A search of the Art Gallery of Ontario collection returns 64 Cornelius Kreighoff paintings. The National Gallery of Canada returns 35.
This Dutch-born Canadian-American painter was nothing short of prolific. His scenes of rural Quebecois life during the nineteenth-century are playful. Picture a rural inn with tipsy townsfolk spilling out of its doors into fresh morning snow. Whenever I peruse the display at the AGO I always love looking for the little dog up to no good that frequents many of his paintings. They are quintessentially settler-Canadian, for better or worse. Stereotypical (both in his moment and ours) framings of Indigenous hunters or red-tuqued habitants, along with winter sleigh rides and log cabins abound.
One of these paintings, The Settler’s Log House, an oil on canvas, measuring 61 x 91.4cm painted in 1859, came up for sale through a Canadian auction house in 2024. It was purchased by an international buyer and was denied export at the border.
The Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board (CCPERB) reviewed the application to export the work and refused the export permit on the grounds that the work is “of outstanding significance by reason of its close association with Canadian history, its close association with national life, its aesthetic qualities, and value in the study of arts; and is of such a degree of national importance that its loss to Canada would significantly diminish the national heritage.”1
While both the auction house that applied for the permit and CCPERB were aligned on the works’s significance, it was the last point - that its loss would diminish national heritage - where opinion was divided. The well-known and widely esteemed auction house made significant effort to attract Canadian, and specifically Canadian institutional, buyers. But the work sold under estimate fetching only its reserve price.
Is it because no one needs another log cabin in their collection?
The reasons for the underwhelming sale are many. As of late, institutional collecting priorities have been focused on contemporary practices and on historic works that counter and challenge the centrality of settler-colonial narratives. It’s also a moment of changing governments and fiscal belt-tightening across all sectors (particularly dire for the arts, as always).
The expert hired by CCPERB used the word “exceptional” to characterize the work and the Review Board decision notes that “the existence of similar settlers’ log house paintings points to the relevance of this theme in both the artist’s body of work and in genre painting of the period – thus making this particular work, with its variation in composition, an important object amongst those similar works.”
Read (in an overly exaggerated way): this log cabin has a feature different from the other log cabins and Canadian art studies will fall apart without it.
In a discipline that has been wonderfully busted apart, re-assembled, re-cast, and re-imagined over the last 20 years, I’m certain this is not the case.
The outcome is that the CCPERB, in determining that the painting is of outstanding significance and national importance, has established a delay period during which Canadian institutions have the opportunity to purchase the object. If no purchase is made within this period, the export permit will be issued and the international buyer will receive their log cabin. If you’re a Canadian institution in the market for a Krieghoff, you have until February 15, 2025 to make your bid and snatch it back on behalf of Canada.
So, how much Krieghoff is enough? For CCPERB, it appears that Canadian institutions can’t have too many. And frankly, it’s great that this type of checkpoint process exists.
Personally, I think 65, at a single institution no less, is plenty. I also think there is national value in having Canadian historical art, something long devalued on the international market, gain a bit of international clout.
We’ll find out on February 15 the fate of The Settler’s Log House. What a cliffhanger!
Review board Decision. REQUEST FOR REVIEW OF A REFUSED APPLICATION FOR CULTURAL PROPERTY EXPORT PERMIT. https://ccperb-cceebc.gc.ca/en/review-of-refused-export-permits/decisions/settlers-log-house.html