ALL IN THE TIMING:

William Kurelek, King of the Castle, 1958.

There’s an odd sense of serendipity in the timing around Shaun Mayberry’s latest high-profile acquisition. The Winnipeg-based art dealer, one of the proprietors of Mayberry Fine Art, received an email from England in the middle of the night. It was the summer of 2008, and Mayberry checked the attachment — an image of a painting by William Kurelek that required an appraisal. The 1958 painting, King of the Castle, was one of the missing links in the artist’s catalogue, a masterwork that had long been thought lost, or at least very difficult to track down.

One of Kurelek’s idyllic prairie boyhood scenes — this one depicting the artist himself as a child, battling on a snow hill in a Maple Leafs jersey — the painting was soon valued at approximately $300,000. The return of King of the Castle to Canada, and particularly to Winnipeg, where Mayberry has represented Kurelek’s work, is important. The artist grew up in Winnipeg, and was indelibly marked by the light and dark of life on the edge of the prairie. Though he produced hundreds of drawings and paintings in his lifetime, much of it dark and desolate, Kurelek is still best remembered for the joyous, homespun memories his work created for Canadians who shared a prairie childhood.

The painting was unveiled at Mayberry in November, part of a larger show of important Canadian historical art, and the story of the Kurelek’s acquisition made it to Andrew Kear, associate curator of historical art at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Kear is involved in building a Kurelek retrospective to tour in 2011 – 2012, and he already had King of the Castle on his wish list of “must-finds”. Mayberry’s email saved him the trouble.