VANCOUVER — Emily Carr’s painting The Crazy Stair sold for $2.9 million at the Heffel auction of Fine Canadian Art in Toronto Wednesday. After a 17 per cent commission was added, the painting sold for $3.393 million — a record price for a piece by Victoria’s most celebrated artist.
It is the fourth-most expensive Canadian work of art sold at auction. The identity of the buyer was not released.
The oil painting was done between 1928 and 1930, and features many of Carr’s classic motifs, including a totem, the forest and a canoe. It was donated by lumber baron H.R. MacMillan to the Vancouver Club, where it hung in the front hall for many years.
The Carr painting was the highlight of a strong sale that netted over $13 million. A 1915 Tom Thomson sketch of Canoe Lake in Ontario sold for $1.45 million, or $1,696,500 after commission is added. Thomson gave it to his friend Fred Martin, whose family sold it nearly a century later.
A 1913 Thomson painting, Autumn, Algonquin Park, sold for $526,500, while the 1908-12 Carr watercolour War Canoe, Alert Bay went for $339,500.
An untitled Jean-Paul Riopelle abstract from 1954 sold for $765,000.
