Group of Seven and Thomson paintings found at garage sale
Vancouver shopper paid $100 for works by Frederick Varley, Tom Thomson
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/briti...12/bc-group-of-seven-garage-sale.html?cmp=rss
A bargain hunter cruising a Vancouver garage sale has hit the jackpot after spending $100 on artworks that turned out to be by two iconic Canadian painters and are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
One of the paintings is by Frederick Varley, of Canada's Group of Seven, and the other is by Tom Thomson, who was not a member of the group but helped inspire it.
Paintings by the two men and those by other Group of Seven artists are often worth millions of dollars and hang in museums and galleries around the world
The buyer of the paintings, whose identity has not been made public, brought them in shopping bags to Maynards auction house in Vancouver in January, according to Kate Bellringer, director of Canadian and contemporary art at Maynards.
"I personally had not seen a Varley watercolour of this age, and the Thomson was extremely dirty and had been quite well handled, Bellringer said.
The find kicked off many months of work for Bellringer. The potentially more valuable Thomson had to be carefully cleaned and examined by experts across the country.
It's believed he made about 400 sketches of this nature in his life, and to find one is extremely rare, Bellringer said.
Bellringer believes Thomson did the painting sitting in his canoe on a lake in Ontarios Algonquin Provincial Park in 1915. It appears to depict a scene just after sunrise, with placid water in the foreground and hills, sky and wilderness beyond.
She's valuing the sketch-style painting at $150,000 to $250,000, but is likely to go for more.
Vancouver shopper paid $100 for works by Frederick Varley, Tom Thomson
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/briti...12/bc-group-of-seven-garage-sale.html?cmp=rss
A bargain hunter cruising a Vancouver garage sale has hit the jackpot after spending $100 on artworks that turned out to be by two iconic Canadian painters and are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
One of the paintings is by Frederick Varley, of Canada's Group of Seven, and the other is by Tom Thomson, who was not a member of the group but helped inspire it.
Paintings by the two men and those by other Group of Seven artists are often worth millions of dollars and hang in museums and galleries around the world
The buyer of the paintings, whose identity has not been made public, brought them in shopping bags to Maynards auction house in Vancouver in January, according to Kate Bellringer, director of Canadian and contemporary art at Maynards.
"I personally had not seen a Varley watercolour of this age, and the Thomson was extremely dirty and had been quite well handled, Bellringer said.
The find kicked off many months of work for Bellringer. The potentially more valuable Thomson had to be carefully cleaned and examined by experts across the country.
It's believed he made about 400 sketches of this nature in his life, and to find one is extremely rare, Bellringer said.
Bellringer believes Thomson did the painting sitting in his canoe on a lake in Ontarios Algonquin Provincial Park in 1915. It appears to depict a scene just after sunrise, with placid water in the foreground and hills, sky and wilderness beyond.
She's valuing the sketch-style painting at $150,000 to $250,000, but is likely to go for more.
