Krieghoff: “Returning from Market”

August 23, 2025 By: Waddington's Staff

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Cornelius Krieghoff is among a select few Canadian artists whose diversity, quality and prolific creativity has contributed to uninterrupted interest for nearly two centuries.

*Lot 3 – Cornelius David Krieghoff (1815-1872)*
*RETURNING FROM MARKET (AFTER SIR AUGUSTUS WALL CALLCOTT, 1779-1844)*

Returning from Market, after Sir Augustus Wall Callcott, encapsulates this status and reflects the practice of artists in Canada making paintings after well-known works by European artists (see also Krieghoff’s Cleopatra, after Guido Reni, sold at Waddington’s November 2023).

Sir Augustus Wall Callcott’s painting, Returning from Market (1834) was well known in its era.

In the early 19th century, Callcott was J.M.W. Turner’s foremost follower and asked prices for paintings similar to Turner’s, pursuing the commercial middle class as buyers. First exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1834, it soon entered the collection of Robert Vernon, a successful English businessman and well-known collector of contemporary art and was reproduced in a series of engravings after paintings in Vernon’s collection known as the Vernon Gallery.

The renown of the copied paintings worked two ways for Krieghoff. Most obviously, it connected him with appreciated and fashionable paintings of the day, but it also showed a stylistic versatility beyond his successful paintings of Indigenous people and the local populace. Returning from Market is a brilliant, multilayered testament to the connections between Krieghoff’s continental influences and his well-known North American genre subjects.

For all its English charm, the narrative and structure of the painting are consistent with Krieghoff’s North American images. A domestic group travelling through nature with provisions for sustenance and survival is as much about unity, domestic duty and hierarchy as it is an occasion to portray a landscape. As many of Krieghoff’s clientele were English members of Quebec’s mercantile or military elite, this sort of landscape would have been well received as a taste of home. Variants of this composition attributed to Krieghoff have appeared on the market, and by virtue of provenance we know the present version is the one cited by Marius Barbeau in his catalogue raisonné.[1]

[1] Marius Barbeau, Cornelius Krieghoff: Pioneer Painter of North America (Toronto: Macmillan Company of Canada, 1934), 149, as Fording a River.

About the Auction

Returning from Market is featured in our Historical Canadian Art auction, online until August 28. The auction includes early Canadian artworks from the 19th and early 20th century by artists such as Cornelius Krieghoff, Frederick Verner, George Agnew Reid, Laura Muntz Lyall, Estelle Kerr, and Sir William Van Horne.

From visual accounts of the landscape by William Armstrong and Otto Reinhold Jacobi to bronzes of pioneers by Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, this auction provides a glimpse of pre- and post-confederate Canada as seen by European settlers.