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Unusual Lawren Harris painting showing in Nova Scotia to mark William Davis centenary
An unusual Canadian painting has made a sentimental journey to Cape Breton this spring, 100 years after the dramatic events that inspired it.
Miners' Houses, Glace Bay, painted by Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris during the bitter 1925 miners' strike, is showing at the Eltuek Arts Centre, an artist-run cultural centre and gallery in Sydney, N.S., down the road from the mines.
The painting is important to both Nova Scotia labour history and Canadian art history. It represents the last time Harris, renowned for his northern landscapes, painted an urban industrial scene.
The Sydney exhibition is timed to the centenary of Davis Day, Nova Scotia's commemoration of miners who have died on the job. The day, marked annually on June 11 since 1925, is named for William Davis, a Cape Breton miner shot by company police during the strike.
Miners' Houses has never before been shown in Cape Breton, but was exhibited in Halifax in 2004. It is now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, which has lent it to the Eltuek for the occasion.
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When Harris visited Nova Scotia that spring, as part of relief efforts for the strikers organized as far away as Toronto, the miners had dug in, 'standing the gaff,' after the management of the British Imperial Steel Corporation threatened them with starvation.
The artist had visited Nova Scotia in 1921 and been appalled by the poverty he saw in Halifax, where he had painted two views of wood-frame tenements. In 1925, he was equally shocked by the miners' working and living conditions in Glace Bay, and published an uncharacteristically illustrative drawing of an emaciated miner's wife and her children in Canadian Forum that summer.
Strikes were rampant in the 1920s in the Cape Breton coalfields. Poorly paid for dangerous work, the unionized miners were captives of an employer who owned their houses and the local store. Davis's death occurred during a riot at Waterford Lake, where the striking workers had at one point seized the power plant that controlled the pumps that kept the mines from flooding.
When the company retook the plant on June 11, it cut off the miners' electricity and water in retaliation. The miners marched to the power plant demanding the restoration of the utilities, and were met by company police on horseback who shot into the crowd, killing Davis.
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His death became a rallying cry for better working conditions in Nova Scotia, and miners traditionally never worked on June 11 ever after. The last underground mine closed in 2001, and the province recognized the commemoration day officially in 2008.
Harris had left Nova Scotia by the time of the riot, and though it would be tempting to say his painting is returning home, it is unclear whether he started the work in Glace Bay or, more likely, just sketched there and completed the painting in his Toronto studio.
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More abstracted than the Halifax tenements of 1921, the work comes from a period when Harris had all but ceased painting urban scenes. It presents a dour, rugged and geometricized view of the miners' housing. No people are in sight, but the houses stand in a row like a line of oppressed workers. They have also been compared to coffins. Only a ray of sunshine appearing in a small gap in moody clouds gives any sense of hope.
Earlier in his career, Harris had often painted pleasant Ontario street scenes and also the slums of The Ward in Toronto, but by this point he had already travelled to Lake Superior and was increasingly only interested in the drama of landscapes. Miners' Houses, his final industrial scene, was also one of the last times he painted houses of any kind as he moved west and concentrated on views of the Rockies and the Arctic.
The painting is being shown at the Eltuek Arts Centre until June 28 – alongside a billy club found in the woods after the 1925 strike.
