Lawren Harris Snow II 1915 Giclee Canvas Print | Group of Seven Art | Scandinavian Influence | Canadian Decorative Winter Landscape

Details

In January 1914, Lawren Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald stood in Buffalo's Albright Art Gallery before 165 Scandinavian landscape paintings and witnessed revelation. Gustaf Fjaestad's winter canvases — frozen brooks rendered with tapestry-like precision, snow-laden branches transformed into jewelled decoration, every snowflake "an actual bit of jewellery design" rather than "merely a suggestive dab of paint" — showed them what Canadian art could become. MacDonald's response was immediate: "This is what we want to do with Canada."

By 1915, Harris had answered that challenge. Snow II represents his fullest realization of Scandinavian decorative principles applied to Canadian winter landscape — a near-square canvas measuring 120.3 x 127.3 centimetres that the National Gallery of Canada purchased in 1916, recognizing immediately that something revolutionary had arrived in Canadian painting.

The composition arranges a screen of snow-bound evergreen trees across the entire foreground — branches weighted earthward by accumulated snow, creating rhythmic arcs that emphasize the painted surface's two-dimensionality rather than receding naturalistic depth. Behind this decorative screen, the middle ground opens onto snow-covered terrain rendered in tranquil pinks, mauves, and pale blues. The sky glows robin's-egg blue streaked with pale clouds. Every element serves decoration over naturalism, pattern over illusion.

Harris painted Snow II using sharply focused receding planes with photograph-like illusionism combined with Art Nouveau's curving, flowing lines. His brushwork demonstrates the Scandinavian influence directly: short, expressive strokes that capture snow's texture and light without dissolving into impressionist looseness. Each branch, each shadow, each highlight receives precise, controlled attention. The snow itself becomes protagonist — brilliant whites, cool blues, warm pinks and mauves creating chromatic symphony from what lesser painters render as monochrome absence.

This was studio creation, not plein air sketch. Harris identified the subjects of his decorative winter series as derived from studies made at York Mills, in Toronto's Don Valley, and in the city's ravines — accessible urban-edge woodlands within walking distance of downtown. He would observe winter light on snow-laden branches, make preparatory drawings and occasional oil sketches, then return to his studio to distill memory and observation into idealized decorative composition. In 1947, Harris told Art Gallery of Toronto director Martin Baldwin that he had made large numbers of preparatory drawings but destroyed them once paintings were completed, wanting finished works to stand independent of their creation process.

Snow II paired with its companion canvas Winter Woods (Art Gallery of Ontario, Thomson Collection) — first exhibited as Snow I — to establish Harris's decorative winter vocabulary. Both use the almost-square format that enhances decorative effect. Both arrange foreground tree screens that flatten pictorial space. Both employ the visual language Harris absorbed from Fjaestad: snow as jewelled ornament, branches as decorative pattern, winter light as chromatic revelation.

National Gallery director Eric Brown — who authorized Snow II's 1916 purchase — described these paintings as "uniting poetic truth with decoration." That phrase captures Harris's achievement: transcending mere prettiness to create works that convey winter's profound quiet while celebrating its formal beauty. Snow II is not reportage documenting specific location or moment. It is synthesis — distilling countless winter encounters into single vision of northern winter's essential character.

The Buffalo exhibition's impact cannot be overstated. For Harris and MacDonald, Fjaestad's winter landscapes demonstrated that northern landscape required its own visual language distinct from European pastoral tradition. The Scandinavian artists had found voice for their rugged, largely unpopulated terrain through decorative patterning, simplified forms, and chromatic boldness. "We would know our own snows and rivers the better for Fjaestad's revelations," MacDonald wrote years later. Canadian winter — previously considered unpaintable except through imported European techniques — suddenly became subject worthy of dedicated artistic investigation.

Between 1914 and 1918, Harris produced his most concentrated series of decorative winter paintings. In March 1914, he exhibited Morning Sun, Winter — the first canvas showing snow-laden fir trees in Fjaestad's manner. Over the next four years, he explored every variation: trees crowning hills, trees creating foreground screens, trees weeping under snow's weight, trees silhouetted against coloured skies. Snow II represents the series's pinnacle — the moment when influence transformed into independent vision.

The painting documents specific cultural moment: Toronto artists seeking distinctly Canadian artistic vocabulary, finding inspiration in Scandinavian example, applying those lessons to local landscape to create something simultaneously international and rooted in Canadian experience. Harris was not copying Fjaestad. He was translating Fjaestad's methods into Canadian dialect, finding decorative potential in Don Valley ravines and York Mills woodlands that rivalled anything Swedish artists discovered in Värmland's frozen lakes.

This occurred five years before the Group of Seven's official formation. In 1915, Harris was still exploring urban subjects alongside winter landscapes. Tom Thomson was alive, working in his shack behind Harris's Studio Building on Severn Street. The First World War raged in Europe. The modern Canadian art movement existed more as aspiration than achievement. Snow II helped transform aspiration into reality — demonstrating that Canadian subject matter treated with decorative boldness could produce paintings matching European quality while expressing distinctly northern sensibility.

The National Gallery's 1916 purchase — just one year after creation — validated Harris's direction. Institutional recognition came immediately, not posthumously. The painting entered Canada's national collection while its creator was thirty years old and still developing his mature style. That early confidence from the nation's premier art institution confirmed that Harris and his colleagues were creating something unprecedented in Canadian art history.

Snow II influenced subsequent generations. When Group of Seven artists travelled to Algoma, Lake Superior, and the Rockies in the 1920s, they carried lessons learned from this decorative period: simplified forms, bold colour, emphasis on surface pattern, willingness to distill observed landscape into idealized composition. Harris's later mountain paintings and Arctic canvases — stripped to geometric essentials — evolved directly from decorative principles first mastered in paintings like Snow II.

The work demonstrates Harris before theosophy became explicit influence. In 1915, he had not yet formally joined the Toronto Theosophical Society (that occurred in March 1924). The spiritual quality viewers detect in Snow II emerges from subject matter and treatment rather than conscious philosophical programme. Harris found transcendence through attention to natural beauty, through patient observation of light on snow and branches bending under winter's weight. The painting's quiet power derives from artistic vision, not doctrinal intention.

Snow II preserves winter's contradictions: cold rendered warm through pink and mauve tonalities, weight made weightless through decorative patterning, specific location transformed into universal winter archetype. This is Canadian winter distilled — not particular storm or specific woodland but the essence of what northern winter means: brilliant light, profound quiet, landscape simplified to essential forms under snow's transforming blanket.

The painting stands as testament to productive artistic exchange across continents. Scandinavian artists showed Canadian painters new possibilities. Canadian artists absorbed those lessons, applied them to their own landscape, and created distinctly Canadian visual language that would define national artistic identity for generations. Snow II embodies that transformative moment — Swedish influence meeting Canadian subject matter to produce something belonging fully to neither tradition yet honoring both.

This is Harris discovering his power as decorative painter — finding beauty in pattern, celebrating surface design, transforming naturalistic subject into ornamental composition without sacrificing emotional resonance or spiritual depth. This is the painting that announced Canadian winter landscape could sustain ambitious artistic treatment, could bear comparison with European achievement, could express national character through visual means.

**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, controlled brushwork and decorative snow effects
✓ 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 transformed Canadian art — where Scandinavian inspiration met Canadian winter to create decorative masterpiece so revolutionary the National Gallery purchased it within one year of its creation.