Collecting Guide

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.

Beware of vendors who offer works of art without the current expertise and use only old labels of reputable galleries to support authenticity. NB. It appears that there is a fellow working primarily but not exclusively in the Toronto area who is affixing labels purportedly of reputable art galleries to endorse the authorship of paintings, sometimes unsigned or recently purchased, as “attributions” or in the “style of,” in minor auction sales. The labels may not be real. Some may have been real but are clearly “doctored,” with new typing to replace erased earlier typing. The problems of buying with only old labels as “proof” of authenticity are threefold.

Lawren Harris & Canadian Masters: Historic Sale Celebrating Canada’s 150 Years features 15 paintings by iconic artist Lawren Harris with a total value of over CAD$ 40 million. Fourteen of the Harrises, which have been in a single private collection for over 40 years, represent the most valuable single consignment in the Canadian art market.

This is straight talk about commissions. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a commission as “a fee paid to an agent or employee for transacting a piece of business or performing a service; especially: a percentage of the money received from a total paid to the agent responsible for the business”.

We imagine that it should go without saying that you should buy only works of art that the market considers to be authentic. If you are purchasing a painting by a living artist directly through that artist’s dealer, you have every reason to expect that the vendor has the expertise required to recognize works that are authentic and those which are not. If purchasing work by a deceased artist and again do so through a dealer whose supply was directly from the artist, it is again reasonable to expect that the seller has the requisite expertise.

Unsurpassed expertise, quality, value-added service and market-leading experience:

We have been operating under the same ownership for over 60 years with unique first-hand and proprietary knowledge. By buying from us at a fixed-price, you are assured of reliability, authenticity and quality in what is an excellent group of works of art vetted by respected experts in the field of Canadian and European painting and offered to you the art collector at competitive market prices.

Lawren Harris, "North Shore, Lake Superior, Pic Island II", one of eight Lawren Harris landscapes offered in the Vancouver auction. Estimated at between $250,000-$350,000, it sold for a hammer price of $230,000.

CANADIAN ART ON CONSIGNMENT: THE NUMBERS, THE QUALITY AND "THE MYSTERY BOX"

 

Our fixed price art gallery business is supply driven making the challenge that of securing a supply of very high quality works of art to advise our clients to purchase. Unlike art auction houses where, according to the president of one Canadian auction business, one sees "the best as well as the worst”, ours is a vetted selection of works of art . 

For over 60 years Galerie Walter Klinkhoff has specialized in the purchase and sale of fine art by important Canadian artists, including the following selection.  To see a complete index, click here.

Canadian art is a relatively small but expanding field.  New or experienced, buyers today are confronted with artwork in an great range of styles, sizes, colour and media from which to select.  At this point, I think we are well served to distinguish between the two general market-types that exist in the field of fine Canadian painting and sculpture, the field in which our gallery specializes. There is the decorative market, in which the vast majority of works today are sold. And there is the market referred to as the resale market, secondary market or collectibles market. This is where the genuinely valuable works in are traded.

Late in the summer of 2009, while in the ancient imperial city of Fès, Morocco, I stood in a carpet shop staring at the dozens of Berber and Rabat carpets stacked and hanging all around me. I had gone to Morocco with the hope of bringing home a good quality, handmade carpet for my new apartment but I was at a total loss. Not only did I not know what I was looking at and what to pay, I didn’t even know how to figure it out or where to start. Information about the market for fine carpets is even harder to come by than information about fine paintings or sculpture. I had been warned by wise people to avoid buying expensive second hand carpets, which like art can be an impassible minefield for novices. Here in Morocco, without a trustworthy expert and an endless supply of choices in front of me, the only tools of discrimination I had were...