A large 1924 Lawren Harris canvas, House in the Ward, Winter, Painting No. 1, sold for $2.52 million at a Heffel auction of Canadian, impressionist and Modern Art Thursday.

Bidding for a smaller Harris live “sketch” painting, From Berg Lake, Evening, started off at $600,000. Then an unknown telephone bidder launched a pre-emptive strike and bid $1.2 million.

It seemed to surprise auctioneer Robert Heffel and the live crowd at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Toronto.

“Does he have a dinner reservation?” Heffel joked. “Is he in a hurry?”

After a long pause another bidder entered at $1.25 million, but the unknown telephone bidder then upped their bid to a winning $1.3 million, which works out to $1.562 million after a 20 per cent commission is added on top.

The bidder tried the same tactic with the next painting in the auction, another Harris sketch, 1930s Arctic Sketch XV, which started at $600,000 and instantly jumped to $1.2 million.

The unknown bidder purchased that Harris as well. But when they bounced the starting bid of $800,000 up to $1.2 million on Tom Thomson’s Moccasin Flower or Orchids, Algonquin Park, it didn’t work — someone else took the painting with a bid of $1.25 million, or $1.5 million with commission. (From now on all paintings will reflect the price with commission.)

The most spirited bidding was for an untitled 1962 abstract by Marcelle Ferron, when two collectors faced off when bids were at $700,000 and brought it up to $1.8 million, six times its high estimate of $300,000. It was a record for the artist at auction.

There was also a bidding war for a 1985 Andy Warhol portrait of Queen Elizabeth II lightly sprinkled in crushed glass “diamond dust,” which sold for $1.14 million. It was part of a “Royal Edition” that featured four images of the Queen, and was issued in two versions, with 70 prints and two Hors de Commerce (not for sale) prints given to the artist. This was one of the Hors de Commerce prints, and set a record price for an Andy Warhol edition print.

Both the Ferron and Warhol were sold in the afternoon session, which was of Post War and Contemporary Art. The afternoon sale also included the Jean Paul Lemieux painting La nuit des rois, which topped the million dollar mark by selling for $1,081,250.

Three Emily Carr paintings were sold, led by Storm Over Grey Forest at $301,250.

Eighty artworks were sold in the auction for a total of $21,016,124.76, including commission.

jmackie@postmedia.com