Earlier this year, New York–based dealer Allen Treibitz found a painting at a barn sale in the Hamptons for just $50. It was apparently signed, he noticed, by the Canadian landscape painter “Emily Carr.” Now its authenticity has been confirmed, it will go under the hammer at Heffel Fine Art Auction House in Toronto auction on November 20th.
The painting, dated 1912 and titled Masset, Q.C.I. , carries an estimated value of C$100,000–C$200,000 ($74,000–$148,000). It is currently slated for cleaning and restoration before its upcoming sale.
Masset, Q.C.I. features an Indigenous memorial post topped by a carved grizzly bear—a monument located in the village of Masset on British Columbia’s Haida Gwaii archipelago. According to The Art Newspaper, the painting was allegedly gifted to Carr’s friend Nell Cozier in the 1930s. Cozier and her husband later moved to the Hamptons, where Treibitz stumbled upon it.
Born in 1871 in British Columbia, Carr first started painting at the Westminster School of Art in London. A Post-Impressionist painter, Carr often found inspiration in the First Nations communities across Canada, painting Indigenous architecture and symbols. In particular, the artist painted what she referred to as the “vanishing totems,” one of which is depicted in the newly resurfaced painting.
Carr first gained recognition in 1927 at 56 years old when she exhibited her work at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. This group exhibition, “Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern,” featured several of her paintings alongside the Group of Seven—Canada’s leading landscape painters in the 1920s and ’30s. Following the show, she continued a friendship with one of the group’s members, Lawren Harris. Alongside painting, the artist also wrote books and ran a boarding house to make ends meet during her lifetime.
In 2013, Carr’s painting The Crazy Stair (c. 1928–30) set the auction record for the artist. It fetched C$3.39 million ($3.2 million) at a Heffel sale.
