TORONTO.- An auction held by Sotheby's Canada in conjunction with Ritchies auction house sold a rare painting by Group of Seven member Lawren Harris for almost $1.1 million. Figure with Rays of Light (Arctic Forms III), was purchased by a private collector from Canada. The painting had long been assumed destroyed until it emerged from the collection of a Toronto art lover. The work had an initial estimate of $100,000 to $150,000.

"He had tried, successfully, to do it through representational landscape painting but I think he had come to a real juncture where he needed to move on and I think he eventually, after wrestling with it for a number of years, decided that abstract painting, non-representational painting was really the way he was best able to express it, Gabrielle Peacock," senior vice-president of Ritchies said to the Canadian Press

Lawren Stewart Harris was a Canadian painter born in Brantford, Ontario and is best known as a member of the Group of Seven who pioneered a distinctly Canadian painting style in the early twentieth century. A. Y. Jackson has been quoted as saying that Harris provided the stimulus for the Group of Seven. During the 1920s, Harris' works became more abstract and simplified, especially his stark landscapes of the Canadian north and Arctic. He also stopped signing and dating his works so that people would judge his works on their own merit and not by the artist or when they were painted. In 1969 he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.