|
By John Mackie, Vancouver Sun
May 21, 2010
The Heffel Gallery Spring Auction includes
Sea Side Figures by B.C. Binning.
VANCOUVER -Theodosia Dawes Bond Thornton had pretty good taste. Long before the Group of Seven came into vogue, the Montrealer assembled a dazzling collection of their work, for a relative pittance.
She bought Lawren Harris paintings for as little as $85, A.Y. Jacksons for the same amount, and at least one Arthur Lismer painting for the princely sum of $37.50.
They've gone up in value. The $85 painting she bought off Harris in 1947, Lake Superior Sketch XXXIII, is expected to bring $200,000 to $300,000 at the Heffel Auction of Fine Canadian Art next Wednesday, May 26 at the Vancouver Convention Centre.
Her $85 Jackson, Coal Miners' Houses, Canmore, Alberta, was purchased four months after the Harris, and has a pre-auction estimate of $20,000 to $30,000.
The $37.50 Lismer, Forest Interior, was purchased in 1949 and has an estimate of $20,000 to $25,000. "She amassed a great collection with a total [cost] of $17,000 to $18,000," marvels David Heffel, who runs the auction house with his brother Robert.
"It's in the millions now. It was a great investment." That's an understatement. Three of the 37 works from the Thornton collection up for auction - Harris' Winter ($600 in 1962) and Arctic Sketch IX ($500 in 1959), and Albert Henry Robinson's St-Urbain ($165 in 1945) - have pre-auction estimates of $300,000 to $500,000.
Thornton passed away last Oct. 27 at the age of 93, and her collection has been put up for auction by her estate. Heffel met her before she died, and said her house had so many works of art, the living and dining rooms were set up like an art gallery, "with a gallery-type peg-board and broad lighting system in the dining room where she would rotate the works." When she died she literally had a cupboard full of Harris paintings in-between the living and dining rooms waiting their turn in the rotation.
The Thornton works will be on display for the public Saturday through Wednesday at the Heffel Gallery at 2247 Granville at 7th.
The Heffel brothers have become the dominant force in the Canadian art auction market. The $23 million Heffel sale in the spring of 2007 is the highest grossing art auction in Canadian history, and the Heffels also own the next seven highest sales.
They expect Wednesday's sale to do very well. "This is one of the biggest sales we've brought to market, with total estimates of $12 to $15 million," said David Heffel. "I think it's going to be in our top three."
The sale will be done in two parts, with Canadian Post-War & Contemporary Art at 4 p.m. and Fine Canadian Art (pre-1945) at 7 p.m.
The highest estimate is $1.5 million to $2.5 million for another Harris painting, Bylot Island I. The canvas was painted in 1930, when Harris and A.Y. Jackson travelled to the Arctic aboard a Canadian government supply ship.
It was his only trip to the region, which means there aren't that many Harris Arctic paintings. The painting is also relatively large (32 by 45 inches); a similar canvas featuring another view of Bylot Island is in the National Gallery of Canada.
"It's a large format Harris canvas, which is a rarity, and it's an Arctic canvas, which adds to how special that painting is," said Heffel.
"We could easily never see a painting like that hit the market again. It's just a very special painting, which deserves a very special price."
At the last Heffel auction in November, the Harris painting The Old Stump, Lake Superior, sold for $3.51 milllion, a record for the artist and the second-highest price achieved for a Canadian artist at auction in Canada.
The buyer remains unknown, but they will probably be interested in an Arthur Lismer cartoon featuring the same painting.
It shows Harris with an axe chopping down a tree to create the stump so he could paint it. It comes with the caption, "Well, that's that," and the stump is adorned with a "1st" tag, a reference to Harris winning 1st prize at a contemporary art competition in Baltimore in 1931. The estimate for the charcoal drawing is $9,000 to $12,000.
Another Lismer painting, The Sheep's Nose, Bon Echo, is featured on the cover of the auction catalogue. It has an estimate of $700,000 to $900,000, but could crack the million-dollar mark. The current record for a Lismer painting is $350,000.
It has impeccable provenance, because it was featured in a 1922 Group of Seven exhibition (the Group of Seven's exhibitions were from 1920 to 1931).
"It's very rare to get a Group-period canvas," said Heffel. "Historically speaking, from when we started in 1995, in every three, four or five years worth of sales, if we had a major Group canvas to feature at one of our sales it was a blockbuster.
"This is not only a major Group canvas, [it was] one of the few Group canvases to be selected in the third Group of Seven exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1922. Most of those canvases are in public institutions. This is really truly a museum painting, that belongs in a public institution."
The highlight of the contemporary side of the auction is a bronze of Bill Reid's famed killer whale sculpture outside the Vancouver Aquarium.
The last time one of the nine smaller bronzes of Killer Whale (Chief of the Undersea World) was sold in 2002 it set a record for Reid's work, selling for $425,000. The estimate this time is $600,000 to $800,000.
The recent economic troubles don't seem to have deterred people from consigning high-end art to the sale. There are nine works by Harris at the sale, 12 by Emily Carr, 11 by Lismer, five by A.J. Casson, and four by Tom Thomson, David Milne and Maurice Cullen.
One of the Thomson paintings, Landscape With Snow, features another painting on the back, Northern Mist. It's estimated at $400,000 to $600,000.
"I think there's four other documented double-side Tom Thomsons," said Heffel. "I believe this is the only one in private hands."
The king of the double-sided painting was the prolific A.Y. Jackson, who may have done 5,000 paintings. Twenty of them are for sale Wednesday.
"Sometimes you get some nice surprises," said Heffel. "With the Jacksons it's not uncommon to see a panel come in that has a cardboard back. We'll take that cardboard off and to the owner's surprise there's a painting on the back that has been hanging disguised or covered up in their house for 60 years."
Mrs. Thornton had several A.Y. Jacksons, including Spring Evening, Lower St. Lawrence, which has an estimate of $175,000 to $225,000. She obtained it in 1946 in a trade for Mauruce Cullen's Cache River, Moonlight, which had an estimated value of $350 at the time.
"She had inherited a Cullen pastel from one of her relatives, which she wasn't that keen on," said Heffel. "So she went to the Watson Gallery and did a trade. Today that Cullen pastel would be perhaps $40,000, and our estimate is that this [Jackson] is going to sell in the hundreds of thousands.
"She had great foresight."
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
|
