Light for a Cold Land: Lawren Harris's World and Life-An Interpretation

Patricia Morley is professor emeritus of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University and the author of Margaret Laurence: The Long
Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

This impressive study traces its origins to the author’s doctoral
thesis on the landscape paintings of Lawren Harris. Larisey argues that
Harris acquired almost all of his landscape forms from German traditions
and transformed them in his early Canadian landscapes. From the 1930s,
he borrowed details and forms from illustrated theosophical books. Like
his post-impressionist heroes—Cézanne, van Gogh, and Gauguin—he
opposed the materialism underlying Western culture. These international
links, Larisey maintains, were a “nourishing” affirmation of human
interdependence.

This book contains 71 full-page colored plates, and a great many
black-and-white photographs of Harris’s work. The
critic/historian/biographer takes us through his subject’s childhood
in southwestern Ontario, through the formation of the Group of Seven,
and through Harris’s later years as a painter of abstractions and a
maverick in Vancouver.

Light for a Cold Land is a rare hybrid—a beautiful book of art-images
and a philosophical biography. Readers may not always find themselves in
agreement with Larisey’s interpretations, but his achievement here
will not easily be matched.