Lawren Harris sales launch spring art auction season

A major sale of a snowy mountain canvas by Lawren Harris launches Canada's spring auction season, with works by Harris, other Group of Seven members and David Milne on the block in Toronto next week.

Vancouver-based Heffel's Fine Art Auction House scored a strong opening volley to the season with its sale Thursday eveningof Harris's Mount Lefroy for $1.677 million (including buyer's premium).

A bidding war between two unidentified buyers made the evening's most expensive sale "one of the most exciting battles for a painting that I've ever auctioned off,"said auctioneer Robert Heffelin a statement.

"It's a personal high for me too," he added.

Two other Harris sketches grabbed the second- and third-place spots at the Heffel's auction, with one bidder buying both Cathedral Mountain from Yoho Valley, Mountain Sketch for $747,500 and Morin Island, Eclipse Sound, North Baffin Island for $397,500.

Other highlights include the sale of works by Jean-Paul Riopelle, Emily Carr and Maurice Cullen.

Harris also to be highlight of Toronto sales

Another work by Harris, Figure with Rays of Light (Arctic Forms III), is among the paintings in the spotlight in Toronto in advance of next week's Sotheby's Canada auction, held in association with Ritchies Auctioneers.

The large-scale oil-on-canvas painting is a watershed Harris work, which scholars had believed lost or destroyed.

"Everybody's surprised and delighted to see it," Sotheby's Canada president David Silcox told CBC Arts Online.

Harris completed the work in the months after his trip to the Arctic with fellow Group of Seven member A.Y. Jackson in 1930.

When he finished it, he stopped painting for more than two years a period when Harris was at a crossroad both artistically and personally.

"He ditched his wife and children and married another woman and basically had to leave town because of it. The Group of Seven was coming to an end. The Depression was a difficult time for people," Silcox said.

After a change in location (a move to New Hampshire with his new wife), Harris also moved in a new artistic direction: abstract works.

"Harris is probably the most important, most prolific and the most accomplished of the Group of Seven. His work is valued the highest above them all," Silcox said.

The most expensive Harris work sold at auction was Baffin Island, painted in 1930, which sold for about $2.5 million in 2001.

Milne, Lemieux, Carr also on the block

Other highlights of the Sotheby's-Ritchies sale, scheduled for Monday, include a key Milne canvas (The Yard of the Glenmore Hotel) also believed lost, a large early Jean-Paul Lemieux canvas entitled The Conversation, a large canvas by Beaver Hall Group artist Henrietta Mabel May (Knitting) and a 1953 work by Alex Colville that harkens back to his time as a war artist (Soldier and Girl at Station).

Toronto auction house Joyner Waddington's will follow with a two-day sale on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Highlights include a large Robert Whale canvas (Panoramic View of Niagara Falls with a Michigan Central Railway Train ), George Reid's 19th-century painting Toronto Waterfront, and smaller pieces from top names such as Cornelius Krieghoff, the Group of Seven, Tom Thomson, Milne, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Rita Letendre.