In the last two decades of his life, E.J. Hughes constantly added new imagery to his repertoire, and in the summers of 1987 and 1993, he made extensive sketching tours along the coastline of the Cowichan Valley. During those years he also revisited favourite compositions from his earlier oil paintings. The new watercolours show that he was not simply turning out replicas of earlier works; it is as if a composer had, in his later years, scored his symphonies for a string quartet.

Early in 1958, Hughes shipped the original oil painting titled Qualicum to his dealer in Montreal, Max Stern at the Dominion Gallery. Stern wrote to Hughes: “We have just received your painting Qualicum and all of us really love it, we admire the beautiful shells and stones and even the way they appear through the water. It really is a very good and beautiful painting.”[1] This canvas is now in the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, donated by Elizabeth Nichol, owner of the Equinox Gallery.

Later, in the catalogue that accompanied the 1983 Hughes retrospective at the Surrey Art Gallery, Jane Young wrote of the 1958 oil:

The painting is exquisite not only for the deep, vivid colours and the delightful motif of the shells and rocks showing through the water, but by virtue of the assured and simple arrangement of the elements.… Each shell is whole, without broken or chipped edges, not as they are in nature, but as Hughes would prefer them to be in the idealized world of his mind’s eye.[2]

In May 1998, the collector and patron Jacques Barbeau visited Hughes in Duncan and, at that time, inquired of Hughes’s friend Pat Salmon whether the artist might undertake to make a watercolour version of the much-admired canvas Qualicum. Since 1993, Hughes had no longer been able to stand at his easel for hours as was required for oil painting but worked seated at his painting table every afternoon, six days a week, painting watercolours. Consequently, it was with pleasure that, fifty years after his initial 1948 visit to Qualicum Beach, Hughes accepted Barbeau’s request and recreated the joy and wonder of the scene in the intimate medium of watercolour. Hughes felt that his painterly skills and his powerful concentration were as sharp as ever. The subject was still fresh in his imagination.

The artist used a simple palette of Winsor & Newton watercolours, filling pans from tubes of that artist-quality paint. For many years he painted on the thickest paper, an English product called Green’s Pasteless Board, but when the Emily Carr College of Art and Design (formerly the Vancouver School of Art) presented him with a diploma in 1985, he received as a bonus 50 sheets of good-quality French watercolour paper. From that time onward, he painted all his watercolours on 400lb Arches 100 percent cotton watercolour paper.

In his book A Journey with E.J. Hughes, Barbeau described how he acquired the watercolour Qualicum and his reaction to it. Six or eight weeks after his visit to Hughes in Duncan, Michel Moreault, director of the Dominion Gallery, phoned to advise him that Qualicum, the watercolour, had arrived at the gallery in Montreal. Writes Barbeau: “I quickly fell in love with this reinterpretation.… A careful and attentive look at both the oil and the watercolour versions of Qualicum will persuade even the most ardent critic that each version has its own cachet, conveying its own distinct message.”[3]

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, March 10, 1958, Special Collections, University of Victoria.

2. Jane Young, E.J. Hughes, 1931–1982: A Retrospective Exhibition (Surrey: Surrey Art Gallery, 1983), 59.

3. Jacques Barbeau, A Journey with E.J. Hughes, 2nd ed. (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2005), 73–74.

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