PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
The Art Emporium, Vancouver, 1977
Private Collection, Vancouver
Canadian Post-War & Contemporary Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 27, 2015, lot 50
Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Howard White, editor, Raincoast Chronicles Ten: Stories and History of the B.C. Coast, 1983, reproduced front cover
Jacques Barbeau, The E.J. Hughes Album, Volume 1, The Paintings, 1932 – 1991, 2011, reproduced page 46

In 1953, E.J. Hughes was approached to create illustrations for The Lamp, a publication of the Standard Oil Company. To achieve this, Hughes’s dealer, Dr. Max Stern of the Dominion Gallery in Montreal, arranged for him to travel north that summer on Standard Oil’s small tanker the Imperial Nanaimo. On this trip, the tanker visited a number of remote communities on the British Columbia coast with supplies of stove oil, gasoline and fuel oil. These logging sites and fish canneries included Namu, Echo Bay, Minstrel and Gilford Islands, and eventually Cumshewa Inlet on Haida Gwaii. After the trip, Hughes reported to Stern: “My sketches were all very rough though as the stops were short, and I had to work rapidly.”[1]

Hughes brought home 39 drawings that formed the basis for five paintings, which would soon be reproduced in The Lamp. Beyond that, these drawings also provided him with subjects that served him for the rest of his career. He created an oil painting titled Store at Allison Harbour in 1955, and a vertical composition in watercolour that included the fishing boat, the Irene. K, at Allison Harbour in 1962. In 1966, Hughes went on to develop this subject into the striking oil painting offered here.

Allison Harbour is a small natural cove named after a logging manager who worked there in the 1920s. Hughes described it as “a refuge for small boats, halfway up the B.C. coast and opposite the open Pacific Ocean.”[2] Situated beyond the northern tip of Vancouver Island, it was the site of a post office and a Union Steamship Company landing. During his brief stopover Hughes drew a detailed study of the Imperial Nanaimo at the wharf and on a separate sheet of paper added the Irene. K in the foreground. By way of context, he added the simple volumes of the oil tanks and small buildings.

The artist took up the drawings again in 1962 when he developed the image as a watercolour. In that painting, he was able to set the strong black, white and red forms of the ships against a misty mid-coast shoreline. (Decades later, in 1992, Hughes painted a horizontal version of this subject in watercolour focusing on the Imperial Nanaimo.)

In 1966, Hughes brought out his drawings of Allison Harbour once more and created a powerful oil painting in a rare vertical format. In this stunning canvas, Hughes shows his mastery of composition, building a complex scene full of strong forms and volume. The mood of the natural setting is that of a sombre, steely overcast day, with mist effects drifting through the forest’s edge in the background. Hughes used bright whites in contrast to the black of the ships’ hulls, to accent both the ships and the buildings on the dock. The rich red and gold on the Imperial Nanaimo generates light and warmth, and the calm waters near the wharf gave him the chance to create a shimmering reflection of the Imperial Nanaimo in the middle distance.

Heightened colour and dramatic, almost supernatural lighting and bold composition take this canvas of the 1960s beyond simple realism. Hughes’s powerful canvases from this decade are greatly sought after. As part of his contract, Hughes sold this painting to the Dominion Gallery on August 5, 1966, at which time Stern, Hughes’s exclusive agent, reported, “Mrs. Stern and I are delighted with the painting.”

This image appeared on the cover of Raincoast Chronicles Ten in 1983, most likely chosen for its iconic coastal subject matter as well as its rare vertical format.

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. E.J. Hughes to Max Stern, September 3, 1953, Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.

2. E.J. Hughes frame label for The Store at Allison Harbour II (1991), Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars