PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Private Collection
Heffel Gallery Limited, Vancouver, 1996
Barbeau Owen Foundation Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Jacques Barbeau, A Journey with E.J. Hughes: One Collector's Odyssey, 2005, reproduced page 58 and listed page 165
Jacques Barbeau, E.J. Hughes Through the Decades, Volume 2, The Paper Works, 1931 - 1986, 2014, reproduced page 19 and listed page 84, dated 1936

The drawing titled Ferry Boat Princess Elaine is the preliminary study for E.J. Hughes’s famous painting Nanaimo Harbour (1962). Thus it is an important drawing in the career of the artist. Hughes described the work’s creation at the time he conveyed the canvas Nanaimo Harbour to his dealer Max Stern at the Dominion Gallery in Montreal. In early October 1962 he wrote:

The painting was executed from sketches done while I was travelling in 1948 on an Emily Carr scholarship. The view is from an upper window of the Malaspina Hotel.… Sad to say, since that time the wharf in the foreground [has] been dismantled, and the foreground ship, the Princess Elaine, has just this year been retired from service and is being sold. Fortunately the two islands in the mid-distance, Newcastle on left and Protection on the right, are being preserved as parks.[1]

Pat Salmon, Hughes’s assistant, commented later about the canvas, “This is one of the artist’s personal favourites and he is overjoyed to see it reproduced … for Vancouver’s Expo 86.”[2] Stern himself said, “It is one of the finest paintings you have ever created.”[3]

The image first appeared as an ink drawing of Princess Elaine backing away from the wharf, drawn in 1948 while Hughes was sponsored by the Emily Carr scholarship. The fully realized pencil study offered here by the Barbeau Owen Foundation presents Princess Elaine at the wharf with some action in Nanaimo Harbour—a trawler heading out, a tug towing two barges of sawdust. Reflecting on this drawing, collector Jacques Barbeau wrote, “Hughes had the uncanny ability to depict these large utilitarian ferries with such grace that they now have become virtual idyllic icons.”[4]

We thank Robert Amos, artist and writer from Victoria, BC, for contributing the above essay. Amos is the official biographer of Hughes and has so far published five books on his work. Building on the archives of Hughes’s friend Pat Salmon, Amos is at work on a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work.

1. E.J. Hughes to Max Stern, October 2, 1962, Special Collections, University of Victoria.

2. Pat Salmon, unpublished manuscript. The work was issued as an offset lithograph print for the British Columbia Pavilion’s Discovery 86 Poster Series.

3. Max Stern to E.J. Hughes, October 13, 1962, Special Collections, University of Victoria.

4. Jacques Barbeau, A Journey with E.J. Hughes: One Collector’s Odyssey, 2nd ed. (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2005), 59.

For the biography on Jacques Barbeau and Margaret Owen Barbeau in PDF format please click here.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars