Owner: My grandfather had it, it was actually my step-grandmother’s, and she passed it on to my father after… but we don’t really know anything about it.

Erik Peters: It’s a wonderful little portrait by Robert Harris. Robert Harris, as you may be aware, was probably one of the preeminent portrait painters in Canada in the Nineteenth Century. He’s most well known for a painting called The Fathers of Confederation, which was a great, huge painting and unfortunately the painting was burned. And he was asked, actually, to do another copy of it but his eyesight was failing and he, you know, declined. He lived in Eastern Canada, Charlottetown. To look at this, there’s some wonderful, wonderful gradations in the texture of the skin, the lighting of the skin. He was formally trained and he brought the Nineteenth Century sensitivities in portraiture to the Twentieth Century as did a lot of the British artists who came to Canada.

It could use a bit of cleaning, which would bring out these wonderful flesh tones quite well. What I’d like to do, if you don’t mind, I’d like to take this off the easel and show you the back.

Owner: Yes.

Erik Peters: You can see the painting has been relined. Obviously because, if we look back again at the front you can see all these bits of crack along it. They’ve obviously relined it to stabilize it, which is probably a good idea.

There’s a nice little signature down here, fully signed “Robert Harris” as opposed to “R. Harris”. The market would be very attracted to a piece like this. In its current condition the market value on this, you’d be looking at somewhere at probably Six to Eight Thousand Dollars.

Owner: Wow! That’s wonderful!

Robert Harris Painting $6,000 - $8,000

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