PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Canada Council Art Bank, 1972
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Private Collection
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 25, 2005, lot 150
Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Paul Duval, Four Decades: The Canadian Group of Painters and Their Contemporaries, 1972, reproduced page 160
Robert Amos, E.J. Hughes Paints British Columbia, 2019, reproduced page 146

E.J. Hughes is best known for his coastal scenes, but he made a number of trips across the interior of British Columbia, gathering materials for paintings he subsequently completed throughout his career. One of these was this canvas showing three little lakes glowing like jewels among the rolling hills west of Williams Lake.

Hughes reported good news to his sister Zoe on March 8, 1963: “I applied again this year for a Canada Council Fellowship and was just advised last month that I have been awarded one! It is not for the full amount of $4000, but it is $3000 and that will be adequate for five or six months of extended sketching to areas of BC and the Alberta Rockies.

“I hope to obtain enough pencil sketches this year to produce paintings in the studio for five or six years to come,” he continued. “It will be a problem and a task to make art out of such beautiful and picturesque subjects … but I feel it can be done if they are only well-painted and composed on the canvas.”[1]

The Canada Council award gave Hughes the confidence to buy a new maroon Pontiac Acadian. At last he would not have to do so much walking to get to his sketching sites.

On July 3, 1963, Hughes wrote to his dealer Max Stern about the initial sketching journey, which he and his wife Fern had just completed. “Our first trip, to the Interior, was to Cache Creek for one week, Williams Lake for week, and the last week at Kamloops.… From Williams Lake, I obtained some different Fraser canyon scenes, and some of beautiful Williams Lake, itself.”

As usual, Hughes did not paint on site but created highly detailed and annotated drawings from which he worked later in his studio. Three paintings resulted from his time at Williams Lake. The first was a view of small blue lakes titled West of Williams Lake, which he painted first in watercolour in 1963, and then as an oil in 1964.

Soon after returning to his home at Shawnigan Lake, on November 25, 1963, Hughes sent the watercolour to the Dominion Gallery. In the accompanying letter, he told Stern: “West of Williams Lake depicts cattle ranching scenery in the BC Interior ‘dry belt’ west of the Fraser River not many miles from the city of Williams Lake, and just east of a small settlement called Riske Creek.”

Six months later, on May 19, 1964, he dispatched the oil painting West of Williams Lake and wrote to Stern: “The original pencil sketch was done from my car, parked by the side of the Bella Coola road, about 20 mi. west of the city of Williams Lake, BC.” The canvas shows part of a drumlin field, sediments deposited by the retreating glaciers of the last ice age. Wildflowers spring from the dry soil in the foreground, and the charming lakes are enfolded in the gently rolling hills. Small bushes and what may be dark coniferous trees could easily be mistaken for some of the dozens of black cattle that graze near the water’s edge in this bucolic ranching scene.

In 1972, Stern reported to Hughes that the Canada Council had purchased three of his paintings, including the canvas West of Williams Lake. Hughes responded in his letter of October 21, 1972: “Official recognition like this, from such an important art body, is most encouraging.”

In July of 1979, the Canada Council Art Bank opted to return to the Dominion Gallery two of the Hughes paintings, and the gallery bought West of Williams Lake for $4,370. On March 21, 1980, Stern wrote to Hughes that he had already resold it, likely for five times the amount. Through Stern’s efforts, over time Hughes became better known for his exquisite BC landscapes such as West of Williams Lake, a harmonious composition that distills, in subtle gradations of colour ranging across the spectrum, the big sky and open country of BC’s Chilcotin region.

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. Copies of all correspondence in Special Collections, University of Victoria.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars