Representations of the sl (n+ 1, C) Lie algebras are constructed with the help of canonical (boson) realisations of these algebras. For every weight Lambda on the standard Cartan subalgebra of sl (n+ 1, C) the authors obtain a representation rho Lambda (n+ 1)(called the maximal representation) which contains an irreducible subrepresentation with Lambda as the highest weight. It is shown that for a major part of the weights Lambda the representations rho Lambda (n+ 1) themselves are irreducible. The standard construction of the highest-weight representations of semi-simple Lie algebras is based on the so-called elementary representations; comparing with them, the authors maximal representations are given in the explicit form.