PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Barbeau Owen Foundation Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Jacques Barbeau, A Journey with E. J. Hughes: One Collector’s Odyssey, 2005, reproduced page 4 and listed page 165
Jacques Barbeau, E.J. Hughes Through the Decades, Volume 2, The Paper Works, 1931 – 1986, 2014, reproduced page 37 and listed page 84
Robert Amos, E.J. Hughes Paints Vancouver Island, 2018, the related 1948 pencil sketch reproduced page 138 and the related 1950 oil reproduced page 139

Nanaimo was the hometown of E.J. Hughes. In 1884, Edward Hughes, the artist’s grandfather, left North Wales, traveling across Canada before the opening of the railway. He arrived at the coal mines at Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island, and there raised a family. The artist, born in 1913, spent the first 10 years of his life in Nanaimo.

It was natural that Hughes chose to draw the Bastion, a wooden defence position built by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1853 and the focal point of the city of Nanaimo. Behind it stands the stone post office building, and to its rear is the Malaspina Hotel, site of a mural painting project Hughes undertook with Orville Fisher and Paul Goranson in 1938. During a seminal sketching trip in 1948 sponsored by the Emily Carr Scholarship, Hughes again stayed in the Malaspina Hotel. Walking south past the post office, he took up a position on the little commercial harbour—since filled in—and sketched the view looking back up to the Bastion.

Hughes’s original sketch included the water and boats on the shore, but as he developed the image, he chose to focus on the historic wooden blockhouse. Later in his studio the artist drew this “cartoon,” a complete tonal rendering of the subject, in preparation for the 1950 oil painting. The precise lines, architectural details and rich, varied tones of the sketch demonstrate his superb skills as a draughtsman. He revisited this subject again in 1998 in watercolour.

We thank Robert Amos, artist and writer from Victoria, BC, for contributing the above essay. Amos is the official biographer of Hughes and has so far published five books on his work. Building on the archives of Hughes’s friend Pat Salmon, Amos is at work on a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work.

For the biography on Jacques Barbeau and Margaret Owen Barbeau in PDF format, please click here.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars