Robert Harris

Robert Harris:

From the Collection

Presented in five large display cases, this exhibition includes oil paintings, drawings, watercolours, and sketchbooks by the eminent Canadian artist Robert Harris (1849-1919). Harris’ sketchbooks contain portrait and landscape studies, travel sketches, notes, caricatures, architectural details, doodles, and imaginings. A selection from the sixty extant sketchbooks provides a visual chronology of Harris’ career while demonstrating the careful observation that informed and underpinned his primary focus on portraiture, from which he earned a comfortable living. Examples of Harris’ genre paintings, so popular in the late 19th century, and his landscapes, are also included to exemplify his range of practice.

Born in Wales, Harris immigrated to Prince Edward Island with his family as a boy of seven and, in 1867 he made his second of ten transatlantic journeys. He was elated by the paintings and architecture he experienced. In Harris’ subsequent notes for a speech to the Charlottetown debating club he wrote, “…there is hardly a place in the world more entirely desirable than a good picture gallery. A picture gallery in a city is a kind of oasis and country of unlimited extent in the middle of the bustle, noise, stench and smoke of a city, something which seems almost to be under a different and a brighter sky.” Clearly, Harris’ art world was international in scope though we do see Island subjects showing up throughout his practice adjacent to images from Canadian and European cities.

Robert Harris: From the Collection is curated by Kevin Rice.

Quoted in Moncrieff Williamson, Robert Harris (1849-1919): An Unconventional Biography (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970) p xiii