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TORONTO — Paintings by three undisputed masters of Canadian art – Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris and David Milne – drew bids exceeding $1-million each last night in Toronto at the final big auction of important Canadian art for the 2007 fall season.
Indeed, their sales were instrumental in giving the auctioneers, Vancouver-based Heffel Fine Art, bragging rights as hosts of the single most valuable art auction session in Canadian history. Before a standing-room-only crowd in a Toronto hotel ballroom, the company's two principals, David and Robert Heffel, hammered down 236 consignments last night – 44 of which carried pre-sale estimates of at least $100,000. The auction house set a sale record of $22.8-million in May.
The star performer, dollar-wise, was Grey Day, North Shore, Lake Superior, a large oil by Harris that fetched $1,782,500, including premium.
(A successful bidder has to pay a 15-per-cent premium on the winning purchase price.)
Quality full-scale canvases by the Group of Seven founder (1885-1970) tend to be scarce at auctions, so when they do appear they usually command considerable attention and dollars. So it was for Grey Day, painted in 1923, just three years after the creation of the Group. Houses, a wintry Toronto streetscape finished seven years before the Group's inception bid well too, going for $1,380,000.
Each painting had a high-end presale estimate of $1,200,000.
Another amazing performance for a Harris work, in short – but not quite amazing enough to best the record for a Harris canvas, $2.85-million, which Heffel established earlier this year with Pine Tree and Red House, Winter (1924).
Tom Thomson's Northern Lights, a small oil sketch completed a few months before his death at 40 in 1917, sold for $1,150,000.
Only five of these sketches are believed to be in existence (three are in museums), and the scarcity was reflected in the presale estimate of $750,000-$950,000. However, the actual selling price was not enough to smash the previous Thomson record of $1,463,500 set just three nights earlier by Toronto's Joyner Waddington's.
Northern Lights wasn't the only Thomson to do well. Heffel, in fact, had a total of seven for sale last night, and of these, Smoke Lake and Wild Cherry Trees in Blossom, both oil sketches and both valued at $400,000-$600,000 each, went for $517,500 and $1,006,250 respectively.
Expectations were high for David Milne's Snow Patches, Boston Corners, New York, and the result was no disappointment: The 1917 oil on canvas sold for $1,437,500, a record.
Going into the auction, most observers agreed it was one of the finest, perhaps the finest Milne to appear on the resale market in decades. At 56-by-66.3 cm, it's one of Milne's larger canvases and with a presale estimate of $400,000-$600,000, Heffel clearly was poised to put it in the record books. Indeed, the record for a Milne, $462,500, had been set only five days previous, by Sotheby's/Ritchies in Toronto.
Last night's sale reflected the continued buoyancy of the resale market for major Canadian art. If there's a so-called correction looming, it's going to have to hold off on its appearance until next year.
