Buffalo hunt painting coveted link to our past

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This article was published 02/06/2009 (6205 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One of the earliest painted images of Western Canada — an 1825 watercolour showing a Manitoba buffalo hunt — has emerged from a private American collection to be auctioned this month in New York for up to $150,000.

A prominent Winnipeg dealer would like to see the work come home — at least to Canada, if not Winnipeg.

The foolscap-sized sketch, Hunting the Bison, was created by 19-year-old Peter Rindisbacher, an artistically gifted Swiss immigrant to Manitoba’s fledgling Red River Colony.

“I’d be very happy to see it repatriated to Canada,” said David Loch, who represents some of the country’s top private collectors.

“It’s extremely rare and it would be very desirable for a sophisticated collector or an institution.”

Rindisbacher’s early paintings of the native inhabitants and scenes of daily life on the Canadian frontier are treasured today by collectors and heritage officials alike.

Several dozen of Rindisbacher’s works are held by major Canadian institutions, including Library and Archives Canada and the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and are valued for both their artistic merit and their historical importance as visual records of a vanished world from pre-Confederation Canada.

The 184-year-old painting is to be offered for sale at a June 19 Sotheby’s sale of rare books and historical artworks. The piece shows several snarling sled dogs harassing a buffalo on a snow-covered plain, with other bison and a group of gun-wielding hunters in the background.

“If we had unlimited funds, or at least a reasonable acquisitions budget, we might like it,” WAG director Stephen Borys said.

But the WAG already has eight Rindisbacher works in its permanent collection, Borys said, including three paintings, three engravings, one drawing and one lithograph.

The WAG’s acquisitions budget varies from year to year but seldom rises above $200,000, he added.

This one would be easier to acquire, Borys said, if it were in Canada and about to purchased by a foreigner. In that case, institutions could apply for help from the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board.

In 2000, the WAG acquired a 1916 canvas by Group of Seven artist Tom Thomson, Early Snow, for $1.15 million. But Loch, who sold it to them, said the WAG got access to federal funds after an American collector had already written a cheque.

“I was 99 per cent sure they wouldn’t let it out of the country,” Loch said.

The Rindisbacher sketch, part of a multimillion-dollar collection being sold by New York-based gallery owner Graham Arader, is described by Sotheby’s as a rare specimen from “the earliest drawn body of work to record the appearances and daily lives of the Western Plains Indians.”

The painting is signed by the artist and, on the back, by the British colonial administrator Robert Parker Pelly. He served as governor of the future Manitoba from 1823 to 1825 and is known to have taken Hunting the Bison and other Rindisbacher works home with him to England.

The painting was eventually acquired by a collector of Old West art in New Mexico before being purchased by Arader.

Loch said any number of Canadian institutions, including the National Gallery in Ottawa, could be interested in buying it.

Rindisbacher spent about five years in Canada. The Red River Colony was hit by a flood in 1826 and Rindisbacher’s family moved to Wisconsin.

— Canwest News Service

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca