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grey suit—flannel in summer, tweed in winter—he looked, a friend later wrote, “like a Bay Street stockbroker.” 2 He had a neat moustache, crisp manner and fastidious dislike of clutter. A photograph taken in his mid-thirties would show him punctiliously adding paint to a canvas while wearing three-piece salt-and-pepper tweeds.
    The patrician manner was genuine. Harris’s grandfather Alanson had founded a wealthy Brantford dynasty whose fortune came from the “Brantford Light Binder,” a horse-drawn reaper that competed with Daniel Massey’s “Toronto Light Binder” until the two firms merged in 1891 to form Massey-Harris, Canada’s largest corporation. A year later Harris’s father died of Bright’s disease, and as the eldest of two brothers, Lawren might have been expected to join the family business. But he had little interest in farm implements. After studying at St. Andrew’s College, a newly opened boys’ school in Rosedale, he enrolled in 1903 at the University of Toronto. His mathematics professor persuaded his mother that the young man was better suited to studying art.
    Aspiring young Canadian artists usually set sail for Paris. One Canadian, arriving in Paris in the mid-1890s, discovered “quite a colony of Canadian art students.” 3 Harris, though, went to Berlin. The choice was based less on artistic than on domestic motives, because his thirty-year-old uncle, Dr. William Kilborne Stewart, a Harvard PhD and German instructor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, was pursuing post-doctoral studies there. Arriving in Berlin in 1905, Harris enrolled in private lessons with three different teachers. One of them, Franz Skarbina, was among the city’s most prominent painters.
    For the twenty-year-old Harris, Berlin was a wholly new experience. He would later describe the Ontario of his youth as a place where the people were “submerged in the severest orthodoxy, divided and blinded and sustained by sectarian views, comfortably warped by provincialism and remote from all cultural centres.” 4 Religion certainly ran in the Harris family. His maternal grandfather had been a Presbyterian minister, and his paternal great-grandfather, “Elder John,” a circuit-riding preacher commemorated by a stained glass window in the Baptist church in Boston, Ontario. His uncle Elmore Harris, a premillennialist, served as pastor of the Walmer Road Baptist Church in Toronto and as president of the Toronto Bible Training School. An uncle by marriage was minister of the Bloor Street Presbyterian Church. Harris himself had been raised a Baptist, attending church three times a day on Sunday.
    Berlin exposed the young Harris to a world very different from this claustrophobic provincialism. In 1905 it had a population of more than 2 million; in Europe, only London and Paris were larger. An English visitor described it as the “chief pleasure town of Germany and the great centre for wealthy persons in search of amusement and dissipation.” 5 Whereas Toronto still did not have a single art museum, for a young student in Berlin an enormous range of paintings from every European school could be seen in large art museums such as the Altes Museum, the Neues Museum, the Nationalgalerie and the newly opened (in 1904) Kaiser Friedrich Museum. There was also the Great Berlin Art Exhibition, held each summer at a large exhibition hall in which thousands of paintings and pieces of sculpture went on show. The city was teeming with other art students, with the Royal Art School and the Berlin Academy of Arts turning out rigorously trained young painters.
    PIONEERING MOVEMENTS WERE well under way in the German art world by the time Lawren Harris arrived in Berlin in 1905. The previous decade had been a period of rapid intellectual and technological innovation. Radical new proofs were emerging about the nature of both the self and the visible world. The realm of