Touting the comfort of a vintage wool coat or the allure of a collectible Barbie doll is, to put it mildly, not typically part of David Heffel’s job. But as Heffel Fine Art Auction House sifts through hundreds of pieces of ephemera from the collection of the collapsed retailer Hudson’s Bay Co., it is not exactly business as usual.
“I tried on a striped wool coat for the first time – I couldn’t believe how warm it was,” Mr. Heffel said. “There’s going to be items here for everybody.”
With more than 1,700 pieces of art and more than 2,700 artifacts, the Bay collection will take months to process and sell following the company’s demise.
Bay Watch by Charles Pachter is the most recently made item on the auction block; he painted it in 2011, colouring the sky with the stripes of an HBC blanket.
Items will be grouped into online sales that will launch on Heffel’s website every few weeks. The first online auctions opened on Nov. 12, featuring Bay blankets; paintings depicting the Bay’s history; portraits, including those of former HBC governors and of King Charles II; and works by Canadian artists such as William Kurelek and Maurice Galbraith Cullen.
Future sales will feature hundreds of pieces of the Bay’s retail-era artifacts, including signage, coats and toys. And this week, an in-person auction will present 27 pieces of art that the team chose as the highlights of the collection.
The 355-year-old company was never known as one of corporate Canada’s most prominent art collectors. (Its historical collection, stretching back to the days of the fur trade, is vast and significant, and was largely donated in the nineties to the Archives of Manitoba and the Manitoba Museum.)
But there are some items of note up for sale. Here are some selections of the lot that buyers will bid on in person at the auction.
With a report from Kate Taylor
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