PROVENANCE
Collection of the Artist
Barbeau Owen Foundation Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Doris Shadbolt, E.J. Hughes: A Retrospective Exhibition, Vancouver Art Gallery, 1967, reproduced, unpaginated, and the related canvas Near Third Beach, Stanley Park reproduced unpaginated
Ian M. Thom, E.J. Hughes, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2002, page 133, and the related canvas reproduced page 138
Jacques Barbeau, A Journey with E.J. Hughes: One Collector’s Odyssey, 2005, reproduced page 56 and listed page 164
Jacques Barbeau, E.J. Hughes Through the Decades, Volume 2, The Paper Works, 1931 – 1986, 2014, reproduced page 25 and listed page 84

EXHIBITED
Vancouver Art Gallery, E.J. Hughes: A Retrospective Exhibition, October 5 – 29, 1967, traveling to York University, Toronto, November 13 – December 8, 1967, catalogue #40

This supremely detailed graphite “cartoon” shows the amount of detail E.J. Hughes could capture in a pencil sketch. With intricate lines and varying tones, he conveys everything from grasses and other vegetation on the forest floor to overhanging maple branches to a mature tree trunk, possibly a Douglas fir, on the right side of the sketch. In the words of Ian Thom, “This is one of the earliest drawings that demonstrate the intense degree of observation that would characterize most of his field sketches for the remainder of his career.”

Hughes was known to create such detailed sketches in preparation for an oil canvas of the same subject. Jacques Barbeau relates this sketch from early in Hughes’s career to a later canvas, Near Third Beach, Stanley Park (1946 – 1959). There are definite echoes of the sketch in the oil painting, including the central overarching branches and the large tree trunk. That said, with its dark colours and stylized forms, the canvas departs from realism and shows Hughes experimenting in the style of Henri Rousseau. In the original graphite sketch, we see the forest directly through the eyes and hand of the artist.

Collector Jacques Barbeau said his interest in the art of Hughes was first sparked when he saw one of the artist’s paintings reproduced on the front cover of a 1958 Vancouver telephone directory. More than a decade later, in 1969, Barbeau acquired his first work by Hughes after paying a visit to the Dominion Gallery in Montreal, which had represented Hughes since 1951. Barbeau purchased several “cartoons,” the detailed graphite drawings that the artist, a meticulous draughtsman, would prepare leading up to an oil painting. Over the years, as Hughes transitioned from oils to acrylics and watercolours, the collection of Barbeau and his wife Margaret Ann (née Owen) grew to 80 works, encompassing sketches, prints and paintings from all phases of the artist’s lengthy career. Fifteen masterpieces from this prominent collection have been on loan to the Audain Art Museum in Whistler since 2016, on public display in the Barbeau–Owen Gallery.

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