When Heffel Fine Art Auction House was getting ready to sell the second round of treasures from Canada\u2019s oldest company, staff were so awe in of one of the paintings that they started to think it was worth an even deeper look.<\/p>\n
The oil-on-canvas estimated to be from around 1665 depicted Prince Rupert. The English Civil War commander became the first governor of the Hudson\u2019s Bay Co. and his name was lent to the vast territory that eventually comprised 40 per cent of Canada.<\/p>\n
He appeared in the portrait in a heavy coat and armoured breastplate with a baton in his right fist, his left hand on a sword and a violent battle behind him.<\/p>\n
HBC\u2019s art catalogue credited the piece to the studio of Anthony van Dyck, a Flemish portraitist known for historical, religious and mythological works. But as bids for the piece started to pour in last November, Heffel staff developed a modicum of doubt that turned them into modern Sherlock Holmes tracing a mystery across Europe and North America.<\/p>\n
By the time the roughly 361-year-old painting hits the auction block next month in a buzzy live sale, it will have a different artist\u2019s credit.<\/p>\n
Heffel wound up with the painting after Hudson\u2019s Bay collapsed last year. Once it closed its 80 department stores, it turned to Heffel to put a dent in its $1.1 billion of debt by selling its 4,400 pieces of art and ephemera through a live auction last November and an ongoing series of online sales.<\/p>\n
Heffel staff decided to give the Prince Rupert painting another look in November, when it was on the block with HBC blankets and portraits of its governors. Then, it had an estimated value between $4,000 and $6,000.<\/p>\n
The Prince Rupert portrait looked so impressive that Heffel staff, including some who are painters, wondered about HBC marking it a studio production \u2014 when an artist\u2019s assistants create a piece partly or wholly under their direction as was common practice.<\/p>\n
Given that auction houses live and die on the credibility of the works they sell, president David Heffel temporarily removed the piece from the sale until his staff had time to play detective.<\/p>\n
They called in historians, including David Franklin, an expert in Renaissance and baroque art and the controversial former deputy director of the National Gallery of Canada.<\/p>\n
He agreed the brushwork was so \u201cspontaneous and audacious\u201d that the piece was worth investigating.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo assistant painted like this,\u201d he explained in an email to The Canadian Press.<\/p>\n
He also realized the painter van Dyck died in 1641, but the portrait\u2019s subject, Prince Rupert, was born in 1619 and looked considerably older than 22 \u2014 Prince Rupert\u2019s age when van Dyck died.<\/p>\n
He set off to corroborate the hunch with \u201cpatient bookish research\u201d across the libraries and archives of London museums.<\/p>\n
The earliest record mentioning the painting that the researchers found was an 1821 letter from the company\u2019s secretary. It said the work, which hung in a hall of HBC\u2019s then-London headquarters, was painted by van Dyck and given to the then-fur trading business, when it was founded in 1670.<\/p>\n
The researchers then found documentation from the first and only time the painting was exhibited. It was 1932 in London and the piece was then credited to Flemish painter Jacob Huysmans. <\/p>\n
However, a review from that time said it bore the subtle lighting and depth of characterization of Peter Lely, a knighted Dutch portraitist once the principal painter to Prince Rupert\u2019s cousin King Charles II.<\/p>\n
By 1937, an article researchers found had discredited the van Dyck attribution and determined the painting was \u201cin Lely\u2019s undoubted manner.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s unclear whether HBC knew of that attribution and if it did, why it didn\u2019t give it any lasting credence when works by a master like Lely would be considered more valuable than a studio piece.<\/p>\n
An essay Franklin wrote about the piece for Heffel said assigning Lely\u2019s name to the portrait \u201cshould never have been in doubt\u201d because there\u2019s a later version of the painting in Italy that Oliver Millar, a British art historian and van Dyck and Lely expert, called a \u201cfully autograph\u201d of Lely. <\/p>\n
Fully autograph doesn\u2019t mean an artist signed a piece but that he or she painted the entire thing instead of having studio assistants do some or all of the work.<\/p>\n
The version sent to the Galleria Palatina in Florence in 1677 is slightly different from the HBC original. It doesn\u2019t have the flash of red on Prince Rupert\u2019s upturned left sleeve cuff, but it does have a new scarlet sash.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t uncommon for several versions of works by master painters to be made because members of the aristocracy were often asked for paintings. Studio copies with slight variations were an inexpensive way to meet the demand, Franklin said. <\/p>\n
Bolstering Heffel\u2019s Lely attribution was the fact that HBC\u2019s version of the painting has a roughly applied bituminous patch defining the hair and face. A copyist would not have left that visible in the final image, Franklin\u2019s essay said.<\/p>\n
The accumulated evidence was enough to convince Heffel to reattribute the painting.<\/p>\n
Franklin was \u201cemotional.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOne feels a direct kinship with a seventeenth-century painter,\u201d he explained. \u201cGiven the HBC connection, recovering an object for Canadian art is doubly special.\u201d<\/p>\n
For David Heffel, it felt \u201ca little bit like winning the Stanley Cup in Game 7.\u201d<\/p>\n
While new works are being discovered all the time and fraud is rampant, it\u2019s a rarity to be able to correct a centuries-old attribution.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis painting in particular has opened a new paradigm of investigation and discovery,\u201d Heffel said.<\/p>\n
The Peter Lely will likely be sold on May 21, when Heffel hosts its semi-annual auction. It will be the lone HBC piece in the sale and carry an estimated value of up to $150,000. <\/p>\n
Estimates are typically conservative and pieces often sell for much more. For example, a school of Peter Lely portrait \u2014 a term also denoting outside assistance \u2014 from the HBC collection of King Charles II had an estimated value of up to $6,000 but sold for $15,000 in December. <\/p>\n
Heffel expects the portrait being auctioned next month to garner plenty of interest because of its grandeur and history. The work\u2019s backstory will only make the piece more fabulous, the gallery said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve never had the opportunity to go back in time so far in the past in terms of research,\u201d David Heffel said. \u201cAnd I hope there\u2019s a future opportunity, but it may never happen again.\u201d<\/p>\n
This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 9, 2026. <\/p>\n
Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Heffel Fine Art Auction House was getting ready to sell the second round of treasures from Canada\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":592394,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[76,45,49,48,75,6578,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-592393","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-canada","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-retail","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=592393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592393\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/592394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=592393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=592393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=592393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}