As a community, Rimbey is well for a number of things such as being a scenic, progressive community, for the Smithson Truck Museum, the Beatty Historical House and a number of other attributes.
Most people however would probably never consider that Rimbey would be the destination for collectors to purchase fine art by some of the world’s great masters, but that all changed last Saturday during the home dispersal auction for long-time resident Neville Roper.
The former mayor and businessman has decided to downsize and relocate to an area condominium and as a result, put most of his household and personal items on the auction block in a sale that was conducted this past Saturday at his 54th Street home.
But the sale included much more than just the standard lawnmower, snow shovels and other everyday items as several pieces of fine art created by the likes of masters such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne and William Hogarth and more contemporary artists like Salvador Dali and Canadians Carl E. Wood and Bill Zuro, to name a few.
“My wife was into art. She was one of the original members of the Rimbey Art Club when they formed sometime in the early to mid1950’s,” Roper said. “She used to go to paint-outs every summer and they’d go out on the Kootenay Plains, or near Corkscrew Mountain or down to Drumheller or some place. When she first started she traveled in a little thing they called a teepee trailer that they made in Eckville and that was where she slept in. I’d take her out on the weekend and she’d stay all week and I’d go back the next weekend to pick her up. Some times we had some awfully muddy roads to go through but she really enjoyed her art, especially landscapes.”
Not only was Roper’s late wife Elaine a very talented artist in her own right – the sale also featured a number of her paintings, but she also had a very discerning eye, especially when it came to the masters.
Art collectors from as far away as Calgary and Edmonton were in attendance at the auction which featured etchings based on originals including Renoir’s Sur la Plage, or On the Beach, which features ladies enjoying a day at the seashore; Cezanne’s Portrait de Juene Fille; a print of Hogarth’s Charity in the Cellar and a limited-edition print by Dali entitled, Woman at Rest.
Following his retirement, Roper said he and his wife traveled extensively throughout the world and along the way, they collected many pieces of art and unique items, most of which were up for bids.
Also included in the auction were a number of pieces of fine antique furniture, some of which are a number of generations old and others that were used for practical purposes.
“I think I collected most of the furniture. There’s one desk that I inherited through my family. My dad had it in the office building when he ran his business here back in the 30’s and 40’s and he inherited it from his dad,” Roper said. “There’s a whicker chair my wife purchased at an auction sale 34 years ago and some of the others I just acquired as I traveled. I’d be selling some machinery to a farmer or go to an auction sale and see something, I’d pick it up. I didn’t throw anything away – I always had it in storage, so now I have the problem of unloading it all at once.”
Prominent Canadian artists featured in the auction included the late Carl E. Wood of Calgary who specialized in capturing spectacular landscape scenes of western Canada and the late Bill Zuro of Ottawa who was trained under the legendary A. Y. Jackson of the famous Group of Seven and also concentrated on the Canadian landscape.