부산대학교 도서관

(b Brantford, Ont., Oct 23, 1885; d Vancouver, Jan 29, 1970). Canadian painter. He attended the University of Toronto in 1903 and then studied art in Berlin from 1904 to 1907. He returned to Toronto in 1908 and sketched in the ‘Ward’, a slum section of the city. Harris’s early masterpiece, Houses, Richmond Street (1911; Toronto, A. & Lett. Club), with its flat perspective and bright colours, is characteristic of his decorative treatment of urban scenes before 1920. In 1908 Harris was a founder-member of the influential Arts & Letters Club in Toronto and in 1911 he was elected to the Ontario Society of Artists. Artistic taste in Toronto generally was provincial and conservative, dependent on British and European academic models; dissatisfied with this, Harris became a leading figure in creating and promoting a distinctly Canadian landscape art. Independently wealthy, he underwrote in 1913 the construction costs for the Toronto Studio Building, a home for the small group of painters who shared his vision of a vigorous national art rooted in the portrayal of the northern wilderness. In the same year Harris and J. E. H. MacDonald visited an exhibition of contemporary Scandinavian painting at the Albright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY. Both were deeply impressed by examples of the northern Symbolist landscape tradition that evoked the experience of a wilderness setting similar to that of Canada. Harris’s immediate response was a series of decorative compositions of snow-laden fir trees (...