Sold for: $145,250

PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Acquired from the above by a Private Collection, Vancouver, 1968
Equinox Gallery, Vancouver
Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Doris Shadbolt, E.J. Hughes: A Retrospective Exhibition, Vancouver Art Gallery, 1967, reproduced, unpaginated
Jacques Barbeau, The E.J. Hughes Album, Volume 1, The Paintings, 1932 – 1991, 2011, reproduced page 33, listed page 93

EXHIBITED
Vancouver Art Gallery, E.J. Hughes: A Retrospective Exhibition, October 5 – 29, 1967, traveling to York University, Toronto, November 13 – December 8, 1967, catalogue #27

Best known for his coastal scenes, E.J. Hughes also painted eight oils resulting from his 1958 trip to Chilliwack, a town 102 kilometres east of Vancouver, BC. Here he found rural peacefulness, with the snowy peaks of the Cheam Range floating high over the sun-warmed farms of the Fraser Valley. As ever, this artist gave his undivided attention to every detail of the scene, from the foreground with two-lane blacktop and roadside weeds all the way to the powder-blue mountains receding in the distance.

Though considered to be realist landscapes, Hughes’s paintings are more than simple documents. Working at a time when colour-field abstraction was foremost, here he made striking chromatic choices for the buildings ranged across the centre of the painting. These stand out against a middle ground of trees in resonant reds and sombre greens. The undulating horizontals of the fields are punctuated by fence posts arranged in almost musical intervals.

While Outskirts of Chilliwack needs no interpretation, a bit of background may be welcome. On February 4, 1957, Hughes wrote to his dealer at the Dominion Gallery in Montreal, Max Stern: “I have some amazingly good news to report. I received a telegram from Ottawa yesterday stating that the Canada Council has awarded me a $4000 senior fellowship.… This will probably be to finance sketching trips in B.C.”[1]

He wrote again to Stern on April 14, 1958, saying that he intended “to concentrate especially on a study of clouds in relation to land and water masses this summer, from Nature.” He mentioned that he would “be leaving for 2 weeks sketching near Chilliwack, B.C. about May 1. My wife will be going for company and as it will be a change for her.” With the money from this, his first Canada Council grant, the couple was able to travel without having to skimp on their meals and lodgings.

This expedition was taken before Hughes owned a car. Leaving their home at Shawnigan Lake on Vancouver Island, he and Fern traveled by ferry boat and bus. They stayed in a motel in downtown Chilliwack from which they could walk to restaurants when he was not off sketching.

Hughes spent the first two or three days hiking over the countryside, and he returned later with pencil and paper to make his careful drawings. As he explained in a note on the back of a later canvas, he was “especially looking for interesting forms, with the beautiful snow-capped mountains of the Coast Range in the background. The farm pictured here is about three miles south of the city. The farm was all but completely deserted all the afternoon I was sketching there.”[2]

Back home on July 5, 1958, the artist reported to Stern: “I took along my oil sketch box on the first trip to Chilliwack, but as it took up all my time to procure the detailed pencil sketches with written-in colours, which is the type of sketch I need for use in producing later paintings, I was unable to use the oil panels.” He went on to say: “My sketches are not large in number but fortunately are all usable without much re-composing, for enlarging into paintings.”

On April 11, 1960, Hughes dispatched Outskirts of Chilliwack to the Dominion Gallery. Stern immediately paid him $215, and in his letter of April 26, 1960, commented that “we always like of course, much better paintings with water, but I leave as always the execution and the choice of subject matter to you.” Hughes considered this suggestion and on May 9, 1960, he replied: “Most of my future paintings will have water in them, but the occasional one will not.”

Even without water as part of the subject, curator Doris Shadbolt found Outskirts of Chilliwack attractive and she chose it for the first Hughes retrospective exhibition, mounted at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1967, and reproduced it in the catalogue.

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 four 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. All correspondence cited held at Special Collections, University of Victoria.

2. Frame label written by Hughes for South of Chilliwack (1973), oil on canvas. A copy of the label is in Special Collections at the University of Victoria.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars