When the entire fine art collection of the bankrupt Hudson’s Bay Company goes under the auctioneer’s gavel on Wednesday, it will include major works worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It includes paintings Canadians will recognize from HBC calendars and advertisements, grand scenes of pioneering explorations of the rugged Canadian landscape to the far north and west, including a painting of an HBC branded birchbark canoe descending rapids on the Fraser River, a portrait of Rear Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson painted two years after his death at the Battle of Trafalgar, and various historical scenes of the iconic HBC multi-coloured stripes keeping people warm out in the wilderness.
But one small painting stands out among them, not primarily for its artistic quality, and not for its subject matter of palm trees in Marrakesh, Morocco, but for the identity of the painter.
Sir Winston Churchill was out of political office, with his greatest challenges and victories as a wartime British Prime Minister still ahead of him, when he took a painting holiday through North Africa in 1935, travelling from Cairo through Tunis to Casablanca and on to Marrakesh, his first visit to Morocco.
“Here in these spacious palm groves rising from the desert, the traveller may rest assured that he will never find the world dull,” Churchill wrote in The Daily Mail on his return to London.
The Churchill painting is the centrepiece of this unusually poignant art auction taking place in Toronto on Wednesday afternoon, the liquidation of the Bay’s fine art collection.
No company occupies a more prominent place in Canadian history. From its origins as a 17th century New World fur trading mission to its modern place atop Canadian retail, HBC had centuries to collect fine art through gifts, purchases and commissions.
Many of these artworks hung in the company headquarters just north of Toronto’s financial district. Now they are on display in the Heffel Fine Art Auction House properties in Yorkville, awaiting their bids.
One famous piece, also for sale, captured a rainy evening streetscape from a bygone age of men in top hats and police officers in capes. Painted by Frederic Marlett Bell-Smith in 1894, Lights of a City Street shows the richly detailed view east from Toronto’s Yonge Street along King Street toward the spire of the Cathedral Church of St. James, which still stands today. The painting used to be owned by Robert Simpson Company, which the Bay bought in 1978 and operated as Simpson’s for another decade or so.
On a tour of the offerings, auction house executive Robert Heffel pointed out that many of the characters’ faces are based on people in Bell-Smith’s family.
Apart from this auction, Heffel is also selling many lesser items, including wool coats in the HBC striped pattern and official Olympic gear from Games past, many of them signed by athletes.
As the big ticket item, the Churchill presents a rare opportunity to buy a painting by the man who defeated the Nazis, and who is remembered today almost as much for his aphorisms, such as “if you are going through hell, keep going.”
Churchill was an avid painter, and his catalogue includes many scenes from the south of France and Italy, but he did not share them or give them away except in unusual circumstances. For example, the only painting he completed during the Second World War was also done in Marrakesh, a view of the tower of the Koutoubia Mosque painted during the Casablanca Conference in 1943. He gave that to U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
But most he gave to his wife, Lady Clementine Ogilvy Spencer-Churchill.
Churchill had family ties to the Hudson’s Bay Company going through his ancestor John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, a British army officer who was the Company’s third governor. So after the Second World War in 1954, in recognition of Winston Churchill’s new status as an pre-eminent global statesman, the Hudson’s Bay Company gave him the honorary title of Grand Seigneur of the Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay.
It was in recognition of this honour that he decided to give the Bay the Marrakesh painting he had previously given to Lady Churchill. It has been in their collection ever since. It is expected to fetch as much as $600,000.
Barry Phipps, an art historian and fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge describes the painting as a turning point in Churchill’s artistic development, away from the muted tones of the scenes he had painted in Europe toward a more “saturated” colour palette influenced by Morocco’s light, executed with a “confident yet unpretentious hand.”
Other parts of HBC are also in the process of being sold, under court supervision.
On Friday, an Ontario judge decided that several large commercial landlords for HBC’s former stores would not be forced to accept a $69-million bid from British Columbia businesswoman Ruby Liu to take over the Bay’s leases, with the intention of running a department store chain named after herself. The judge cited “significant concerns” about her ability to meet the terms of the leases.
Also on Friday came word of a bid for the Hudson’s Bay Company’s 1670 Royal Charter, a document signed by King Charles II that granted a trading monopoly over all lands that drain into Hudson Bay. Sponsored jointly by the Weston and Thomson families, both major names in Canadian business, the $18-million bid would see the document preserved and shared among four museums for rotating public display.
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