Vancouver art dealer Uno Langman, left, and actor Louis Herthum react to a photograph of them from 1994, on March 14, 2019.star Louis Herthum and fine art dealer Uno Langmann were together in Langmann’s Vancouver gallery, it was the 1990s and the two men had teamed up to find a home for an unlikely discovery Herthum had made in an antique shop in Baton Rouge.
But way up near the ceiling, Herthum saw something that intrigued him: a series of paintings depicting lumber work in the forest, done in muted tones, clearly by the same artist. Some were signed “LSH” and some just “H.” The proprietor said he had bought them from his restorer in St. Louis in the 1960s. For years, they had been rolled up, but the store owner had recently put them on stretcher boards and displayed them.
“So I was like, okay, we have to make sure that these are Mr. Harris,” says Herthum, who had never before heard of Harris – one of the pre-eminent Canadian artists of the 20th century – or the Group of Seven, the landmark collective of painters Harris co-founded. “I kept looking. It literally took me about four months between work and being able to take my time to research. And I finally found this tiny little book that was a biography of Canadian artists,” Herthum recounts. “And it said in 1909, he went to Minnesota, U.S.A., to depict life in the logging camps. And I was like, that’s got to be it.”
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