewana | Group of Seven | Algoma Boxcar Trip 1918 | Canadian Wilderness Art | Giclee Canvas

Details

In spring 1918, Lawren Harris stepped off a converted railway boxcar at Batchewana siding, fifty kilometres north of Sault Ste. Marie, carrying his pochade box and a burden of grief that threatened to break him. His brother Howard had been killed overseas. Tom Thomson had drowned the previous summer. The Canadian Army had medically discharged him after a nervous breakdown. His doctor prescribed what seemed an impossible remedy: paint your way back to sanity in the Algoma wilderness.

With Dr. James MacCallum — patron, friend, and co-financier of Toronto's Studio Building — Harris ventured into territory so remote that most lakes appeared on no map. The Algoma Central Railway dropped their converted boxcar at isolated sidings for seven to ten days at a time, leaving the artists alone with four bunks, a wood stove, rudimentary supplies, and an expanse of untamed Canadian Shield stretching in every direction. They carried a handcar for travelling the rails and a canoe for exploring waterways that had never known European names.

Mitchell Lake became one of dozens of Algoma waters the artists christened after people they admired — a practice born of necessity in country where Indigenous names had been forgotten or ignored, and colonial cartography had yet to penetrate. Near Batchewana — its name derived from the Ojibwe *badjiwanung*, "water that bubbles up," referring to the turbulent currents between Batchewana Island and Sand Point — Harris found a landscape that demanded new visual language.

The painting captures spring's tentative arrival in the north. Harris's 1918 Algoma work is characterized by rich, bright colours and decorative compositional motifs — a stark contrast to the austere, spiritualized palette he would later develop on Lake Superior's North Shore. Here, in Mitchell Lake, Batchewanna, Algoma, the artist is still working in a mode influenced by the 1913 Scandinavian art exhibition he and J.E.H. MacDonald had witnessed in Buffalo — bold colour applied in evident, ribbon-like brushstrokes, attention to light, and layered spatial development.

These spring 1918 sketches marked the beginning of Harris's practice of sketching in oil en plein air, a discipline he would maintain throughout his career. Working directly on 10 x 14 inch boards that fit perfectly in his pochade box, Harris could capture fleeting effects of northern light while balancing the board on his knee or propping it against a rock. The oil sketches served as field notes — vivid records of colour, atmosphere, and composition that he would later translate into major canvases in his Toronto studio.

The Algoma trips were Harris's salvation. A.Y. Jackson later claimed, "Without Harris there would have been no Group of Seven. He provided the stimulus; it was he who encouraged us always to take the bolder course, to find new trails." But in spring 1918, Harris was following trails to save himself, painting as therapy, using art to process grief and trauma in a landscape vast enough to absorb both.

The region offered what wounded men desperately needed: solitude without isolation, challenge without combat, beauty without horror. Harris would organize six more boxcar expeditions between 1918 and 1921, financing the trips from his Massey-Harris fortune and inviting fellow artists — MacDonald, Frank Johnston, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer — to join what became legendary painting campaigns. They would travel north to Canyon, sketch for days, then have their boxcar hitched to southbound trains, stopping at Hubert near Montreal Falls and Batchewana before returning to the Sault and eventually Toronto.

The April-May 1919 exhibition "Algoma Sketches and Pictures" at the Art Gallery of Toronto showcased the fruits of these expeditions. Harris exhibited two canvases and forty-six oil sketches, including six identified simply as "Spring 1918" — Mitchell Lake, Batchewanna likely among them. Critics and public alike responded to something unprecedented: Canadian wilderness rendered not as picturesque scenery but as raw, immediate, powerful presence.

Mitchell Lake, with its rugged shoreline and spring-awakened waters, represents a specific moment in Harris's artistic evolution — before the spiritual abstraction, before the mountain mysticism, before the Arctic austerity. This is Harris as recovering soldier, grieving brother, artist learning to see wilderness not as escape but as encounter. The decorative richness of the colour, the attention to surface pattern and texture, the celebration of spring renewal — all speak to a painter finding his way back to life through landscape.

By 1920, these Algoma sketches would coalesce into the visual vocabulary that defined the Group of Seven's first exhibition. The boxcar trips became origin mythology — artists venturing into uncharted territory, living rough, painting fearlessly, forging a distinctly Canadian aesthetic from wilderness experience. Twenty-five Algoma subjects appeared in that inaugural show, establishing the Group's reputation and setting the course for Canadian landscape painting.

Harris would move beyond Algoma by 1921, venturing to Lake Superior's North Shore where he would develop his mature style — simplified forms, limited palette, spiritual intensity. But the Algoma period gave him technical mastery of plein air oil sketching, confidence in bold compositional choices, and proof that wilderness immersion could heal what civilization had broken. The converted boxcar on isolated sidings, the unnamed lakes christened after friends, the spring light on northern water — these became the crucible where Canadian modernism was forged.

Mitchell Lake, Batchewanna stands as testament to art's redemptive power and wilderness's capacity to restore broken spirits. Harris painted his way back from despair in country so remote the lakes had no names, finding in Algoma's unforgiving beauty the strength to become the catalyst for Canada's most important art movement.

**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 decorative brushwork and rich spring palette
✓ 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 created on a converted boxcar in spring 1918 — where Canada's future art movement leader painted his way back from grief in the unnamed lakes of Algoma wilderness.