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He's young(ish), he's sexy (in a toque-wearing, Eddie Bauer kind of way), he's talented and he's dead. As a result, Tom Thomson is probably the hottest artist in Canada right now – and he's going to get even hotter this month.
He was certainly already hot last year, the 90th anniversary of his death (at 39, by drowning – a death almost invariably preceded by the adjective “mysterious”), when five of his oil paintings sold at auction in Toronto and Vancouver for more than $1-million each, including buyer's premium, marking the first time Thomson passed the million-dollar threshold already claimed by his old pal, Group of Seven founder Lawren Harris, as well as by J.W. Morrice, Paul Kane and a couple of others.
Not that paintings by Canadians other than Thomson haven't sold for more. In fact, Thomas John Thomson, native of Claremont, Ont., isn't even in the all-time Canuck Auction Performers Top 10. But when it comes to bang per buck per square centimetre, he's the undisputed champ, the bluest blue-chipper of them all. This is because all five of last year's high performers were oil sketches, painted on location in Ontario's Great North woods, on rectangles of board smaller than a standard sheet of office stationery – 21.6 cm by 26.7 cm, give or take a millimetre or so. By contrast, the auction record for an oil by Lawren Harris – $2,875,000, also established last year, by Vancouver's Heffel Fine Art – was for a painting on canvas measuring an impressive 81.3 cm by 96.5 cm.
Five Thomson sketches are coming up for auction soon: three by Heffel at its spring sale on May 22 in Vancouver; one by Sotheby's Canada in association with Ritchies in Toronto on May 26; and one by Joyner Waddington's the following day, also in Toronto. Expectations are high that two works from this batch will at the very least enter the million-dollar circle, and at the very best smash the Thomson record of $1,463,500 that Joyner set just six months ago with an itty-bitty thing (12.5 cm by 17.5 cm) sketched four months before Thomson's death in the depths of Canoe Lake in Northern Ontario.
Pine Trees at Sunset, bought 12 years ago for $187,000, is estimated to fetch up to $1.1-million.
The most attention is being paid to the Sotheby's and Joyner sketches because, for the first time in Thomson auction history, these biddables are each carrying a high-end presale estimate of more than $1-million – a substantial change from as little as five years ago, when a good Thomson often would go into the bidding wars estimated at $100,000 to $200,000.
By contrast, the Sotheby's sketch, Pine Trees at Sunset – consigned by a New York dealer who bought it 12 years ago for about $187,000 to hang in his Adirondacks cottage – is estimated at $900,000 to $1.1-million. The Joyner, View from a Height, Algonquin Park, like Pine Trees painted in fall of 1916, is expected to fetch between $800,000 and $1.2-million. It was consigned by the family of George Garland, a Thomson buff and Toronto university professor, upon his death at 82 last month. Garland, who had a cabin in Ontario's Algonquin Park, had owned the work since the late 1930s and “loved it very much,” keeping it in impeccable condition, notes Joyner director Rob Cowley.
A commercial artist by occupation, Thomson was a serious landscape painter only in the final five years of his life. During that time, he likely finished no more than 350 paintings, the majority of those, sketches on wood-pulp board, paperboard or plywood. A more definitive accounting should be available soon: Veteran art historian Joan Murray recently completed the catalogue raisonné of Thomson that she started in 1971, and it's hoped it will be published next year.
Thomson also did a number of canvas works, some of them quite large, like his famous The West Wind, which is about 121 cm by 138 cm. But it's the sketches that most often find their way to auction – sketches that, in the early 1920s, could be had for all of $50.
Most of Thomson's oil paintings are housed in public institutions such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery in Ottawa and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont. This means they'll never find their way to a Heffel or a Sotheby's. And of the eight or so still believed to be in private hands, at least four, according to Thomson scholar and Sotheby's Canada president David Silcox, have been promised to galleries or museums. Should a significant, privately held Thomson canvas ever come to auction, predicts David Heffel, co-proprietor of Heffel Fine Art, it would easily fetch at least $5-million.
Besides the febrile, near-Van Gogh-like intensity of what Thomson left behind, his meteoric, almost alchemical attainment of artistic maturity and the utter “Canadianness” of what he chose to paint, it is the relative rarity of Thomsons that accounts for their appeal to art buyers. This scarcity was reflected until recently at auction houses: In both its fall, 2002, and spring, 2003, hammerfests, for instance, Sotheby's hadn't a single Thomson consignment for sale.
Indeed, not a few observers believe the current mania can be traced to the major, near-definitive Thomson retrospective that toured five of Canada's major art galleries from spring, 2002, through December, 2003. Tens of thousands attended showings in Vancouver, Ottawa, Quebec City and elsewhere. Owners of Thomsons renewed their appreciation of what they had. Wannabe collectors had their appetites whetted.
Neither Pine Trees at Sunset nor V iew from a Height, Algonquin Park was included in that retrospective. What makes Pine Trees so enticing, beyond its excellent condition, is that it's one of the artist's rare vertical sketches; Thomson almost invariably worked the horizontal mode. Point of view is also one of the big selling points for Joyner's Thomson. While it is in the artist's preferred horizontal format, the twist is that “it's a look-down view of a fall scene,” notes Cowley. “Look-down views are pretty novel for Thomson. He usually painted front-on.”
In contrast to Joyner and Sotheby's, Heffel is being decidedly conservative in its estimates of the three Thomson sketches it's hammering down May 22. The most highly valued work, at $400,000-$600,000, is Tamarack Swamp, consigned by the family of the late Ottawa collector Alan O. Gibbons. The relatively modest estimate is somewhat surprising, in that of the five million-dollar Thomsons sold last year, four went through Heffel, including two from the Gibbons collection.
David Heffel, in fact, believes Tamarack Swamp will go for $1-million. “It's a very important painting.” But “our philosophy, when we estimate a painting, is first and foremost to look for the market to find value, as opposed to dictating what the price should be,” he explains. “We look not so much at sales results but at the conservative estimates that generate those highly successful results.”
