Steamer in Grenville Channel, 1952 by Edward John Hughes

Born in North Vancouver, B.C., E. J. Hughes spent his childhood at Nanaimo, B.C. After 1923 he lived in North Vancouver and Vancouver where his father was employed as a professional musician (trombone player) at the Orpheum and Capitol Theatres and at the Malkin Bowl in Stanley Park. Edward Hughes attended evening art classes in North Vancouver with Mrs. Verrall in 1926 and in 1929 he entered the Vancouver School of Design and Applied Art where he studied for six years under Charles H. Scott, F. H. Varley, Charles Marega, Grace Melvin, and J.W.G. Macdonald.

After post-graduate studies, in 1935 he he became a freelance commercial artist, creating dry-point engravings and coloured linocuts with Paul Goranson and Orville Fisher. By 1939 the trio had painted commissioned murals for the Malaspina Hotel at Nanaimo, B.C. and the B.C. Pavilion at the Golden Gate Exposition in San Francisco. The Vancouver Province carried the following report of their work, “Murals, to them, seemed to embody all of art: figure work, landscape and portrait work…These three are in favour of realism in murals and are opposed to the present trend toward the abstract.” [Helen Dickson, Vancouver Province, 25 March 1939]

Despite his success, it was difficult to earn a living as an artist and so, in 1939, he joined the Royal Canadian Artillery, training at Esquimalt as a gunner. In 1941, while stationed in Vancouver, he was appointed as a “service artist”, transferred to the Historical Branch of the Canadian Army in Ottawa. When the Canadian War Art Program became official in 1943 he was working in Britain and was given the rank of captain. Returning to Canada, he was the only war artist to serve at Kiska in the Aleutian Islands. During all those years he recorded with great accuracy the life in the services and was discharged in 1946.

Hughes married Fern Smith in 1940 and, following his discharge from the army, they lived in Victoria from 1946 until 1951. Then they moved to Shawnigan Lake.

It was during July of 1951 that Max Stern came to western Canada to find a successor to Emily Carr, whose work had been so popular at his Dominion Gallery in Montreal. While having lunch with Lawren Harris at the faculty club of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver Stern noticed Hughes’ painting Fishboats, Rivers Inlet (1946), then on loan to the club. From that moment, Stern was determined to find the artist, eventually tracing him to his home at Shawnigan Lake. Arriving unannounced, he took a look at the paintings and, then and there, told Hughes: “I like your work. I’d like to buy it all.” He then drafted a brief contract by which, for $500, he bought the contents of Hughes’ studio and arranged to buy everything the artist would make in the future. This simple contract was in effect until the Dominion Gallery ceased to exist in 2000.

Hughes could now give his full attention to painting, while he and his wife lived in isolation. Stern immediately sold Hughes’s works to the National Gallery of Canada and to the most prestigious clients in the country. The well-connected dealer also arranged a number of ways for the artist to increase his income. The first was a contract with Standard Oil for Hughes to sail on one of their tankers north along Vancouver Island so that he could create paintings for their magazine, The Torch. In the following year Hughes painted a mural Toronto’s Royal York Hotel.

In 1956 he made a six-week sketching trip across Canada, travelling by bus. Then, in 1958 Hughes received his first grant from the Canada Council for the Arts which enabled him to set aside three months for sketching in B.C. He received further grants for sketching in the B. C. Interior in 1963 and again in 1966. Otherwise, he concentrated on his home territory.

Hughes was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, curated by Doris Shadbolt In October 1967. Joan Lowndes, writing in the Vancouver Province, was “overwhelmed by the strength of the artist’s forms, by the supernatural quality of his light, and by the intensely personal nature of his vision.” [Joan Lowndes, Vancouver Province, October 6 1967] The exhibition was also seen at York University in Toronto.

As Fern’s muscular dystrophy became more pronounced, in 1972 they bought a house at nearby Cobble Hill where, in 1974, Fern died. Hughes soon moved to Duncan where he worked undisturbed for the next thirty-three years. Soon after moving, a neighbour, Mrs. Pat Salmon, came into his life. Hughes described her as “ my long-distance chauffeur, as well as secretary and biographer.” Salmon kept the world at bay so that he would have the peace he needed to paint.

A new level of recognition soon came with an exhibition presented by the Surrey Art Gallery in 1983, accompanied by a 104-page catalogue. The show travelled from Surrey to Victoria, Edmonton, Calgary, Fredericton and was seen at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. At the opening of another Hughes exhibit, at the Beaverbrook Gallery in Fredericton in 1983, Max Stern commented: “In 1943 I went west in search of new Canadian artists and found Emily Carr. In 1951, I went west and found Ed Hughes and since then I have found no other.” [Fredericton Daily Gleaner. November 24 1984]

Hughes’s renown grew, with Honorary Doctorates from the University of Victoria (1995), the Emily Carr College of Art and Design (1997) and Malaspina College (now Vancouver Island University) (2000). In addition, Hughes was presented with the Order of Canada (2001) and the Order of British Columbia (2005). An exhibition, The Vast and Beautiful Interior (1994), accompanied by a 72-page catalogue, was held at the Kamloops Art Gallery, and subsequently toured the province.

Ian Thom, curator of the Vancouver Art Gallery, curated the major Hughes retrospective exhibition with an accompanying book in 2003 which, after Vancouver, was shown at the McMichael Canadian Collection in Kleinberg outside Toronto. On November 25, 2004 Hughes’ painting Fishboats, Rivers Inlet (1946) sold for more than a million dollars at auction, a record price for a living Canadian artist. Since then a number of Hughes’ early works have topped that price.

Hughes died on January 6, 2007 at 93 years old. In the Vancouver Sun on Saturday January 13 2007, Ian Thom summed up the career of E. J. Hughes succinctly: “His remarkable images have transformed the way many of us view our native province. The integrity and length of his commitment to his subject (the landscape of British Columbia) has few parallels in the history of art and he achieved that rarest of goals—a personal vision which maintained the highest artistic standards and was also of almost universal appeal.” Ian Thom, quoted in the Vancouver Sun on Saturday January 13 2007

Biographical sketch contributed by Robert Amos, who is the official biographer of E. J. Hughes and author of five books about this artist published by TouchWood Editions. Mr. Amos is compiling the catalogue raisonné of the works of E. J. Hughes.