Auction of 27 Hudson’s Bay paintings wraps after ‘tremendous’ demand

The public is getting a look at several pieces of art formerly owned by the Hudson Bay Company that will go up for auction next week. Janice Golding has more.

The future homes for 27 pieces of Hudson’s Bay history were decided Wednesday in a packed Toronto auction, where art lovers, historians and those wistful about the fall of Canada’s oldest company spent a collective $5.9 million.

A Winston Churchill alone went for $1.3 million.

“We knew the sale was going to be very successful, but that was a watershed moment for the Canadian art market and we’re delighted to see the Hudson’s Bay do so well,” Heffel Fine Art Auction House vice-president Robert Heffel said as the bidding wrapped. “Everything quadrupled and every lot seemed like it was a record.”

The sale his brother David Heffel presided over attracted so many people that his auction house ran out of seats, and in-person bidders, including one man who clutched a dachshund unfazed by the proceedings, had to mill about the sidelines of the room in the tony Yorkville neighbourhood. Even more watched the sale online.

Over the course of an hour and a half, viewers were treated to a spectacle where bidders and their proxies rapidly raised white paddles to indicate yes, they’d drop another few thousand dollars on that piece.

Sometimes all that divided the rivalries were a few rows. Other times, the tête-à-tête was playing out with online bids flashing up on a giant screen behind Heffel or through calls to 14 Heffel staff stationed along the room’s perimeter and often covering their mouths to give bidders a modicum of privacy.

All of the pieces blew well past Heffel’s conservative estimates, in some cases setting records.

The piece that fetched the most money was an oil on canvas depiction of Marrakech that former British prime minister Winston Churchill created on a painting holiday. The 1935 piece depicting women standing in the shade of palm trees in Morocco was given to HBC by Churchill’s wife and had an estimated value between $400,000 and $600,000.

It sold for $1.3 million, excluding the bidder’s premium and taxes.

“If you look over the past 15 to 20 years, they’ve been regularly going for over a million dollars,” Norman Vorano, a Queen’s University associate professor of art history, said of Churchill’s works.

“This canvas, in particular, it’s such a lovely, kind of sun-soaked, pastel colour, and you don’t get many of his Marrakech paintings on the market. In fact, one of the last ones that came on the market was sold by Angelina Jolie, after her divorce from Brad Pitt, in 2021, and it went for like $11.5 million.”

Another highlight was when “Lights of a City Street” by Frederic Marlett Bell-Smith hit the block and the din of the room got considerably louder.

The 1894 painting, which overlooked the auction room, shows pedestrians strolling rainy Yonge and King streets in Toronto, while streetcars trundle past them and news peddlers sell copies of the Evening Telegram — perhaps an allusion to Bell-Smith’s many years drawing for the Canadian Illustrated News. It was valued at between $100,000 and $150,000 but sold for $575,000 before added charges.

Earlier in the afternoon, a 1941 painting from Charles Fraser Comfort of two HBC traders – including one clad in a white coat adorned with the retailer’s signature stripes — at a post in Tadoussac, Que., created quite a stir.

David Heffel kicked off bidding on the piece by joking that it felt chilly in the room and then putting on a jacket to match the painting’s subject.

“This one fits me nice,” he said while wearing a crisp black suit and matching bow tie underneath.

When the lot reached $240,000, there was an audible gasp from the audience. The bids kept rising from there with one of the main bidders joking he was “just checking” his bank account before offering $450,000. He bowed out, his legs nervously tapping, when a rival offered $475,000. “Thank you, appreciate the ride,” Heffel told him.

In addition to covering their successful bid, buyers must also pay a premium of 25 per cent of the hammer price up to and including $25,000 plus 20 per cent of the hammer price over $25,000 and any applicable sales tax. Collectively, bidders spent $4.9 million on paintings before the buyer’s premium was added.

HBC and its financial advisers, who were on hand for the auction, will be delighted with Wednesday’s result. The retailer has been trying to scrounge up as much cash as possible since it filed for creditor protection earlier this year and closed its stores. It’s since been working to pay off the $1.1 billion it owes creditors.

Aside from its leases (which largely went unsold because HBC couldn’t convince landlords to let a B.C. billionaire mall owner buy 25 of them), the retailer’s collection of 4,400 pieces of art and artifacts is the best shot it has at drumming up cash.

Ever since the company floated the prospect of selling its collection, people have been anxious to buy parts of it — or at least ensure it doesn’t wind up outside the country on some billionaire’s wall, never to be seen in Canada again.

Heffel doesn’t publicly identify its bidders by anything other than a paddle number, so it’s unclear who was making offers for the items being sold Wednesday, but many who nibbled on fried chicken, sliders and caprese sticks on the way in told The Canadian Press they were auction regulars with collections at home.

They murmured about Jean Paul Riopelle, Lawren Harris and Emily Carr as they entered a completely white room adorned with some of the HBC art they were bidding on and other pieces Heffel was due to auction off in three sales sessions booked for just after.

Several of the pieces came from calendars HBC produced and distributed for free at its department stores and trading posts from 1913 to 1970.

Demand for the works from absentee bidders alone was so “tremendous” when beginning the sale, David Heffel said, that he recommended “bidding early and fast to avoid disappointment.”

Some people he spoke to were likely looking to add to their own collections, while others might want to donate any purchases to a museum, gallery or archival institute.

Dorota Blumczynska, CEO of the Manitoba Museum, said her institution wouldn’t be bidding in HBC’s auctions because it doesn’t have “an adequate acquisitions budget.”

However, she said the museum would be “honoured” to receive anything that aligns with its collection. It already owns 27,000 items, including furnishings from the company’s former head office in London, England and a birchbark canoe from the early 20th century.

Several other museums and galleries The Canadian Press contacted did not respond to requests for comment about whether they’d be in the mix Wednesday. Many also said it was their policy not to reveal their acquisition targets.

Anyone who was successful in the auction will receive an invoice they must pay within seven days. Successful bidders can choose to reveal themselves to the public or remain unknown.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 19, 2025