Peter Doig’s painting White Canoe (1990/91) is considered one of the Scottish-Canadian artist’s best-known and most mysterious works. The painting depicts a tranquil, almost dreamlike scene: a white canoe floating on dark, mirror-smooth water. The scene is suffused with deep greens, shades of blue, and diffuse light. The boat is reflected on the water’s surface in a slightly distorted form, blurring the boundary between reality and reflection. This shimmering blur is a central feature of Doig’s painting, which often oscillates between memory, dream, and perception.

Doig found the inspiration for White Canoe in a film image—a scene from the horror film Friday the 13th (1980) in which a canoe drifts alone on a lake. However, the artist isolated this motif from its original context and transformed it into a poetic, almost meditative image. The threatening atmosphere of the film dissolves in the painting into a mood of silence and infinity. In this way, Doig illustrates how powerful painting as a medium is in transforming images from popular culture and giving them new levels of meaning.

The canoe becomes a symbol. It refers to Canadian landscapes and experiences of nature, to traveling and being on the move, but also to loneliness, lostness, and the fragility of existence. Doig’s composition combines the tradition of landscape painting with a contemporary, cinematic perspective. At the same time, the tense silence in the image emphasizes a kind of psychological depth: the viewer is transported into a state of pause and reflection.

White Canoe also gained special significance in art history. When it was sold at auction in 2007, it fetched a record price of around $11 million for a work by a living European artist. This event brought Doig to the center of international attention and cemented his status as one of the most important painters of his generation.

Today, White Canoe is considered a key work that exemplifies Doig’s painterly strategy: the combination of personal memory, cinematic imagery, and traditional landscape representation. The mysterious beauty of the painting has a magnetic pull that invites viewers to engage with their own associations and emotions—as if they themselves were drifting, like the canoe, on the still waters between dream and reality.

The original painting White Canoe by landscape painter Peter Doig sold at an auction in London in 2007 for 7.5 million pounds, the equivalent of just under $13 million, setting a record for the artist’s work. The phenomenal sale on June 30th was further evidence of Peter Doig’s success and has now reached new heights. White Canoe, a 1990-1991 horror film-inspired painting, is offered at Sotheby’s with an estimated price of $1.5 million. In a bidding war, the price climbs to $11.3 million. The anonymous buyer is Boris Ivanishvili, a Russian collector who made his fortune in ore mining and banking.

This graphic is based on this painting.