Works by Carmichael, Harris fetch over $300,000 at Joyner auction
Posted May 25, 2012 4:03 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
TORONTO – A rare, large-scale watercolour by Group of Seven artist Franklin Carmichael, and a Lawren Harris oil sketch of the Canadian Rockies fetched $330,400 apiece at Friday’s Joyner Spring Auction of Important Canadian Art.
The sale price for Carmichael’s 1929 “Lone Lake,” which includes the buyer’s premium, set an auction record for a work on paper by the artist.
Dominated by cool blues and greens, the piece depicts the western end of Nellie Lake in the La Cloche region of Northern Ontario and had a pre-sale estimate of $300,000 to $350,000. The Joyner auction marked the first time the work, which was held in the same Canadian collection for decades, had ever been available for sale before.
Meanwhile, Harris’s “Mountain Sketch VII” was inspired by his first trip to the Rocky Mountains in the summer of 1924 and had been consigned by a private Ontario collector. It had a pre-sale estimate of $300,000 to $400,000.
Fetching three times its pre-sale estimate was William Kurelek’s “After Church During Indian Summer (The Kavanagh Homestead, Bancroft),” which depicts settlers gathering for dinner on their expansive homestead. The mixed media on board realized $177,000 and came from a private Quebec collection.
Two of George Theodore Berthon’s portraits of Lt.-Col. George Taylor Denison also fetched auction records (one at $40,120 and another at $49,560) as did two of Greg Curnoe’s works (“Mariposa T.T.,” $59,000, and “Dessin Anime,” $42,480).
Other artists netting record prices for their works at the auction included David Blackwood (“Ephraim Kelloway’s Red Door,” $64,900).
