Lawren Harris was born in Brantford, Ontario, to a wealthy family - The Harrises of the Massey-Harris industrial fortune. He took up painting at an early age and studied in Germany from 1904 to 1907. He worked briefly with Norman Duncan, illustrating several of Duncan's stories, but Harris was in fact the only member of the Group of Seven who was free all his life from monetary pressures and temptations of commercial art and advertising designs. Harris is also the only member of the Group who kept pushing his painting, never resting for long with one style or one species of subject matter. Long after the Group disbanded, Harris continued to grow and change as a painter, moving eventually into art deco and pure abstraction. He was also a talented ceramicist, and in 1922 he published a volume of poems. His affection for Scandinavian landscape painting was one of the key factors in the formulation of the Group of Seven's approach to the Ontario woods, which Harris himself painted with gusto and attention. It was Harris who led the way toward painting the high Arctic, the Rocky Mountains, Gaspe and other unique and powerful parts of the Canadian earth.