PROVENANCE
Acquired directly from the Artist
Barbeau Owen Foundation Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
E.J. Hughes, “My Impressions When Viewing Nature,” Canadian Art, vol. 13, no. 4, Summer 1956, the related 1952 canvas mentioned page 314
Howard White, editor, Raincoast Chronicles Six/Ten: Stories and History of the B.C. Coast, 1983, the related 1952 canvas The Car Ferry at Sidney, B.C. reproduced page 42
Ian M. Thom, E.J. Hughes, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2002, the related 1952 canvas reproduced page 111
Jacques Barbeau, A Journey with E.J. Hughes: One Collector’s Odyssey, 2005, reproduced page 120 and listed page 168
Jacques Barbeau, E.J. Hughes Through the Decades, Volume 1, The Paintings, 1935 – 2006, 2012, reproduced page 85
Robert Amos, E.J. Hughes Paints Vancouver Island, 2018, the related 1952 canvas, titled as The Car Ferry at Sidney, reproduced page 43
Robert Amos, The E.J. Hughes Book of Boats, 2020, the related 1952 pencil drawing The Car Ferry at Sidney reproduced page 4

EXHIBITED
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, E.J. Hughes, J.L. Shadbolt, Paintings, October 1 – 16, 1955, the related 1952 canvas
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, the related 1952 canvas

Vancouver Island was the home of E.J. Hughes for most of his life. There is something romantic about Island life, where coming and going often involves a boat ride. In 1948, when Hughes was awarded the Emily Carr Scholarship, he set out to gather subject matter for his paintings. He began with day trips to Sidney, a breezy seaside town 27 kilometres (16 ¾ miles) north of Victoria, before his longer up-Island ventures to Ladysmith, Nanaimo and Courtenay.

At Sidney he painted the jaunty little steamships that sailed between that town and the Southern Gulf Islands. These ships were among the best-loved subjects he painted during his long career. The Car Ferry at Sidney, B.C. shows the MV Motor Princess, which traveled the route between Sidney and Bellingham in Washington State before being reassigned to the Nanaimo-Vancouver route. Hughes painted the harbour on a blustery day, with a flag snapping in the breeze and the seagulls facing into the wind. The ship is straining at its mooring lines and smoke is billowing from the stack. The captain can be made out on the bridge, with his brass buttons gleaming.

The earlier oil painting of this subject, dated 1952, was first shown at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1955, in an exhibition that paired Hughes with Jack Shadbolt. On October 3, 1955, Hughes’s dealer, Max Stern, wrote to him: “The show is now hanging. It consists of 20 paintings and 6 drawings. The exhibition looks very well, and we have succeeded already in selling one to the National Gallery.”[1] That painting was The Car Ferry at Sidney, B.C. (1952).

Hughes later wrote about this painting in an article titled “My Impressions When Viewing Nature,” published in Canadian Art magazine:

The white ferry, with repeated windows, and the sky, Gulf Island hills, the sea and the movement caused by breezes are some of the elements that combined to make this scene as I sketched it. I later (in 1952) tried to put it down as I saw and felt it. The painting was done almost directly with very little changing from the arrangement in the original sketch. The seagulls and people were really there but the small boat to the left was added later and the tree moved a little to the right.[2]

Ian Thom exhibited the National Gallery’s painting in the 2003 retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery and in the accompanying book had this to say: “It is in this space between observed reality and the imagination that Hughes makes his art.” [3]

Hughes traveled to Vancouver for that exhibition and, after seeing the original oil hanging there, he was inspired to revisit this fine composition in a different medium, watercolour. Like many of the paintings of this period, it was purchased by Jacques Barbeau immediately upon completion.

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. Max Stern to E.J. Hughes, October 3, 1955, Special Collections, University of Victoria Libraries.

2. E.J. Hughes, “My Impressions When Viewing Nature,” Canadian Art 13, no. 4 (Summer 1956): 314.

3. Ian M. Thom, E.J. Hughes (Vancouver, BC: Vancouver Art Gallery, in assoc. with Douglas & McIntyre, 2002), exhibition catalogue, 108.

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

All prices are in Canadian Dollars