TORONTO – When David Heffel got a call earlier this year asking if he’d be interested in helping Canada’s oldest company sell its collection of art and artifacts, he knew his auction house was on the brink of something special.
It’s not often that a retailer has any significant art collection, let alone one featuring 4,400 items, including a painting by former British prime minister Winston Churchill.
But it wasn’t until the head of Heffel Fine Art Auction House saw one of the pieces — Frederic Marlett Bell-Smith’s 1894 depiction of a drizzly downtown Toronto — that he really felt the gravity of the task at hand.
“When you’re looking at the numbers on a spreadsheet, you don’t necessarily get a sense of the scale of that painting,” Heffel said of the piece measuring 133.4 cm by 200 cm.
“You feel like you could step into the frame and be there. It’s a monumental work.”
He’s expecting Canadians to share that feeling over the next few weeks as they visit his business to preview the Bell-Smith and 26 other high-profile paintings that make up the first allotment of HBC’s treasures destined for the auction block.
They’re being sold to chip away at the $1 billion in debt HBC had when it filed for creditor protection and closed its stores earlier this year.
The sale will be a “watershed moment” bound to generate “unprecedented interest and competition.”
“In the history of the Canadian art market, there’s always been watershed moments when great collections have come to the market,” Heffel said. “They don’t come often enough, maybe once a decade.”
The Nov. 19 sale of the first 27 pieces is “the cream of the crop” and are thus, likely to draw a record audience and fetch the highest sums.
“Marrakech,” Churchill’s oil on canvas painting of a sunny day in Morocco, alone has an estimated value between $400,000 and $600,000.
It’s “very special,” Heffel said, because when Churchill was first approached to gift a work to HBC, the late statesmen said all of them had been given to his wife, Clementine.
When they sent “Marrakech” to HBC, “the story goes … it was next in line to, in her opinion, the very best works by the artist,” Heffel said. “So it’s pretty, pretty monumental.”
To price the piece, Heffel relied on both its 47 years of experience and its database tracking every transaction since fine art auction began in Canada in 1967.
The business says it has sold more Canadian art than any other auctioneer worldwide and has presided over more than $590 million in art auction sales since 1995.
In preparing for the HBC auction, Heffel said he even found letters between his late father and the retailer dating back to the ‘80s. At the time, he said the company was looking to sell a canvas from Group of Seven member Lawren Harris, which is now at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
While the first 27 HBC pieces being sold will likely go to deep-pocketed buyers, Heffel envisions many of the items in a series of online auctions to be held before the end of the year to be more “approachable.”
That’s because several of them will be listed without a minimum price, allowing them to attract offers even under $100 and then be sold to the top bidder.
HBC has yet to reveal what will be on offer in the online sales starting in November and running through December but has teased that the items will mostly be from the company’s retail era.
Heffel has said the items to hit the auction block will include HBC point blankets, rare coins, retail antiquities and collectible toys, but offered no further hints.
“Sometimes surprises are best kept as surprises,” he said.
None of the auctions will contain the royal charter that established HBC in 1670 and handed it tremendous control of Indigenous relations and the land that became Canada.
While Heffel was originally chosen to help with the sale, HBC has said it will instead seek court permission for its financial adviser to auction off the document.
Heffel got a chance to see the charter, which was housed at HBC’s Toronto headquarters until it was recently moved to a secure facility.
“You feel just how special that document is by putting your eyes on it and standing within a few feet or inches from it,” he said.
So is he bitter about not getting the chance to sell it?
“We would have been honoured to have a bigger role to play in finding it a new home, but I think it’s taken a life on its own,” he said.
Since the company revealed it was in possession of the document and intending to sell it, several historians and archivists have expressed worry about the charter being bought and kept from public view.
The Weston family of Loblaw Cos. Ltd. fame and the Thomsons, the media magnates linked to Thomson Reuters Corp., have both expressed interest in purchasing and donating it to museums.
HBC is asking the court to stipulate that any buyer must donate it to a public institution that will share it.
“I look forward to the day I’m standing in front of a room with the charter being on display and seeing a school field trip of elementary kids come in front of it and put their eyes on it,” Heffel said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 10, 2025.
