Peter Doig's Canadian-inspired Jetty fetches $10.5M at auction

Peter Doig's nostalgic canvas Jetty, which the Scottish-born artist painted in Toronto, fetched the lofty price of £6.5 million (about $10.5 million Cdn) at auction in London today.

Without adding the auction house commission, the price that the large-scale work achieved squeaked past the high-end of its pre-sale estimate of £4 million to £6 million (about $6.5 million to $9.7 million Cdn) at Tuesday's Christie's sale in London.

"It's — for me — probably Peter Doig's greatest painting. Certainly the best that's ever been to auction," Francis Outred, international director and head of post-war and contemporary art for Christie's Europe, told CBC News.

"This is a painting that sits on the edge of abstraction and figuration."

Spanning more than two metres in width, Jetty blends different artistic styles in its depiction of Alberta's Cameron Lake, showing "huge glacial mountains behind it and this single, solitary jetty that juts out of the water with a single figure looking out onto one isolated canoe... It's a very romantic image but it's portrayed with great conceptual depth," Outred said.

"[Doig] spent a lot of his early years in Canada and clearly they've had a big influence on his vision."

In the video above, Outred tells CBC what makes Jetty so special, about Doig's Canadian influences and where the artist's Canadian works rank among his overall body of work.

Tuesday's sale did not set a new record for the Trinidad-based Doig: a previous canvas entitled The Architect's Home in the Ravine, sold in February, fetched $12 million.