Scene in the Northwest (Portrait of John Henry Lefroy)

“ Scene in the Northwest: Portrait of John Henry Lefroy ), also known as Topographer ( The Surveyor ), painted by Canadian artist Paul Kane , is written in 1845 and is an oil painting on canvas measuring 50.9 × 78.7 cm. It is currently stored in the Ontario Art Gallery in Toronto . In 2002, at the auction the canvas was sold for 5.1 million Canadian dollars, which made it the most expensive Canadian painting ever sold. The canvas was bought by entrepreneur Ken Thomson, who then donated it to the Art Gallery of Ontario. The picture shows the British explorer John Henry Lefroy during his successful expedition to map the magnetic N Pole.

Paul caine

Scene in the Northwest (Portrait of John Henry Lefroy) . 1845

Scene in the Northwest: Portrait of John Henry Lefroy

Canvas, oil. 50.9 × 78.7 cm

Art Gallery of Ontario , Toronto

Lefroy returned to Toronto in November 1844, and the painting was probably painted by Kane shortly after his return from the expedition. Lefroy helped Kane, convincing the head of the Hudson's Bay Company, finance the western expeditions of the artist, to which he went in June 1845. In the picture, Lefroy is depicted in “ ” - clothes of a forest courier, snowshoes , standing in front of a dog sled . In the background, one of his comrades goes to a tipi woman.

Lefroy returned to England in 1853, taking the picture with him. The original remained in the family of the researcher for about one hundred and fifty years, but they did not know about the author of the canvas, nor about its value. They started talking about the picture again when researchers from the Library and Archives of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario found a canvas in one of the descendants of Lefroy ^[1] . In February 2002, the painting was auctioned at Sotheby’s in Toronto and sold for $ 5,062,500. Initially, the picture was estimated by experts from 450,000 to 550,000 US dollars, but the competition for the canvas at the auction significantly exceeded its estimated cost. At the auction, a struggle broke out between the Canadian agent and his two American counterparts ^[2] . The previous record for the sale of works of art by the Canadian author was 2.2 million US dollars and also belonged to the entrepreneur Ken Thomson, who bought for this price the painting “ Island” painted by . The selling price of the painting “A scene in the northwest: the portrait of John Henry Lefroy” was almost ten times higher than the price for which Kane's paintings were ever purchased; the previous record in 1999 was $ 525,000 and belonged to the painting “Portrait of Mongvudos” ^[3] .

Although art critics did not know about the original of the painting, its copy was kept for more than a century in Canada. This version was acquired by the Glenbow Museum in Calgary in the 1950s. The name of the author of this picture was forgotten, which led to many years of debate about authorship. Some art critics attributed the canvas to Kane and others to . The opening of the original led to a consensus view that this is a copy of Kane's work, made by another artist of the same period. There is a suggestion that the copy was written by Kane's wife, artist Harriet Klench.