Q & A

S.C. from Montreal, Quebec writes:

I bought a few years ago a watercolor in a garage sale. It represents a dog (hound dog I think). I think it is from a painter Graham Noble Norwell; it has the same style, hand framed and signature.

The signature was done in a red ink pen. It looks like it was done fast for somebody and signed with another kind of pen. Can you help me with this? Thank you.

We asked Erik Peters to respond:

Your painting entitled “Beer Hound” is a charming and whimsical little painting – more like a cartoon, really - that has the feel of being a unique work that was, in all likelihood, created by the artist for someone in particular. Given the playful nature of the piece, my suspicion is the recipient was a friend of the artist, who shared with Norwell some inside joke, perhaps one or the other being referred to as a “beer hound”.

Graham Noble Norwell (1901-1967) was a Scotsman who immigrated to Canada at age 13, settling with his family in Kingston, Ontario. During his early career he studied under Arthur Lismer, George Reid and J.W, Beatty and, later, under Augustus John in Paris. His works appear quite regularly at auction in Canada and are almost always variations on the same theme – watercolours of cottages in gently undulating winter landscapes, usually in the Laurentians. There is a rather crisp austerity to his style and his palette tended to be rather limited, but intelligently deployed – touches of red and yellow amongst the winter whites, and clean blue skies. I’ve heard it said several times that his trees had the stylized quality of those one might find in architectural renderings. One senses that, like some other artists such as F.S. Coburn, Norwell found a steady market for this subject matter and continued to feed it through much of his career.

Norwell’s work has never realized high prices at auction, in large part due to the highly decorative and conventional treatment they exhibited. Typically, they sell in the low- to mid-hundreds. (Interestingly, the one noteworthy exception was at an auction in which I was involved in May 2002, when an oil painting of his sold for $21,850!) Your work is a delightful departure in both style and subject; you get the sense that he dashed it off quite quickly, chuckling to himself the whole time. From a market perspective, it would have a modest appeal; were it to be offered at auction, I suspect it might sell for perhaps $150 - $200 dollars, assuming it is in good condition and is about 8 inches by 12 inches (my guess, based on your photos). To me, however, the real value of works like this is that they offer us an insight, however fleeting, into some aspect of an artist’s life rarely seen by the public – a brief moment when they utilized the talent and skills for which they are known on a personal, rather than professional, level.

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