Private Collection Presentation
Eight life-sized oil portraits of the 1920s Montreal Canadiens. Discovered, restored, and now fully identified.
Oil on board · ca. 1925–1932 · 68 × 30½ inches each · Professionally conserved · All eight players confirmed through La Presse archival records.
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Section II — The Discovery
The Montreal Forum stood at 2313 Sainte-Catherine Street West for seventy years. When the Canadiens moved to the Molson Centre in 1996, workers demolishing the building found the paintings.
Eight portraits. Life-sized. The players unmistakably in the Canadiens' uniform of the 1920s. They were acquired by Christopher English and professionally restored in 2013 by Tom Yost of Yost Conservation, LLC — a $20,000 treatment that addressed decades of accumulated damage and brought these works back to their proper condition.
“There was a lot of time and skill that went into these paintings.”
— Christopher English, Original Acquirer
Section III — Historical Validation
Between December 10, 1927 and March 3, 1928, La Presse published full-page photographs of individual Canadiens players in its weekly Saturday advertising supplement. Each player appears in his uniform against a plain background — the same presentation as the paintings. These archival scans, held by the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, provided the basis for confirming all eight identities.
