Sold for: $541,250

PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Emme Frankenberg, Montreal
By descent to a Private Collection, Ontario
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 25, 2005, lot 136, reproduced front cover
Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Doris Shadbolt, E.J. Hughes, Vancouver Art Gallery, 1967, reproduced, unpaginated
Jane Young, E.J. Hughes, 1931 – 1982: A Retrospective Exhibition, Surrey Art Gallery, 1983, page 55

EXHIBITED
Vancouver Art Gallery, E.J. Hughes, 1967, catalogue #15

When E.J. Hughes returned to Canada in 1946 from his duties as an official war artist, he began a series of paintings of the coast of British Columbia that are among the most singular paintings ever produced in the country. Other artists soon recognized his work, most notably Lawren Harris, who recommended him to the National Gallery of Canada and to Hart House. By 1950 Hughes had major paintings in public collections in Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa. Harris also supported his work through the awarding of an Emily Carr Scholarship, which allowed Hughes to sketch around Vancouver Island in 1947 and 1948. Drawings done during this period served as source material for his work for several years.

Although other artists recognized him, it was difficult for Hughes to make a go of a career because he was a very deliberate painter. The dates on the back of this canvas, from November 1949 to June 1950, covering a period of more than seven months, suggest the consideration that Hughes brought to all of his images. Low Tide at Qualicum Beach is the result of a careful process of distillation and refinement; there is nothing casual or haphazard about it. His care is equally reflected in the development and organization of the composition – the positioning of the figures, the use of light and dark, and the patterns of the water surfaces, from the shimmering of shallow water flowing in tidal action over the sand to the whitecaps on the ocean waves. Even the placement and colour of the buckets that the children use is part of a dense and closely knit fabric.

Low Tide at Qualicum Beach is one of a rare group of paintings from the late 1940s, when Hughes developed a style influenced by “primitive” painters such as Henri Rousseau. These works are characterized by a precise and stylized approach to detail and a slight distortion of perspective as well as repeated linear patterning. Hughes explained:

I admire the primitives so much, especially their flattening and slight distortions…[which] lead them to make the shapes more interesting on the picture plane…When I see it coming into my picture subconsciously, I leave them in even though the perspective may be slightly out if it helps the composition.

Two examples of this willingness to distort are particularly prominent in this painting – the depiction of the raft or float that rests on the sand (since the tide is out) and the depiction of the sky in relation to the background mountains. Hughes’s unusual viewpoint of the raft is from above, seen from a rise of land behind the beach, so that it appears to be tilted up, while the silhouettes of the boats, farther out on the ocean, are seen from the side. The chain anchoring the raft is an extremely effective colour accent. We read the colour as rust, but it is much more likely that a chain on a raft would be covered with seaweed and barnacles and dull in colour, rather than vivid orange brown. The dark silhouette of the mountain range against the yellowish light in the sky that breaks through the dark grey of the clouds creates a strong, dramatic contrast. Hughes was an expert at capturing and heightening the unusual lighting effects sometimes seen on the coast, which appear to be almost unreal but do, in fact, exist.

The entire composition is a remarkable exercise in artifice, each element sharply finished, precisely placed, and balanced in colour and form within the whole. It is, however, artifice of the most exceptional sort because it convinces us of a larger truth - that the world is a place of phenomenal and unusual beauty—and we can share in Hughes’s extraordinary perception of it.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars