Tugboats at Ladysmith Harbour is based on a drawing made by E.J. Hughes on his 1948 trip up Vancouver Island, sponsored by the Emily Carr Scholarship. Ladysmith was his first stop on that northern journey, and he spent a week there making studies that resulted in a number of paintings.

In 1950, Lawren Harris wrote as follows to H.O. McCurry, director of the National Gallery of Canada, recommending the purchase of Hughes’s oil painting Tugboats, Ladysmith Harbour (1950):

There is a painting at the present B.C. Artists exhibition here which I am sure should belong to the National Gallery—a coast scene of tugboats, logs, sea, rocks and hillside bank. It is by Ed. Hughes and it to my mind is superb. Not large, price $275.00. Nothing quite like it has been done before here or anywhere in the country. Everybody likes it, painters, laymen and just folks. It’s that kind of painting—factual, detailed, accurate, full of interest but its art quality transcends all these.[1]

The National Gallery did buy the painting, making Hughes one of the few living British Columbia artists represented in the national collection. On March 27, 1956, reproduction rights for Tugboats, Ladysmith Harbour were sold to Bell Telephone to be used on the cover of their May issue of The Blue Bell magazine. Later, the painting was part of Hughes’s first retrospective exhibition, curated by Doris Shadbolt in 1967 for the Vancouver Art Gallery, and it was hung in the inaugural exhibition of the new National Gallery in 1988.

By 1993, when he was 80 years old, Hughes found that standing at his easel for long periods of time was no longer possible. From then on he devoted himself to painting watercolours, which he could do while seated at his work table. It was about this time that Jacques Barbeau made the acquaintance of the artist.

After the Dominion Gallery closed in 2000, Barbeau was able to buy paintings from Hughes directly through the agency of Pat Salmon. Between 1998 and 2006, Barbeau purchased 13 watercolours, most of which were new versions of earlier oil paintings. When Hughes revisited Tugboats, Ladysmith Harbour in watercolour in 2004, Barbeau was eager to buy it.

Barbeau wrote as follows about these new versions in his book A Journey with E.J. Hughes:

Replicas, reinterpretations and duplications of any work by an artist are sometimes denigrated by the so-called cognoscenti as being, in the grandchildren’s parlance, a bit of a “cop-out” on the part of the artist. The original is the only one to reflect any aesthetic achievement. Any reinterpretation or duplication in a different medium of an original work is adjudged as an inferior product. I do not propose nor am I qualified to engage in such esoteric debate. A careful and attentive look at both oil and watercolour versions … will persuade even the most ardent critic that each version has its own cachet, conveying its own distinct message. Yes, I would like to have acquired the oil, but I am more than content to have had the opportunity to acquire the watercolour.[2]

As owner with his wife, Margaret Owen Barbeau, of the largest collection of both oils and watercolours by Hughes, Barbeau was in fact unusually “qualified to engage in such esoteric debate.”

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. Lawren Harris to H.O. McCurry, December 1, 1950, Archives of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

2. Jacques Barbeau, A Journey with E.J. Hughes, 2nd ed. (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2005), 73, 75.

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