E.J. Hughes originally painted Low Tide, Qualicum Beach in oil in 1950, when he was an unemployed former official war artist. This early work (sold by Heffel in June 2022) was dark and moody, reflecting the artist’s post-war state of mind. When, half a century later, Hughes once again took up the subject, he brought to it the mellow wisdom of old age and lightened the mood of his earlier composition. Low Tide, Qualicum Beach, the watercolour from 2005, is a breezy and buoyant painting.

Making a considered addition to his earlier canvas, in the watercolour Hughes included a mother sitting on a log watching over her son, who has laid his toy sailboat aside and is digging in the sand. The endless waves no longer seem to represent an existential void but are now infused with his fond memories of the 1948 trip sponsored by the Emily Carr Scholarship that originally took him to Qualicum.

Hughes is most often admired for his evocation of the landscape and is not often thought of as a narrative painter, but close study of this work reveals him as more than just a recording eye. Amid the meticulously rendered waves, a number of boats at anchor off-shore await someone to put them to use. Along the water’s edge, at the centre line of the picture, a solitary man in a black suit with hat and cane is poised upon the border between land and sea. A raft marooned by the receding tide offers a springboard to an unknown future, though it is tied to the past by a rusty chain and a concrete anchor. Oblivious to these symbolic elements, three children—two girls and a boy—are lost in play, making sandcastles at the lower right side of the image.

Many artists have looked out from the water’s edge and painted the far shore. Hughes somehow brought an unusual power to this simple subject. He divided the picture plane into four horizontal sections. The lowest band is given over to the beach, dotted with scenes of figurative interest picked out in red, white and blue. Above it the prominent beached raft is set on an uptilted plane, akin to a tabletop by Paul Cézanne. The distance is marked by dark hills set against a luminous cloudscape. This powerful contrast seems to generate the relentless succession of waves, which command our interest as they roll down from the horizon to the centre line of the picture.

In the early days of his career, Hughes was sometimes considered a naïve or primitive painter, but this fine watercolour, created in the artist’s ninety-third year, demonstrates his discerning taste and a lifetime of training and practice. The whole composition is an extraordinary exercise in artifice, each element precisely placed and balanced in colour and form within the whole.

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.