Sold for: $115,250

PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Equinox Gallery, Vancouver
Galerie Bernard Desroches, Montreal
Private Collection, Toronto
Sold Sale of Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, Wednesday, May 29, 2019, lot 055
Private Collection, Vancouver

Madrona value $168,000

LITERATURE
Jacques Barbeau, The E.J. Hughes Album: The Paintings, Volume 1, 1932 – 1991, 2011, reproduced page 73

Inscribed on verso on a label:

"I often stop here when I go for a drive, south of Duncan, BC. There is a wide place to pull off the road and this view can be seen from the shelter of the car, which is most welcome when it is raining. Sometimes the Alder saplings grow up in the foreground, as can be seen in the paintings. At other times someone clears them away and the view is more open."

- E.J. Hughes, July 1979

E.J. Hughes included the local industry that sustained the communities on the southeast shores of Vancouver Island in his works, and here includes a big freighter unloading supplies on the far shore. As always, Hughes had a fine sense of patterning, doubling the repeating forms of the yellow gantries on the deck of the freighter with reflections in the water. In the 1970s Hughes was using a lighter palette as he strove to capture daytime light with what he felt were the right tonal values. Always technically masterful, Hughes, when his paintings were near completion, turned them upside down to see if they were compositionally balanced, also looking at them backwards in a small mirror. Hughes’s finely cast balance is readily apparent in View of a Freighter at Cowichan Bay, an impeccably thought-out composition.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars