[1][2] Lawren Harris's share of the fortune that resulted made him free from financial cares the rest of his life.

[7] From 1904 to 1908 he studied in Berlin under Adolf Schlabitz, Franz Skarbina, and most likely Fritz von Wille, gaining an academic foundation similar to that which was offered by the Paris academies.

[8] Harris stayed in Berlin for three years, learning about Impressionism and Post-Impressionism as well as seeing exhibitions of German and European modern art.

[11][12] In 1910, he became interested in philosophy and Eastern thought, likely through Mitchell, and began discussing Theosophy seriously (although it was not until 1924[13] that he formally joined the Toronto Lodge of the International Theosophical Society).

From 1910 to 1918, he focused in his painting on the urban landscape of Toronto, featuring a significantly brightened palette, an attention to light, and a layered development of space in order to convey a sense of place.

[16] In 1913, Harris took the first step that would cement a group of like minded artists together in Canadian art, by inviting A. Y. Jackson, then in Montreal, to Toronto.

[17] The following year, he and his friend Dr. James MacCallum, financed the construction of a Studio Building in Toronto which provided artists, among them Tom Thomson, with an inexpensive space to work.

He was appointed a Lieutenant attached to the 10th Royal Grenadiers and served as a Musketry Instructional Officer at Camp Borden until May 1918 when he was medically discharged, suffering a nervous breakdown.

In May 1920, Harris, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Franklin Carmichael, A. Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, and Frederick Varley, formed the Group of Seven.

[20] In the fall of 1921, Harris in the company of Jackson ventured beyond Algoma to Lake Superior's North Shore, where he would return annually for the next seven years.

They took the Algoma Central Railway north to Franz, where they caught the Canadian Pacific train travelling west.

While his urban and Algoma paintings of the late 1910s and early 1920s were characterized by rich, bright colours and decorative compositional motifs, the discovery of Lake Superior as a source of subject material meant the depiction of features of the landscape in light over a vast body of water to compose a "sublime order", as described by Jackson.

[26] In 1926, he represented Canada in the International Exhibition of Modern Art organized by the Société Anonyme (of which he was a member) and shown at the Brooklyn Museum in New York:[27] he helped bring the show to Toronto in 1927.

[35]In May 1920, Harris, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Franklin Carmichael, A. Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, and Frederick Varley, formed the Group of Seven.

[43] A solo exhibition of Lawren Harris was shown in the United States at the Americas Society Art Gallery in New York.

[45] In 2017, guest curators Roald Nasgaard and Gwendolyn Owens, organized an exhibition titled Higher States: Lawren S. Harris and his North American Contemporaries, comprising some seventy paintings at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.

It featured works by Canadian and American contemporaries of Harris' such as Bertram Brooker, Emily Carr, Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, Arthur Dove, Georgia O'Keeffe, Raymond Jonson, Emil Bisttram and Marsden Hartley.

[49] On May 23, 2007, Pine Tree and Red House, Winter, City Painting II by Harris came up for auction by Heffel Gallery in Vancouver, BC.

On November 24, 2008, Harris's Nerke, Greenland painting sold at a Toronto auction for $2 million (four times the pre-sale estimate).

[51] In May 2010, Harris's painting, Bylot Island I, sold for $2.8 million at a Heffel Gallery auction in Vancouver, British Columbia.