PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, November 7, 1996, lot 5
Barbeau Owen Foundation Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Ian M. Thom, E.J. Hughes, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2002, pages 36 and 44, reproduced page 40
Jacques Barbeau, A Journey with E.J. Hughes: One Collector’s Odyssey, 2005, reproduced page 60 and listed page 164
Robert Amos, E.J. Hughes Paints British Columbia, 2019, the totem poles discussed page 21 and the related 1985 watercolour reproduced page 23

EXHIBITED
Vancouver Art Gallery, E.J. Hughes, January 30 - June 8, 2003, travelling to McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, November 29, 2003 - February 15, 2004; Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, March 11 - June 13, 2004, catalogue #EJH2003.57

In 1937, E.J. Hughes was working in a partnership with Orville Fisher and Paul Goranson. The trio, fellow graduates of the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts, produced a number of prints and murals together. This work may have been intended as a study for a woodblock print, linocut or mural.

Totem Poles at Stanley Park was reproduced in Ian Thom’s 2002 monograph on the artist, and Thom described the work as follows: “A tonal study that uses only black and a series of yellows, it is a striking example of foreshortening and arbitrary cropping. The work recalls, albeit in different form, Emily Carr’s Totem and Forest (1931) in the abrupt conjunction of the poles and the forest behind.” He concluded, “This image is one of the most remarkable of Hughes’s early works.”

Revisiting past subject matter later in his career, in 1985, Hughes painted a similar, larger work in watercolour, also titled Totem Poles at Stanley Park.

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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