Robert Harris

Artist
Robert Harris
Tyn-y-Groes, Wales, 1849 – Montreal 1919

Title
The Skipper’s Daughter

Date
1908

Materials and dimensions
Oil on canvas
61.4 x 76.7 cm

Credits
Purchase, Donald Luc Boisvert and Gaston Lamontagne Fund

A highly esteemed Canadian portraitist, Harris is particularly famous for his canvas The Fathers of Confederation, which was destroyed in a fire that tore through the Parliament buildings in Ottawa in 1916. It was this commission, in fact, that catapulted his career and established his reputation.

The Skipper’s Daughter represents Harris’s goddaughter, the Canadian painter and member of the Beaver Hall Group, Lilias Torrance Newton, when she was a child. Among the unique aspects of the canvas is its Impressionist features. With its luminosity, small touches of bright colours, pastel hues and fluid brushstrokes, the painting is a distinct departure from the artist’s earlier, more sombre, production.

The painting is composed of three planes: the seated girl in the foreground, a pond with two rowboats in the middleground, and a row of buildings in the background. Dressed in a white dress with white socks and shoes, it is quite possible she was at a wedding when she posed for this portrait.