How a Canadian auction house unravelled a Hudson's Bay art collection mystery

An oil painting of Prince Rupert painted by Sir Peter Lely hangs on the wall of Heffel Gallery in Toronto, on Wednesday April 8 2026.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

When Heffel Fine Art Auction House was getting ready to sell the second round of treasures from Canada’s oldest company, staff were so in awe of one of the paintings that they started to think it was worth an even deeper look.

The oil-on-canvas estimated to be from around 1665 depicted Prince Rupert. The English Civil War commander became the first governor of the Hudson’s Bay Co. and his name was lent to the vast territory that eventually comprised 40 per cent of Canada.

He appeared in the portrait in a heavy coat and armoured breastplate with a baton in his right fist, his left hand on a sword and a violent battle behind him.

HBC’s art catalogue credited the piece to the studio of Anthony van Dyck, a Flemish portraitist known for historical, religious and mythological works. But as bids for the piece started to pour in last November, Heffel staff developed a modicum of doubt that turned them into modern Sherlock Holmes tracing a mystery across Europe and North America.

By the time the roughly 361-year-old painting hits the auction block next month in a buzzy live sale, it will have a different artist’s credit.

Heffel wound up with the painting after Hudson’s Bay collapsed last year. Once it closed its 80 department stores, it turned to Heffel to put a dent in its $1.1 billion of debt by selling its 4,400 pieces of art and ephemera through a live auction last November and an ongoing series of online sales.

Heffel staff decided to give the Prince Rupert painting another look in November, when it was on the block with HBC blankets and portraits of its governors. Then, it had an estimated value between $4,000 and $6,000.

The Prince Rupert portrait looked so impressive that Heffel staff, including some who are painters, wondered about HBC marking it a studio production — when an artist’s assistants create a piece partly or wholly under their direction as was common practice.

Given that auction houses live and die on the credibility of the works they sell, president David Heffel temporarily removed the piece from the sale until his staff had time to play detective.

They called in historians, including David Franklin, an expert in Renaissance and baroque art and the controversial former deputy director of the National Gallery of Canada.

He agreed the brushwork was so “spontaneous and audacious” that the piece was worth investigating.

“No assistant painted like this,” he explained in an email to The Canadian Press.

He also realized the painter van Dyck died in 1641, but the portrait’s subject, Prince Rupert, was born in 1619 and looked considerably older than 22 — Prince Rupert’s age when van Dyck died.

He set off to corroborate the hunch with “patient bookish research” across the libraries and archives of London museums.

The earliest record mentioning the painting that the researchers found was an 1821 letter from the company’s secretary. It said the work, which hung in a hall of HBC’s then-London headquarters, was painted by van Dyck and given to the then-fur trading business, when it was founded in 1670.

The researchers then found documentation from the first and only time the painting was exhibited. It was 1932 in London and the piece was then credited to Flemish painter Jacob Huysmans.

However, a review from that time said it bore the subtle lighting and depth of characterization of Peter Lely, a knighted Dutch portraitist once the principal painter to Prince Rupert’s cousin King Charles II.

By 1937, an article researchers found had discredited the van Dyck attribution and determined the painting was “in Lely’s undoubted manner.”

It’s unclear whether HBC knew of that attribution and if it did, why it didn’t give it any lasting credence when works by a master like Lely would be considered more valuable than a studio piece.

An essay Franklin wrote about the piece for Heffel said assigning Lely’s name to the portrait “should never have been in doubt” because there’s a later version of the painting in Italy that Oliver Millar, a British art historian and van Dyck and Lely expert, called a “fully autograph” of Lely.

Fully autograph doesn’t mean an artist signed a piece but that he or she painted the entire thing instead of having studio assistants do some or all of the work.

The version sent to the Galleria Palatina in Florence in 1677 is slightly different from the HBC original. It doesn’t have the flash of red on Prince Rupert’s upturned left sleeve cuff, but it does have a new scarlet sash.

It wasn’t uncommon for several versions of works by master painters to be made because members of the aristocracy were often asked for paintings. Studio copies with slight variations were an inexpensive way to meet the demand, Franklin said.

Bolstering Heffel’s Lely attribution was the fact that HBC’s version of the painting has a roughly applied bituminous patch defining the hair and face. A copyist would not have left that visible in the final image, Franklin’s essay said.

The accumulated evidence was enough to convince Heffel to reattribute the painting.

Franklin was “emotional.”

“One feels a direct kinship with a seventeenth-century painter,” he explained. “Given the HBC connection, recovering an object for Canadian art is doubly special.”

For David Heffel, it felt “a little bit like winning the Stanley Cup in Game 7.”

While new works are being discovered all the time and fraud is rampant, it’s a rarity to be able to correct a centuries-old attribution.

“This painting in particular has opened a new paradigm of investigation and discovery,” Heffel said.

The Peter Lely will likely be sold on May 21, when Heffel hosts its semi-annual auction. It will be the lone HBC piece in the sale and carry an estimated value of up to $150,000.

Estimates are typically conservative and pieces often sell for much more. For example, a school of Peter Lely portrait — a term also denoting outside assistance — from the HBC collection of King Charles II had an estimated value of up to $6,000 but sold for $15,000 in December.

Heffel expects the portrait being auctioned next month to garner plenty of interest because of its grandeur and history. The work’s backstory will only make the piece more fabulous, the gallery said.

“We’ve never had the opportunity to go back in time so far in the past in terms of research,” David Heffel said. “And I hope there’s a future opportunity, but it may never happen again.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 9, 2026.

Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press