Blog

Scholar Lucie Dorais reflects on a delicate James Wilson Morrice pochade, likely painted during a trip to Italy in the early 1900s.

Landing is the finest Jean Paul Riopelle painting our family has had the pleasure of offering for sale over the soon to be 70 years we have been active in the art business.  Its kaleidoscope of color and geometry of brushwork in this most elegant and rare format result in offering the greatest of visual pleasure.

Serving as fine art dealers and advisors, we continue to develop some of Canada’s most prominent public collections. Paintings sold by the Klinkhoff family are on the walls of  numerous major Canadian museums, including the National Gallery of Canada, Le Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (Quebec Museum), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the McMichael Collection, The Art Gallery of Hamilton, and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery to name a selection.

Celebrating the centenary of the Armistice, we reflect on Canada’s involvement in the recapture of Hill 70 and the subsidiary attacks on the French city of Lens during World War I. Alan Klinkhoff Gallery is proud to have facilitated the sale of an ink sketch by Augustus John for his larger mural, now in the Canadian War Museum, The Canadian Opposite Lens.

Deemed Canada’s “forgotten victory,” the Battle of Hill 70 was the first to be planned and carried out almost exclusively by Canadians, a rarity for the first world war.  As with Vimy Ridge, soldiers from across Canada participated in the action and were largely successful in their efforts. The victory, however, came at a substantial cost. In total, the number of casualties for the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the Battle of Hill 70 and the subsequent efforts in Lens was 9,198 killed, wounded, or missing.

Six Victoria Crosses, the highest award for military valour, were awarded to Canadians who fought at Hill 70 and Lens. A monument dedicated to the Canadian Corps that achieved victory at the Battle of Hill 70 was opened to the public in August 2017 Loos-en-Gohelle, France.

Alan Klinkhoff reflects on Molly Lamb Bobak's career and her role as a Canadian military artist in the Second World War.  Bobak was the first female Canadian war artist.  During her career in the Canadian Women's Army Corps, Bobak began a journal in which she depicted her military training as well as dynamic scenes of marches and parades — subject matter for which she would later be well known.

A selection of quotations — plucked from an array of sources to include comments from contemporaries and students of Maurice Cullen, art critics, and established scholars — are examples of the consistent praise that Cullen receives for his tenacity of colour, inimitable style of painting, and for his integral role in the development of Canadian Impressionism.

Not to be missed in our Yorkville and Montreal galleries and at klinkhoff.ca is an outstanding selection of Classic Canadian art, from Cornelius Krieghoff & Maurice Cullen to Paul-Émile Borduas & Léon Bellefleur.

Unpublished and not seen in public since acquired from Carr by Dr. Max Stern of the Dominion Gallery in August 1944, Totems, Tanoo is in exceptional condition, its colour and vivacity as fresh as the day Carr painted it.

Independent scholar Lucie Dorais, M.A. reflects on the pochade Study for "Effet de neige, Montréal", 1906 by James Wilson Morrice, which was offered for sale by Alan Klinkhoff Gallery. 

Study for "Effet de neige, Montréal",  1906 is a rare Montreal painting by J.W. Morrice, and the source for Power Corporation’s celebrated Salon canvas.  Read about this outstanding painting by one of Canada’s greatest artists. 

Alan Klinkhoff on the most important Edwin Holgate canvas that one will ever have the opportunity to purchase.  Indian Grave Houses, 1926, is one of only two known major canvases of the Skeena River painted by Holgate after his legendary trip to the area with A.Y. Jackson and Marius Barbeau.  The other canvas has been in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada since 1939, making this an extraordinary opportunity to own this extensively celerated masterpiece, the only known work of its type that is still owned privately.  Alan also reflects on his memories of Edwin Holgate. 

Indian Grave Houses, prompts many memories of the man Edwin Holgate and encourages study to appreciate its importance in the annals of Canadian art history, especially linking the Group of Seven, Canadian art of western Canada and of course the “discovery” of Emily Carr and her subsequent return to painting after a hiatus of a dozen years. 

As fine as are Holgate’s best nudes, figures and landscapes which are primarily of Quebec province, in our opinion the most historically important Edwin Holgate paintings are Indian Grave Houses and Totem Poles, Gitsegukla, the latter in Canada’s National Gallery (NGC, 4426). The two have been exhibited side by side on a few occasions, most recently in The Beaver Hall Group: 1920s Modernism in Montreal. 

Indian Grave Houses was sold in an exhibition, Edwin Holgate, Twenty-Five Years of Painting at Dominion Gallery in Montreal in the fall of 1946 and has remained, until now, in the family of the buyer of this period.

A read of the documentation prepared for us by Dr. Brian Foss will, we believe, lead others to our conclusion that  Indian Grave Houses is the finest and most important Edwin Holgate composition one will ever have the opportunity to purchase.

The exquisite Suzor-Coté, Lilas Canadien, painted shortly before Suzor returned to pursue his studies in Paris, demonstrates the aesthetic effect of technique the artist learned from one of his masters in Paris, the important Barbizon painter Henri Harpignies.

Alan Klinkhoff comments on a superb 19th watercolour by James Duncan.

Jonathan Klinkhoff reflects on the diversity of Fritz Brandtner's art on the artist's concern for social issues in the 1930s.

 A look at a carved and painted linoleum panel by Fritz Brandtner and how this support served to complement the artist’s abstract and Cubist aesthetic as well as his interest in depicting modern industry.  Introductory text by Jonathan Klinkhoff.

“I believe the export controls continue to do much disservice to the interest they were designed to protect." (Walter Klinkhoff, Reminiscences of an Art Dealer, 1994, p. 26). 

Having been a major and distinguished participant in the art dealing trade in Canada for more than four decades, in 1994 my father Walter Klinkhoff wrote the above about the unintended consequences of Bill C-33, The Cultural Properties Act.

Tuesday, June 12,  the Federal Court issued its ruling in favour of Heffel Auction House in their appeal against a decision by the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board (CCPERB) to bar the export of a Gustave Caillebotte. The Honourable Mr. Justice Manson’s judgement in Heffel Gallery v. the Attorney General, Canada breathes fresh air into what, in our opinion, has always been a disservice to Canadians and has become increasingly so over the decades since Dad penned those astute remarks. 

Available for sale: Marc-Aurèle Fortin, Lafresnière, First Snow, c. 1923-1930, oil on canvas, 39 x 48 in.

First Snow, Lafresnière beautifully illustrates that brief time of year when the leaves are still a wonderful array of reds and oranges and yet, a soft, glistening layer of the first snow lightly covers the ground and rooftops. This brief moment of transition between the fall and the winter is perhaps the best subject matter for Fortin, a virtuosic colourist, as it implored him to broaden his palette and marry the reds of the fall with the blues of the winter. 

Careful draughtsmanship and a profound knowledge of the clean modernist aesthetic led Edwin Holgate to be a central figure in the development of Canadian art in the 1920s and 1930s and to be what the National Gallery calls "instrumental in the revival of woodblock printing."  Holgate recognized the capacity of wood engravings to represent splendid, three-dimensional forms.  Nude by a Lake exhibits a judicious balance of detailed and broadly treated volumes and shows the precision possible in wood engraving.   

Tom Forrestall while in Toronto to attend his important exhibition at Mira Godard Gallery, stopped by Alan Klinkhoff Gallery