PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Barbeau Owen Foundation Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Jane Young, E.J. Hughes, 1931 – 1982: A Retrospective Exhibition, Surrey Art Gallery, 1983, reproduced page 12 and listed page 96
Ian M. Thom, E.J. Hughes, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2002, reproduced page 192
Jacques Barbeau, A Journey with E.J. Hughes: One Collector’s Odyssey, 2005, reproduced page 42 and listed page 167
Jacques Barbeau, The E.J. Hughes Album, Volume 1, The Paintings, 1932 – 1991, 2011, reproduced page 77 and listed page 99
Jacques Barbeau, E.J. Hughes Through the Decades, Volume 1, The Paintings, 1935 – 2006, 2012, reproduced page 49

EXHIBITED
Surrey Art Gallery, E.J. Hughes, 1931 – 1982: A Retrospective Exhibition, November 18 – December 11, 1983, traveling in 1984 – 1985 to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; Edmonton Art Gallery; Glenbow Museum, Calgary; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, catalogue #45
Dominion Gallery, Montreal, Forty Years with E.J. Hughes, April 27 – May 18, 1991, catalogue #3
Nanaimo Art Gallery, From Sketches to Finished Works by E.J. Hughes, January 1 – February 17, 1993
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

Jacques Barbeau, who owned the painting Ladysmith, B.C. for many years, called it “a masterpiece of subtle colour orchestration.” He reported that “the overall effect is one of quiet solitude and serenity.”[1] This popular image was selected for the 1983 Surrey Art Gallery retrospective, the Dominion Gallery’s exhibition Forty Years with E.J. Hughes (1991), the Nanaimo Art Gallery’s 1993 show From Sketches to Finished Works by E.J. Hughes as well as the Vancouver Art Gallery’s E.J. Hughes retrospective of 2003.

In his career Hughes painted many views of small towns in British Columbia, and Ladysmith, B.C. is one of the most evocative. His descriptive frame label sets the scene: “This painting was produced from a 1948 pencil sketch from nature, made during a summer of sketching on the West Coast, made possible by an award of an Emily Carr Scholarship, presented by Lawren Harris Sr. himself.”

In about 1898, the Dunsmuir mines moved their operations from Wellington, north of Nanaimo, south to Extension. Ladysmith, 18 kilometres (11 miles) away, was developed as the port from which coal was shipped. The Extension mine eventually closed and the shipment of coal from Ladysmith concluded in about 1930. Ladysmith was then transformed into an important depot for the lumbering industry.

Hughes spent a week or two in 1948 at Ladysmith, where he recorded a number of scenes that served him for years to come. He also created a few small oils on panel at the time, showing the streets of the town running downhill to the harbour, and he made a precise pencil study, identical to our painting in almost every detail.

This view of Ladysmith looks down from the hillside past the little old false-front shops to the calm water beyond. A few cars and a truck are parked along the street, and a single man walks on his errand, oblivious to the gaze of the artist. In the harbour at the foot of the road, booms of logs are moored between pilings, while two yellow, black and white tugs tootle about, setting things right. A single white fishing boat makes its way out to the open water. Across the bay, the hillside looks rather bare—not surprising, considering the amount of timber floating in the water in front of it.

Early in 1983, Hughes wrote to his Montreal dealer Max Stern regarding his recently completed painting Ladysmith, B.C.:

I have now obtained a snap of the actual scene depicted in the painting, and have enclosed a print for you. Also enclosed is a snap of the painting, so you can compare the two. The sketch for the painting was done on the spot, in pencil, in 1948, so there has been quite a change since then. The only large building remaining is the one second from the left and even that has had the windows changed. The foreground vacant lot has now become a neatly kept lawn. The sketch was done from a slightly higher elevation than that from which the recent snap was taken so that explains the higher skyline of the background in the painting.[2]

In his book on Hughes, Ian Thom reproduced the painting and noted: “Hughes was, as always, particularly astute.… He is not simply repeating the image but distilling it into a timeless work of art.”[3]

From a photograph, probably taken by Hughes in 1987, adjustments that the artist made to create the image can be discovered. In her notes, Pat Salmon reported, “In September 1987 we took Michel Moreault there and Hughes immediately and with great agitation noticed that the old cream-yellow building with the grey roof in the left of the painting had been torn down.” In fact, many of the details are identifiably the same, and yet the photograph lacks that sunny somnolence of an out-of-the-way town on an autumn afternoon that Hughes, with his technical precision and subtle use of colour, brought to the painting.

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. Jacques Barbeau, A Journey with E.J. Hughes: One Collector’s Odyssey (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2005), 41.

2. E.J. Hughes to Max Stern, January 7, 1983, Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.

3. Ian M. Thom, E.J. Hughes (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, in assoc. with Douglas & McIntyre, 2002), exhibition catalogue, 193.

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

All prices are in Canadian Dollars