William Kurelek's rare 1958 painting, King of the Castle, will soon be on display at a Winnipeg art gallery. (Mayberry Fine Art)

A rare and valuable painting by former Manitoba artist William Kurelek has been purchased by a Winnipeg art dealer and will be on display later this month.

The painting, called King of the Castle, was found in England earlier this year.

"This is the kind of painting that comes along once in a blue moon. It's a great painting by a prominent Canadian and Manitoba artist," said Shaun Mayberry, co-owner of Mayberry Fine Art on McDermot Avenue in Winnipeg's historic Exchange District.

The piece, from 1958, depicts Kurelek as a child, outfitted in a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey, playing King of the Castle on a snow hill with a crowd of other kids.

For Mayberry, the excitement of discovering the painting was akin to a collector of sports memorabilia unearthing a rare, trading card of a long-retired NHL star.

"It's a playful work and the kind of Kurelek painting which is most in demand by collectors across Canada," he said. "Important, early Kurelek pieces have come to light within the last year or so. I know people in Winnipeg own early Kureleks; I just don't know how many are out there."

'It's a playful work and the kind of Kurelek painting which is most in demand by collectors across Canada.'—Shaun Mayberry, Mayberry Fine Art

King of the Castle came to Mayberry's attention one day in the summer of 2008, when his BlackBerry buzzed in the early morning hours. It was an email from the painting's British owner, who wanted an appraisal and attached an image of the Kurelek piece.

Mayberry immediately recognized the significance of the painting, the whereabouts of which had been unknown to art dealers.

That email triggered a chain of events that culminated with Mayberry's purchase of the painting several months later. Now, he is planning the Canadian unveiling of King of the Castle.

It will be on display at Mayberry Fine Art from Nov. 14 to 28 alongside more than 100 other works by more than 30 of Canada's most prominent and historically-important artists from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Painting will be part of national tour

Not long after the Mayberry exhibit, King of the Castle will join a touring exhibition dedicated to Kurelek works.

When Mayberry was making arrangements to acquire the painting, he was unaware that the curators of a major Kurelek retrospective slated for Winnipeg, Victoria, B.C., and Hamilton, Ont., had identified that very painting as a must-find for their 2011-12 touring show.

The Winnipeg Art Gallery's associate curator of historical art, Andrew Kear, was about to launch a search to locate the work he coveted for the retrospective, Mayberry later learned.

'It's an early work which means it's rare to begin with and hard to track down, and the fact that it was overseas doesn't make it any easier to find.'—Andrew Kear, Winnipeg Art Gallery

Kear had only seen King of the Castle in old catalogues from art shows in England and had planned to start his search there. It was pure chance that Mayberry showed Kear a photo of the recent purchase when the latter was at Mayberry Fine Art on unrelated business.

"It's an early work which means it's rare to begin with and hard to track down, and the fact that it was overseas doesn't make it any easier to find," Kear said, calling the coincidental arrival of King of the Castle in Winnipeg a "fortuitous" event.

"It is a painting that immediately grabbed my attention because it combines two very significant things — the nostalgic theme from Kurelek's youth on the Prairies in Manitoba and, on the other hand, how he viewed society in general, as a kind of place of competition, of aggression," Kear noted.

"There is a moral message in a lot of his work and it is very clear in this one. I can't overemphasize the importance of this work to the retrospective exhibition."

Mayberry has agreed to hold off selling King of the Castle so it can be loaned for exhibition in the year-long Kurelek retrospective — the first major show of the artist's work in almost 30 years.

Kurelek was born near Whitford, Alta., in 1927, the oldest of seven children in a Ukrainian immigrant family. His family lost the farm during the Great Depression and moved to Stonewall, Man.

He later studied at the Ontario College of Art and at the Instituto Allende in Mexico. He died in Toronto in 1977.