E.J. Hughes enlisted in the Canadian Army in 1939 and became an official war artist but, when he was demobilized in 1946, he had no patrons and no market on Canada’s West Coast. Fortunately, Lawren Harris had his eye on Hughes.

Harris had introduced Emily Carr to Max Stern, owner of Montreal’s Dominion Gallery, in 1944, and Stern became Carr’s only dealer. After her death in 1945, Harris arranged for the Emily Carr Trust to give many of her best paintings to the people of British Columbia. The remainder were sold by the Dominion Gallery, and the money raised was used to create the Emily Carr Scholarship Fund.

When Hughes was released from the army, Harris awarded him the scholarship of $1,200, which, at the time, seemed to Hughes an enormous sum. Harris hoped that this would enable Hughes to sail north and paint as Carr had done. As it turned out, the Dominion Gallery subsequently became the sole agent for Hughes’s resulting artwork.[1]

When the money arrived in the spring of 1947, Hughes booked passage on the Princess Adelaide, bound for Prince Rupert on the Inside Passage. The Adelaide was the first and largest of the CPR’s fleet of Princess steamships, built in Scotland in 1919. She embodied the charm that Hughes was to convey in his subsequent paintings of the Princess ships.

After a stop at Alert Bay, the Princess Adelaide called in at Englewood on Vancouver Island, just south of Port McNeill. A lumber mill had been built there in 1924, with a post office, general store and community hall on the wharf. A logging railway brought timber to the mill, and from the ship the artist made a rapid drawing with many annotations. In 1951, Hughes used this sketch as the basis for an oil painting titled Englewood and, half a century later, he revisited the scene as the basis for this 2002 watercolour.

Many of his late-period watercolours revisit favourite compositions from his early days. On June 27, 1995, Hughes informed Michel Moreault at the Dominion Gallery, “I’m still painting 4 hrs. a day, on the large watercolours, and still, at this age [he was 82], learning about the handling of the medium. As you said, in one of your letters, ‘It is a difficult medium.’ ”[2] Hughes practised the pure British watercolour method, in which all colours are transparent, with no additions of white or opaque “body colour.” He built up an intensity of colour by repeated applications of washes, and brush-strokes are never seen. There are no “happy accidents” in a Hughes watercolour.

Hughes wrote again to Moreault on October 5, 1996: “I am getting the desired effects of composition that I’m after, and I’m satisfied to keep on with watercolours.” About this time, Pat Salmon, his long-time assistant, wrote in her diary: “Hughes’s tonal range in the watercolour is quite remarkable for a medium known for its bland colours. If a comparison were ever done, one could see that his latest watercolours are simply the best watercolours ever done [in Canada]. Even Franklin Carmichael of the Group [of Seven] can’t touch them.”[3]

In his book A Journey with E.J. Hughes, Jacques Barbeau described how the painting came to him:

By the spring of 2002, E.J. Hughes, forever devoted to my cause, undertook to remedy another gap in the collection. He produced the watercolour counterpart of the forsaken oil rendition of Englewood I had originally seen at the Dominion Gallery in the early 1980s. I remember the experience as if it were yesterday. It had a mesmerizing impact upon me. The painting oozes mysticism—like a vision from Wuthering Heights. It disturbed me, yet it captivated my mind.…

As contrasted to its oil counterpart, the watercolour rendition of Englewood is a melodious and lithe rendition of this intriguing coastal sawmill site.… The same subject but an entirely different tonality emerges in the watercolour to generate a completely different mood. Where the oil is harsh and hard-edged, the watercolour is gentle and supple—one confronting and the other mollifying the viewer.[4]

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 Emily Carr Scholarship and Hughes’s travels is recorded in Robert Amos, E.J. Hughes Paints British Columbia (Victoria: TouchWood Editions, 2019), 43–46.

2. E.J. Hughes to Michel Moreault, June 27, 1995. Correspondence available at Special Collections, University of Victoria.

3. Pat Salmon diary entry November 18, 2004, Special Collections, University of Victoria.

4. Jacques Barbeau, A Journey with E.J. Hughes, 2nd ed. (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2005), 89.

For the biography on Jacques Barbeau and Margaret Owen Barbeau in PDF format, <