<strong>Tom</strong> <strong>Thomson</strong> Life & Work by David P. Silcox perhaps $50 each, fifty were worth $40 each, and for the other seventy, $20 each would be a good price. Harris advised his friends the Laidlaw brothers to add <strong>Thomson</strong> to their collections, and soon after he told MacCallum that they had purchased twenty sketches for a total of $1,000. <strong>Tom</strong> <strong>Thomson</strong>, Autumn Clouds, 1915, oil on wood panel, 21.8 x 26.9 cm, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario. Lawren Harris persuaded wealthy businessman Robert Laidlaw to purchase this painting after <strong>Thomson</strong>’s death <strong>Tom</strong> <strong>Thomson</strong>, Early Spring, Canoe Lake, 1917, oil on panel, 21.6 x 26.7 cm, private collection. This painting holds the record for the highest price paid at auction for a work by <strong>Tom</strong> <strong>Thomson</strong> All told, <strong>Thomson</strong>’s prices doubled in the five years after he died—and they have doubled every few years thereafter. In 1943 MacCallum donated his huge holding of <strong>Thomson</strong>’s works, eighty-five in all, to the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, to which he had, in 1918, sold twenty-nine oil sketches. Because <strong>Thomson</strong>’s canvases nearly all found their way into public collections soon after his death, and there were so few in any case, the market in his work has mostly been the sketches. The highest price for a <strong>Thomson</strong> sketch, Early Spring, Canoe Lake, 1917, is $2,749,500, achieved by Heffel auction house on November 26, 2009. A canvas, were a good one to become available, would likely eclipse Paul Kane’s record of $5.1 million for a Canadian painting. But today only four or five canvases remain in private hands. 66
<strong>Tom</strong> <strong>Thomson</strong> Life & Work by David P. Silcox Once he caught fire as an artist, <strong>Tom</strong> <strong>Thomson</strong> created new and startling colours; primed his canvases and sketching panels with an eye to his planned compositions; used ideas and motifs from other art movements that appealed to him; and grappled with subjects in original and durable ways. 67
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