Scene in the Northwest: Portrait of John Henry Lefroy

Scene from the Northwest: Portrait of John Henry Lefroy
Artist	Paul Kane
Year	1845–1846
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	50.9 cm × 78.7 cm (20.0 in × 31.0 in)
Location	Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

Scene in the Northwest: Portrait of John Henry Lefroy, also known as The Surveyor, is a painting by

Lefroy returned to Toronto in November 1844 and it is likely that Kane painted him soon after that. Lefroy helped convince

Lefroy returned to England in 1853 and took the painting with him. The original remained in the Lefroy family for some 150 years, but they had no knowledge of the artist or its value. It was forgotten in Canada until researchers at the Library and Archives Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario learned of its existence and located it in the possession of one of Lefroy's descendants.^[1] They opted to put it up for auction in 2002. It sold at auction in February 2002 at Sotheby's Canada in Toronto for $5,062,500. The painting was appraised at $450,000 to $550,000, but a competitive auction vastly exceeded its appraised value as Thomson's agent competed with two American bidders.^[2] Its sale price more than doubled the previous record for a Canadian painting—$2.2 million for Lawren Harris's Baffin Island, which had been bought by Thomson the previous year. The sale price of Scene in the Northwest was almost ten times more than had ever had been paid for a Kane work; the previous record was $525,000 for Portrait of Maungwudaus in 1999.^[3]

While scholars had no knowledge of the original painting for over a century, a copy of the painting did remain in Canada. This version was acquired by the

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