At a barn sale in the Hamptons earlier this year, New York art dealer Allen Treibitz plucked a cool-hued painting off the wall and purchased it for $50. In the bottom right corner, a signature and date suggested that the work could be an original by Canadian artist Emily Carr from 1912.
Treibitz took the work to an auction house in Vancouver and confirmed that his hunch was correct. A spokesperson for Heffel Fine Art Auction House told Hyperallergic that the work, titled “Masset, Q.C.I.” (1912), is estimated to sell for up to C$200,000 (~$147,330).
The spokesperson said Carr may have gifted the painting to her friend Nell Cozier, who then transferred the work to a private estate in the Hamptons. In the weeks leading up to its November 20 sale, “Masset, Q.C.I.” will tour through Calgary, Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto.
Emily Carr was a relatively unknown painter working in the post-Impressionist style before attracting the attention of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, where she exhibited her work in 1927 when she was in her mid-50s alongside landscape artists known as the Group of Seven in Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern. Carr later became a Canadian feminist icon, as her landscape paintings were shown across international venues including the Tate Gallery in London in 1938 and the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Her works now largely remain in her home country at institutions including the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Museum of British Columbia.
The painting that Treibitz discovered in the barn sale features a grizzly bear sitting atop a totem pole. Carr took an interest in First Nations communities and villages, and her paintings typically meld Indigenous elements with natural landscapes, such as in “Big Raven” (1931), which includes a towering Haida raven structure amid a lush green and mountainous scene. Critics have accused Carr, who was the daughter of British immigrants, of cultural appropriation and of promoting the myth of the “Vanishing Indian.”
Treibitz told CBC News that Carr’s painting was the most significant work he had ever discovered, adding that it was important to him that the piece return to Canada.
