Peter Doig has the résumé of an art superstar—he’s been showing his atmospheric landscapes in major international galleries and museums for more than a decade and is credited with inspiring a generation of young painters. Still, he has managed to stay relatively under the radar. So when White Canoe, 1990–91, sold for £5.7 million ($11.3 million), then the highest price ever paid for a work by a living European artist, to a Russian buyer at Sotheby’s London last February, the art world was stunned.

Although Doig’s paintings have been fetching six- and seven-figure prices at auction for the past five years and White Canoe is considered an extraordinary example of his painterly style, its record price has been regarded as a bit of a fluke. Nevertheless, museums and a few lucky collectors immediately snap up his new works, of which the artist makes only six to eight a year. “He has a show, people fall in love with the paintings, but they can’t buy them because the works are going to museums,” explains Francis Outred, senior director of contemporary art at Sotheby’s London and a longtime Doig supporter. “This pent-up demand creates a situation where people will go to the end of the earth to buy them.”

Could Doig’s current museum survey at the Tate Britain mean more auction records and even greater demand? Regardless of the market’s response to his pictures, Tate chief curator Judith Nesbitt says the moment is right for the artist’s first major retrospective: “Two decades of sustained development means there is a mature body of work to survey. And it’s always worth paying attention to someone whose output is so continually interesting to other artists as well as to the wider public.” The show, which is on view through April 27 and then travels to the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, features 50 paintings and a group of works on paper created from 1989 to the present, including portraits and landscapes, plus six brand-new-works.

Doig’s landscapes are richly layered—both formally and conceptually—and draw on a variety of art-historical references, from Munch and Monet to Friedrich and Klimt. His imagery is based on found postcards as well as photographs, some found and some that he has taken himself. Lake scenes with canoes, cabins nestled in the woods and skiers dotting mountain landscapes are his best-known and most repeated subjects. Despite the recognizability of Doig’s subjects, his painterly touch and off-kilter compositions create a dreamy strangeness that renders the familiar unsettling. “I’ve always made the case that he’s not an image painter; he’s a conceptual painter,” says Gordon VeneKlassen, of Michael Werner Gallery, in New York. “He finds something he likes and makes it in 15 different ways to adjust the surface.”

Doig’s appeal extends beyond aficionados of contemporary work. “One of the underbidders on White Canoe was an Impressionist and modern collector who was drawn by the very potent link with Klimt,” says Outred.

Born in Edinburgh in 1959, Doig moved to Trinidad as a child and then to Canada, where he spent most of his youth. He relocated to London to study art at St. Martin’s in the late 1980s and remained there until he returned to Trinidad in 2002. Doig was noticed fresh out of the master’s program at the Chelsea School of Art when, in 1991, he was awarded the Whitechapel gallery’s Artist Award and given a show at that prestigious London institution. “That was a big thing,” says Outred, adding that the paintings Doig made then have formed the “matrix for the rest of his work: In that show you see the first cabins, the first canoes.” Doig’s cabin paintings were inspired by a visit to the Unité d’Habitation, Le Corbusiers Brutalist housing complex in Briey-en-Foret, France. Last October, Christie’s London sold Concrete Cabin, 1995–96, for £916,500 ($1.8 million), and at Sotheby’s London that same month, Briey, 1992, realized £58,100 ($119,000)—a significant price for a small oil on board.

The cabin pictures have performed consistently well at auction, but according to Outred, the escalation of Doig’s market started with the sale of his first canoe painting, Swamped, 1990, at Sotheby’s London in 2002. “At the time, Doig’s highest price at auction was roughly $160,000. We priced the painting at £80,000 to £100,000, and it ended up making roughly £320,000 [$450,000], which was really staggering. There weren’t those kinds of prices for young artists at all—it wasn’t the same climate.” The seller had originally paid £1,000 for the work.

“All of Peter’s themes are sought after, but the canoe paintings are most highly prized,” says London dealer Victoria Miro, who along with Gavin Brown, in New York, has represented Doig since 1994. The motif was inspired by a lake scene in the 1980 horror flick Friday the 13th. Doig watched the film in 1987, viewed the scene and went straight to his studio to paint it.

The top-selling White Canoe was once among Charles Saatchis collection of seven Doigs; last year he sold all of them to Sotheby’s for a reported $11 million. Saatchi’s divestment did not hurt Doig’s market—quite the contrary. Last May at Sotheby’s New York, The Architect’s Home in the Ravine, 1991, sold for $3.6 million (est. $1.8 million); Saatchi had paid £322,500 ($450,000) for it in 2002. Last June, Orange Sunshine, 1995–96, sold in London for £1.8 million ($3.6 million), well above its estimate of £600,000 to £800,000 ($1.2–1.6 million). Sotheby’s has more than recovered its investment even before offering the four remaining Saatchi consignments.

After the spectacular results of White Canoe, there was a danger that Doig’s prices would balloon, but they have gone up only slightly. “The market showed a logical response,” says Pilar Ordovas, head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s London. “Sales have still been very good, but not like that one. Everyone considers the White Canoe price extraordinary.”

“Dedicated collectors knew it was sort of a crazy thing,” says VeneKlassen, who will be organizing a show of Doig’s new paintings at Michael Werner later this year (the gallery occasionally shows Doig and offers secondary-market material). “But it has had the effect of bringing out of the woodwork paintings that collectors think they can sell now.” When Doig’s larger paintings sell privately on the secondary market, they go for around $1.5 million to $3 million, VeneKlassen says, while smaller paintings fetch $250,000 to $450,000.

More moderately priced are Doig’s works on paper. Paragon Press, Crown Point Press, Sabine Knust and Griffelkunst have published several editions of his prints. On the secondary market, they range from around $1,000 to as much as $60,000, depending on the image and edition number. Examples from Doig’s “100 Years Ago,” made in an edition of 46 and published with Paragon in 2001, appear most frequently at auction and fetch the highest prices; one set of eight prints sold last spring for £30,000 ($59,311) at Christie’s London.

Galerie Maximillian, in Aspen, which specializes in prints, recently acquired two complete editions of “100 Years Ago” and immediately sold one of them for $20,000 to $35,000 per print, says director Albert Sanford.

Prints from the remaining edition are on view at the gallery through the end of February. These evocative works, which Sanford characterizes as “very large for prints,” suggest film stills; one of the best known, depicting a long-haired man in a canoe, was inspired by a 1970 Allman Brothers album cover. “The works resonate because the buyers—people in their 50s—are haunted by nostalgia for that era,” notes Sanford.

Since his move to Trinidad, Doig has turned to the local landscape for his subjects—islands, palm trees and lagoon scenes, in particular. Although these pictures are largely unavailable because of the artist’s limited production, variations on paper are reasonably priced at auction. An untitled color aquatint with etching based on the 2004 painting Pelican sold at Villa Grisebach, in Berlin, last June for €566 ($754), and Green Palm, 2004, a lacquer-on-card version of Pelican, sold at Reiss & Sohn, in Mainz, last April for €720 ($982). Perhaps the most affordable of Doig’s works are his “Studiofilmclub” posters, which he paints for a cinema society he runs with an artist-friend in Trinidad. He makes posters for most of the screenings, and they occasionally surface at auction for around $1,000 or less. In December 2006 at Phillips de Pury in New York, one of these screen prints sold for just $300.

Prices for all of Doig’s pictures stand to strengthen on the heels of the Tate survey, as does their creator’s reputation. “There will be a much wider understanding of the artist that few really know, because they’ve only seen works in reproduction,” says VeneKlassen. “Many works are really experimental. The Tate exhibition is not just a show of pretty canoes.”

"Market File" originally appeared in the February 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's February 2008 Table of Contents.