PROVENANCE
Barbeau Owen Foundation Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Doris Shadbolt, E.J. Hughes: A Retrospective Exhibition, Vancouver Art Gallery, 1967, the related 1952 canvas titled Hopkins Landing, Howe Sound reproduced, unpaginated
Ian M. Thom, E.J. Hughes, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2002, page 25, titled as Hopkin’s Landing, Howe Sound, same image reproduced page 26 and the related 1952 canvas reproduced page 106
Jacques Barbeau, A Journey with E.J. Hughes: One Collector’s Odyssey, 2005, reproduced page 20 and listed page 164
Jacques Barbeau, E.J. Hughes Through the Decades, Volume 2, The Paper Works, 1931 – 1986, 2014, reproduced pages 13 and 72 and listed page 84

EXHIBITED
Vancouver Art Gallery, Exhibition by Paul Goranson, Ed Hughes and Orville Fisher, December 6-15, 1935, catalogue #12
Vancouver Art Gallery, Exhibition of Drypoints by Paul Goranson, Ed Hughes and Orville Fisher, August 11-23, 1936, catalogue #18

E.J. Hughes is renowned for his BC coastal and interior landscapes painted in oil, acrylic and watercolour, but his work in the medium of printmaking is less well known. According to Ian Thom, “Although his print oeuvre is small—only twenty or so—he is one of the most significant printmakers to have worked in British Columbia.”

Hughes began to make drypoint etchings in 1935, after graduating from art school, and in that year produced 11 such prints, most of them landscapes. These works ably demonstrate Hughes’s skill as a draughtsman. Because the medium relies on direct drawing on a copper plate, the etchings also have a charming sense of immediacy.

Hopkins Landing in particular features many motifs that would engage Hughes throughout his long career: the ocean in all its moods, distant islands and dramatic mountains, and elements of industry such as the dock, left foreground, or the large stump and its new growth, right centre, suggestive of forestry. Hughes would revisit this exact scene in 1952, painting a canvas titled Hopkin’s Landing, Howe Sound, and it is fascinating to compare this canvas and the early etching.

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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