Brilliantly coloured Lawren Harris oil sketch, created during his famed Arctic voyage of 1930, fetched a whopping $1.77 million in Toronto on Friday, helping end the Canadian art spring auction season on a high note.
The dramatic painting titled Island off Greenland, Arctic Sketch XIX was the highlight of Joyner's spring sale, with rapid bidding from a trio of interested parties quickly driving the price up from an opening bid of $400,000.
"It was just a steady climb. There wasn't any stalling at all," Joyner vice-president Rob Cowley, who served as auctioneer, told CBC News.
"We climbed an entire million in a very short period of time."
The stunning, rare work — which Harris had painted on-site during his trip and used as the preliminary sketch for his later, larger canvas South Shore, Bylot Island — was consigned by an Alberta family that had owned the piece for 40 years.
Ultimately, it was another Western Canada collector — participating by phone — who won Friday's bidding war.
Other highlights of the Canadian spring art sale included "Fall Woods, Algonquin Park," a 1914 oil sketch by Tom Thomson which sold for $472,000.
Toronto's Laing Galleries acquired the work from the artist's sister, Elizabeth Thomson Harkness.
Isabelle Dunbar, the aunt of Canadian scientist George Garland, bought it for her then-young nephew in the late 1930s or early '40s, and he kept it until his death in spring 2008.
Meanwhile, "Pickle Jar," a large still life by David Milne, sold for $153,400, and "The St. Anne Falls," an 1855 canvas by Cornelius Krieghoff, fetched $118,000.
On Thursday, another Harris work sold at the Sotheby's auction for $163,500, but a second Harris piece failed to find a buyer, as did a prized work by Jean-Paul Riopelle.
The biggest seller at the Sotheby's sale was Milne's "Trilliums and Trilliums." It went for $278,500, including the buyer's premium.
At the Heffel auction in Vancouver earlier this month, an E.J. Hughes piece fetched a little more than $1 million, while another Hughes painting earned a bid just shy of $800,000.
Minus the Harris and a handful of other high fliers, among them a 1914 Tom Thomson sketch bought for $472,000 by the same western Canadian collector, Joyner’s spring sale would have been cause for hand-wringing. A hefty 35 per cent of its offerings – 89 lots – went unsold on Friday, and those that did sell more often than not went for prices at or slightly above their reserve (the confidential price, established pre-auction, that auctioneer and consignor agree will be the minimum acceptable bid).
It was yet another reflection of the cool-down the once nova-hot resale market has undergone in the past 12 to 18 months as would-be buyers “increasingly look for fresh material,” in the words of Winnipeg-Toronto art dealer Shaun Mayberry, “work that hasn’t been cycled through one auction or another, that doesn’t have that sort of anchored, hammered-down valuation assessment on it.”
For Joyner vice-president Rob Cowley, “the bottom line is that quality Group of Seven work, quality historical and contemporary stuff [including a large 1953 abstract by Painters Eleven member Alexandra Luke that Joyner sold for $70,800, an artist record] continue to do well. What we did find today is that later work by the Group, post-Group work by Franz Johnston, the later paintings of A.J. Casson had trouble … There’s more of an abundance of those things in the market place, not that much rarity.”
Works by Harris, of course, have long been pace-setters in the resale world. Of the top 10 paintings by Canadians ever sold at auction, six are Harrises. Yet even the mighty Harris is not immune, it seems, to the demand for rarity and quality. Joyner had another Harris for sale Friday, a small autumn scene from 1915, but because it lacked what Mr. Cowley called “the absolute rarity of the Arctic painting,” bidding reached only $48,000 ($12,000 less than the low end of its pre-sale estimate) and the work was declared unsold.
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