You never know what you can find in a barn.
That’s probably along the lines of what Allen Treibitz has been thinking for a few months now. The New York-based art dealer went to a barn sale in the Hamptons and came across a rather unique painting. “It stood out from everything else in that barn,” he told the Canadian Press on Oct. 2.
Treibitz apparently had no idea who the painter was. He didn’t have any knowledge about the subject material, either. The only details he had were the signature, size (41 cm by 33 cm), date (1912) and title (Masset, QCI). Yet, the experienced art dealer, who had been in the industry for 40 years, thought the painting was “special,” according to several news reports like CP and The Art Newspaper, and wanted to buy it.
The cost of this barn purchase? $50 USD, which is $68.24 CAD (as of Oct. 8).
Treibitz began to research the painting. He quickly learned that it was “far more valuable than what he paid,” according to the New York Post’s Anna Young on Oct. 2. He would then contact David Heffel, president of Toronto’s Heffel Fine Art Auction House, and discuss his findings. It turned out that Treibitz’s hunch about the inexpensive albeit exceptional painting was correct.
“We were provided photos and there was no doubt in my mind that this was an exciting Cinderella discovery,” Heffel told CP. In short order, the painting “was deemed an authentic work” by Emily Carr, according to The Art Newspaper’s Larry Humber on Oct. 3. “After a good cleaning,” Humber continued, it will be put on the auction block on Nov. 20 and “will carry an estimate of C$100,000 to C$200,000 ($74,000-$148,000).”
What an incredible return on investment!
Carr, born in Victoria, B.C. is widely regarded one of Canada’s greatest post-Impressionist painters. She studied art in Canada and the U.S., worked in France, associated with the Group of Seven and lived among several Indigenous communities along the West Coast. This includes her artistic sojourn with the Nuu-chah-nulth people, who gave her the name Klee Wyck (Laughing One). Carr treasured this name for the rest of her life, and it became the title of her first book.
Carr’s sketches and paintings of Native scenes and totem poles are among the most important of her body of work. It became her “creative inspiration,” as Dennis Reid wrote in A Concise History of Canadian Painting. Famous paintings such as The Crazy Stair (1928-30), Grizzly Bear Totem, Angidah, Nass River (1930), Blunden Harbour (1930) and Big Raven (1931), provided Canadians with their first glimpses into Indigenous culture, life and art. Lisa Baldissera also pointed out in Emily Carr: Life & Work that the great artist “reframed existing First Nations iconography and developed her own imaginative vocabulary, thereby inventing an image system for the West Coast that embraced political, social, cultural, and ecological subjects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”
Masset, QCI, as it happens, fits within her creative inspiration like a glove. The painting depicts an Indigenous memorial post with a carving of a grizzly bear on top. There are a couple of small homes and a single tree in the background. This memorial post was located in the village of Masset, situated on B.C’s Haida Gwaii archipelago – also known in some quarters as the Queen Charlotte Islands.
How did Carr’s work remain undiscovered for over a century? Moreover, how on earth did it end up in the Hamptons?
“The piece is believed to have been a gift to Carr’s friend Nell Cozier and her husband in the 1930s,” according to CP, “and has been hanging in a barn in the Hamptons since.” The Art Newspaper noted that Cozier and her husband, “originally from Carr’s longtime home of Victoria, British Columbia…had moved to the Hamptons for work on a large estate.” The painting apparently has an inscription on the back, Miss Carr/chez R. Charbo 96 Bvld Montparnasse, which Humber suggested is a “likely reference to Carr’s time spent studying in Paris around 1910-11.” Carr painted a different version of this scene, Bear Totem, Masset, Q.C.I, in 1937, which is housed in Victoria’s BC Archives.
So. A Canadian couple took a Canadian painting by a then-unknown Canadian artist, inscribed with a Parisian address, to the U.S. while working as caretakers on an estate in the Hamptons. That’s quite the unusual journey, and helps explain why the B.C. and Canadian art world was unaware of its existence.
“I see a lot of very interesting things,” Treibitz told CP, but this find is “the most significant thing I’ve ever found. The fact that it was found and that it is back to its home place is very important.”
Imagine if Treibitz hadn’t gone to this art sale. Or, he didn’t like the painting. Or, he thought the price for a completely unknown work of art simply wasn’t worth it.
Little quirks of fate can occasionally lead to big developments that change the course of history. That’s how Emily Carr’s artistic legacy grew by one painting that was sitting in a barn in the Hamptons.
Michael Taube, a long-time newspaper columnist and political commentator, was a speechwriter for former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper.
