PROVENANCE
John Avison, Vancouver
Pappas Auctions, Vancouver, 1997
Barbeau Owen Foundation Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Jane Young, E.J. Hughes, 1931 – 1982: A Retrospective Exhibition, Surrey Art Gallery, 1983, reproduced page 33 and listed page 98
Ian M. Thom, E.J. Hughes, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2002, reproduced page 55
Jacques Barbeau, A Journey with E.J. Hughes: One Collector’s Odyssey, 2005, reproduced page 64 and listed page 164
Robert Amos, The E J. Hughes Book of Boats, 2020, reproduced page 13
Jason Vanderhill, Illustrated Vancouver, 2022, the related Indian Life mural reproduced, https://illustratedvancouver.ca/post/661429783172923392/the-biggest-art-history-mystery

EXHIBITED
Surrey Art Gallery, E.J. Hughes, 1931 – 1982: A Retrospective Exhibition, November 18 – December 11, 1983, titled as Study for a mural: “Indian Life,” Surrey only, catalogue #55
Vancouver Art Gallery, E.J. Hughes, January 30 – June 8, 2003, traveling to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

In 1938, E.J. Hughes and his fellow art school grad Paul Goranson returned from fishing at Rivers Inlet to begin work on a high-profile mural project. The provincial government had commissioned 12 murals to be installed in the provincial pavilion at the Golden Gate Exposition in San Francisco, each mural 16 feet wide and 10 feet high.

This gem-like watercolour study for Indian Life conveys a remarkable amount of information. The totems were brought forward from Hughes’s 1937 study Totem Poles at Stanley Park. An Indigenous woman stands on a curving boardwalk like the waterfront of the Squamish reserve in North Vancouver. There is a clapboard church that Hughes based on one in South Vancouver by the Fraser River. Beyond it a three-funneled CPR coastal ship, the Prince Robert, steams out of the harbour. The hills and peaks are reminiscent of the mainland coast north of Powell River. The shawl the woman is wearing is the Mackenzie Tartan, familiar from Hughes’s cadet training with the Seaforth Highlanders.

This watercolour belonged to John Avison, a fellow student of Hughes at the Vancouver School of Art (and later a noted conductor of the CBC Vancouver Chamber Orchestra). Pat Salmon discovered it, one of four studies, at Pappas Auctions in Vancouver in 1997, and she alerted collector Jacques Barbeau. Two others were purchased by the Vancouver Art Gallery at that sale.[1]

Indian Life is the pinnacle of Hughes’s pre-war expression. With sweet poetry he presents life on the north shore of Burrard Inlet. On a minute scale, he drew the young man straining to pull his dugout canoe up onto the beach and two children sitting near the church. Already at this stage of his career, Hughes was an accomplished artist capable of rendering complex compositions and subjects with great sensitivity and style.

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.

1. A detailed description of the purchase of this drawing is presented in Jacques Barbeau, A Journey with E.J. Hughes: One Collector’s Odyssey (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2005), 65 and 67.

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

All prices are in Canadian Dollars