Buyers spent $5.9 million at the Bay’s art auction
Not bad, but the company owes a reported $1.1 billion to creditors
Shortly after filing for creditor protection and closing its stores earlier this year, the Hudson’s Bay Company announced that it would auction off its art collection. A catalogue released by Heffel Fine Art Auction House described the auction as a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity to acquire pieces by notable artists such as Adam Sherriff Scott and Lorne Holland Bouchard. A piece by former British prime minister Winston Churchill, called Morocco, was estimated to be worth between $400,000 and $600,000.
Related: The Thomsons and Westons want to buy the Hudson’s Bay charter for $18 million
With the amount owed to creditors now reported at $1.1 billion, the company’s art auction was held this week in Yorkville. “Art lovers, historians and those wistful about the fall of Canada’s oldest company spent a collective $5.9 million,” reported the Canadian Press.
The Churchill oil painting went for $1.3 million, according to CP, and all other pieces in the catalogue also sold for well over their estimates. Frederic Marlett Bell-Smith’s 1894 painting Lights of a City Street, which depicts a street scene at King and Yonge, went for $575,000. (It had been valued between $100,000 and $150,000.)
In total, auction bidders spent $4.9 million on 27 pieces, not including auction house fees and taxes. So there’s still a lot more money to recoup. We have two questions: what other treasures are tucked away in Bay storage to help the company pay its debt, and was Ruby Liu in attendance?
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
