Artwork by Edward John Hughes,  Indian Church, North Vancouver, B.C.

E.J. Hughes
Indian Church, North Vancouver, B.C.

graphite on paper, laid down on card
9 x 12 ins ( 22.9 x 30.5 cms ) ( sheet )

Auction Estimate: $8,000.00$6,000.00 - $8,000.00

Price Realized $5,750.00
Sale date: May 28th 2019

Provenance:
Private Collection, Toronto
Literature:
Ian M. Thom, E.J. Hughes, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2002, page 99
As art movements in Canada rapidly evolved into abstraction and minimalism, Nanaimo-native E.J. Hughes maintained a steadfast and unique dedication to realism throughout his long career. His distinct and nostalgic style consisted of flattened perspective and simplified forms. On the subject of the association between realist art and photography, the artist proclaimed: “If I didn’t have a conviction that a serious painter can portray Nature more profoundly than the best colour photography, I’d probably give it all up or go abstract or take up photography.”

“Indian Church, North Vancouver, B.C.” attests to Hughes’ meticulous and painstaking approach to illustrating the landscapes of British Columbia. During the 1950s, the artist approached each painting through a series of drawings, beginning with intricately detailed notes outlining full reference for the picture’s theme. Hughes typically completed a detailed graphite drawing known as the “cartoon”, which was then ruled off into squares in order for the composition to be transferred to the canvas. These squares in lines of graphite are visible in “Indian Church, North Vancouver, B.C.”, suggesting that the artist was preparing to make the final canvas version. The drawing depicts St. Paul’s Indian Church, which is the oldest surviving Catholic church in Greater Vancouver. The Gothic Revival-style building was constructed in 1884 by the Sacred Heart Mission for the Squamish native population.

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Edward John Hughes
(1913 - 2007)

Born in North Vancouver, B.C., he showed an early interest in art and 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 also to play concert music and symphony with Cal Winters at the Malkin Bowl. Edward Hughes attended evening art classes under Mrs. Verrall in 1926 and in 1929 he entered the Vancouver School of Art where he studies for six years under F.H. Varlet, C.H. Scott, C. Marega, Grace Melvin, and J.W.G. Macdonald. He then entered the field of free lance commercial art working with dry-point, and coloured woodcuts.

By 1935 he was working with Paul Goranson and Orville Fisher and by 1939 the trio had come to the forefront with the commission for the B.C. Murals at the San Fransisco fair. 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. So they gladly accepted an opportunity to do six panels for the walls of the First United Church. And it was then that they found and adopted the formula to which they have ever since adhered. These three are in favour of realism in murals and are opposed to the present trend toward the abstract.” Hughes also decorated the Malaspina Hotel at Nanaimo, B.C., and the W.K. Oriental Gardens, Vancouver (Chinese decorations).

In 1939 he entered the Royal Canadian Artillery at Esquimalt as a gunner and in 1940 he was appointed a sergeant and army artist. From 1942 to 1946 he was an official army war artist and served with the rank of captain, in Canada. Great Britain and the Aleutians where he recorded with great accuracy, the life in the services. He marries Fern Smith in 1940 and following his discharge from the service, they lived in Victoria for a number of years.

In 1947, he was awarded an Emily Carr scholarship which enabled him to sketch along the B.C. Coast. The following year, he was elected a member of the Canadian Group of Painters. It was about 1951 that Dr. Max Stern, owner of the Dominion Gallery, discovered the work of Edward Hughes during a visit at the University of British Columbia where two of the artist's canvases were hung. Dr. Stern had been making a two months' tour from Manitoba to British Columbia to arrange an exhibition of paintings by Western Canadian artists. He had some difficulty locating Hughes but after two days and with the help of the press and the R.C.M.P. Found him at his home at Shawinigan Lake (thirty miles north of Victoria) where he and his wife had settled the same year.

The exhibition took place at the Dominion Gallery in the fall of 1951 when the following was noted by Robert Ayre, “...19 Western painters attracting attention at the Dominion. No one is attracting more attention than Edward John Hughes of Vancouver Island. He not only looks at the Canadian scene, but feels it, with passion, and puts it down note for note, leaf for leaf and wave for wave, with the love and concentration of a 'primitive'. I can well believe that it takes him two months to paint a picture—I almost said carve, because some of these works look as id they have been carved our of linoleum. The result of this passion and his labour is tremendous intensity. The familiar world of the West Coast—the sea and the shore, the boats and the houses and the trees of the forest—takes on the solidity and the strangeness of the world in the after-life describes by C.S. Lewis in 'The Great Divorce' where the grass blades are swords and the raindrops bullets.” About this time, representatives-actives of Lever Brothers purchased one of his paintings for an office in their new Manhattan company building.

In the spring of 1953, Doris Shadbolt's warm article on Hughes appeared in “Canadian Art” magazine with four black and white reproductions of his paintings by the courtesy of the Dominion Gallery who were by then his exclusive dealers. She described his paintings as follows, “He is not a naive painter, but he has some of the fine and vivid qualities which belong also to the child's world. There is for one thins a keen sense of friendly adventure in his work. The boats, the sea, the beaches which appear so frequently are, of course, symbols filled with the lure of adventure for all of us. The clear bright colours have the spanking freshness of newly painted boats and they and the repetitions of many crisply triangulated forms set our senses a-tingle. As we look, we are like jade summer vacationers from the city, rejuvenated by the simple vital drama of the Coast Islands as it unfolds before our cottage door.”

His first one-man show of paintings took place at the Dominion Gallery in the autumn of 1954. It was that same year that he completed a mural for the Canadian Pacific Railway's coaches used in their transcontinental service. In 1958, his painting of the first stern wheeler at Yale on the Fraser River, B.C., was reproduced o the directories of the B.C. Telephone Company (also the North-west Telephone Company) to commemorate B.C.'s centennial year. He did other issues for the telephone companies.

He received a Canada Council Grant in 1958 to do sketching. In 1961 J.E.M. Porter of the “Victoria Colonist” explained how the artist works. “First, he makes a field sketch of the subject in a 9 x 12 sketch book with pencil, drawing in detail and writing in the colours most faithfully. Then, in his studio which is the whole supper storey of the house, he makes a watercolour on 18 x 24 paper. Finally, from this, he does an oil painting on 25 x 32 inch canvas. For many years he made a detailed pencil drawing, known as a cartoon as the secondary stage, but has lately given it up for watercolour which gives better toning.”

A retrospective exhibition of his work was organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery in the autumn of 1967 with the assistance of a grant from the Canada Council. Doris Shadbolt, Director of the Vancouver Art Gallery, prepared an excellent catalogue with 41 illustrations or the occasion. This exhibition was also shows at York University, Toronto (Nov. 13 – Dec. 8, 1967).

His works can be found in the collections of the National gallery of Canada; The Brock Collection, University of British Columbia; College of Physicians and Surgeons of B.C., Vancouver; Hart House, U. Of T.; The Vancouver Art Gallery; and the Art Gallery of Ontario as well as many private collections. He received a Canada Council Award in 1967 and passed away in 2007.

Source: "A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, Volume I: A-F", compiled by Colin S. MacDonald, Canadian Paperbacks Publishing Ltd, Ottawa, 1977