Sold for: $157,250

PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal, 1971
By descent to the present Private Collection, Ottawa

LITERATURE
Jacques Barbeau, The E.J. Hughes Album: The Paintings, Volume 1, 1932 - 1991, 2011, reproduced page 55

This stunning E.J. Hughes painting is a view of Pipers Lagoon Park, north of Nanaimo on the east side of Vancouver Island. We look towards Shack Island, with its historic rustic cabins, built by fishermen in the 1930s who would row to Nanaimo to sell their catch, as the road was not yet built. In the centre of the painting is a jaunty, bright blue Volkswagen Beetle, a modern contrast to the primitive shacks, which did not have electricity or running water. Hughes’s fine eye for detail makes us aware of patterns in nature in the leaves casually scattered across the foreground, the sun-whitened logs tossed up on the beaches and the white rocks on the steel grey shore across from the car. Hughes includes iconic images of the West Coast – the arbutus tree with its gracefully curved branches and trunk and, in the distance, the majestic mountain range on the mainland, its peaks shrouded in cloud. The painting has a crystalline clarity of atmosphere that makes every detail stand out, and an authenticity of place that entices us to enter into the scene and explore it.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars