Art appraiser offers free evaluations

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This article was published 14/08/2017 (2446 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Is the painting on your wall worth $1 million?

Toronto-based art appraiser Rob Cowley of Consignor Canadian Fine Art will be in Winnipeg on Thursday to conduct free valuations, and he’ll be happy to tell you.

Since its founding in 2013, Consignor has appraised an estimated $20 million worth of fine paintings, sketches and other artwork — much of which was valued during the company’s annual valuation tour.

“A lot of the time we see work we’ve never seen before,” Cowley said.

“People can be sitting on a gold mine and not even know it.”

At one valuation, a collector brought in an early painting of a winter landscape in Ontario’s Algoma region by Group of Seven member A.Y. Jackson. The collector knew it was valuable, but didn’t expect it to be appraised for $20,000.

Across Canada, Cowley said, many pieces of art have been handed off from generation to generation, and the current holders might simply mount them on their walls, unaware of any historical significance.

“Sometimes, people don’t know the value,” Cowley said. “And that’s where we step in.”

In one case, a family was handed a one-of-a-kind piece by famed Manitoba artist William Kurelek near the end of his life and never even knew the man’s identity until bringing it to be evaluated.

Kurelek, who grew up in Stonewall, became renowned in the 1950s and ’60s for his ethnic-themed oil paintings and mixed media portrayals of life on the Canadian Prairies.

In the mid-’70s, a woman in Toronto brought a local photographer a basket of Ukrainian-style strudel as a thank you gift, and Kurelek was there to taste a sample.

“This is better than my mother used to make,” Kurelek said, as the story goes. And then, without any indication of who he was, Kurelek brought the painting to the woman as a thank you gift to her. He died of cancer in 1977, only a short time after the encounter.

For more than 40 years, Kurelek’s painting — with the titular proverb “He who chases two rabbits at the same time catches neither” written at the bottom in English and Ukrainian — stayed in the family’s collection.

When it was brought in to be appraised by Consignor, the collector brought in five pieces. The first four were recreations. “What’s this worth?” the collector asked of the Kurelek original, expecting nothing but chump change.

It was appraised to be worth between $15,000 and $20,000. a few months later, sold for $41,400 at auction.

Finds like the Kurelek are obviously exhilarating for the owners, but Cowley said the appraisers and auctioneers for Consignor get just as much of a thrill uncovering the art of the past.

Last spring, Consignor gave its highest-ever valuation for a large original painting by Lawren Harris, another artist of Group of Seven fame.

The painting was done during one of the group’s early sketching trips, sometimes referred to as “boxcar trips,” because the artists would work out of a train-car-turned-workspace.

But this painting wasn’t in Winnipeg or Regina or Vancouver; it was in a private collection in Australia, so Consignor flew out to see it for themselves.

Consignor appraised the Harris original, and estimated its value to be as high as $600,000. In 2016’s spring auction, the painting sold for a whopping $977,500.

While not every sketch is a Lawren Harris or an A.Y. Jackson, Cowley says the Prairies are rich with valuable pieces by artists like Norval Morrisseau and Illingworth Kerr, among others.

A million-dollar painting might not be hanging on your wall but, then again, it just might be.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca