Fishboats at Rivers Inlet is a legendary image in E.J. Hughes’s oeuvre. It began as a sketch Hughes made during his summers fishing at Rivers Inlet in 1937 and 1938, and was later realized as an oil painting in 1946. At a Heffel auction in 2004, that painting set a record price for a work of art by a living Canadian artist. It was again sold by Heffel on November 21, 2018, this time for $2,284,800.

After 1993, entering his eighties, Hughes painted exclusively in watercolour and frequently reinterpreted earlier images. In 2000, Jacques Barbeau privately published his book A Journey with E.J. Hughes, and then lan Thom created the impressive catalogue E.J. Hughes, which accompanied the 2002 exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Hughes was delighted with the accuracy and brilliance of the reproductions in these books and used them as source material for re-rendering his favourite subjects. The new medium of watercolour stimulated his creative spirit, as if a composer now transposed his symphony into chamber music.

In 2001, Barbeau specifically asked Hughes to paint Fishboats, Rivers Inlet as a watercolour, and this resulted in a painting with a different mood. The 1946 oil, done immediately following Hughes’s war service, is dark and dramatic, the boats lit with a surrealistic glare. The presence of illuminated marker buoys and lanterns in the wheelhouse of many of the gillnetters shows this was a night scene. In the later watercolour, the rounded hillsides are thickly forested and the foreground tree trunks, formerly rim-lit with mystery, are now washed with the light of an overcast afternoon. About this painting Barbeau wrote: “This is a nimble piece of work. Whereas the oil painting is severe and somewhat ominous, the watercolour is bubbly and cheerful.”[1]

In 2002, Robin Laurence wrote more about Hughes’s late watercolours:

No longer able to manage sketching trips, nor interested in the mess and fumes of oil paint, the artist works at home, in watercolour, for two hours each day. Watercolour, he notes, is a very difficult medium, one that he feels he is still learning how to use. “It’s a succession of transparent washes and you have to know from experience just how the final effect turns out,” he explains with considerable modesty. He’s been a deft watercolourist for more than half a century.[2]

Throughout his career, Hughes had worked hard to rise to the special challenges of painting in watercolour. As far back as 1961, he wrote to his dealer Max Stern:

I find that watercolours depend a great deal on accident to make them successful in an Art sense, while in oils I can alter if necessary and obtain more technical effects in order to reach the qualities of a work of Art. However, as Turner, Girtin, and John Varley, for example, in early English Art, have proven, along with more recent painters like Winslow Homer, Audubon, Burchfield and Hopper of the US school, and Charles Comfort and Goodridge Roberts for some examples of the Canadian school, watercolours can be raised to a high level, alongside oils, as works of Art.[3]

Towards the end of his life, his friend Pat Salmon noted: “Hughes was always saying to people, ‘I’m trying to improve my work.’ If a decent comparison were ever done, one could see that his latest watercolours are simply the best watercolours ever done. Even Franklin Carmichael’s of the Group [of Seven] can’t touch them. Also, it is a bit of an insult to a person who has painted all his life, and says he is learning every day, to state that his earliest work is his best and strongest. Do they think that in learning every day, he has not learned a thing?”[4]

The richly layered colours of this small painting bring forth the dancing whitecaps on deep blue water. It is at once an important documentary image and a bold abstraction, a new vision of Hughes’s most famous composition.

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. Jacques Barbeau, A Journey with E.J. Hughes, 2nd ed. (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2005), 97.

2. Robin Laurence, “A Vision Nurtured Far from the Public Eye,” Globe and Mail, November 2, 2002.

3. E.J. Hughes to Max Stern, September 21, 1961, Special Collections, University of Victoria.

4. Pat Salmon’s diary, November 23, 2004, collection of the author.

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