The peace and tranquility that E.J. Hughes found at Shawnigan Lake was essential to his success as an artist. This painting, a very personal image, conveys the contentment of the life he made in the small Vancouver Island community. Old Baldy Mountain, Shawnigan Lake also revisits in watercolour a favourite subject the artist had painted in oil decades earlier.

“You may be interested to know a few facts about the content of the picture,” Hughes wrote in a letter to Max Stern on June 27, 1961. He had just sent the original canvas of this subject to the Dominion Gallery in Montreal. “I have tried to paint the impression I have of the Lake near our home, on a summer week day, when it was very quiet. (On weekends there are, of course, many more boats and water skiers and swimmers on the lake.)”[1]

Hughes and his wife, Fern, lived at Shawnigan Lake from 1951 to 1972. Old Baldy, the mountain shown here, rises 464 metres behind the Hughes home. Though the couple faced financial challenges at times, this was a perfect spot for a hard-working artist to retire from the world. The two had a simple life and a very happy life.

Hughes continued: “Although most of the houses and cottages are owned by summer visitors, there are some, like our own home, just out of the picture to the left in the small bay, and the large building, which is a girls’ private school [Strathcona Lodge School for Girls], the building to the right of it, white with a green roof, which is a chicken farm, and below this Hamilton’s Boat Rentals where motorboats can get gas at the little Home Gas float; which are all used all year round.” At the marina there is a snack bar, and walking over to the Galley for a milkshake there was the Hugheses’ Sunday outing.

The letter concluded: “The boat in the foreground is one we owned for 4 years until a few weeks ago when unfortunately we were obliged to sell it, as our rented docking facilities were not suitable.… In case anyone wonders about the two ropes on the boat deck, the left hand, thinner rope is attached to an anchor, which I had overboard while sketching the original pencil sketch. The thicker white rope is just the ‘painter’ which is attached to the bow.”

The original pencil sketch was made from Hughes’s boat in 1958, and the detail of the bow of the boat was added later to Old Baldy Mountain, the oil painting, in 1961. Hughes wrote to his sister Zoe on October 24, 1960: “I am still plugging along in my old realistic manner, out of style with the times. I don’t like being out of style as I am more of a conservative than a rebel, but I like Nature in its many forms so much that I feel it is a shame to leave it all to the camera and commercial illustrators.”

Hughes revisited the scene in 1966 in a pencil drawing made for the cover of Green Boughs and Fallen Leaves, a book published by the Shawnigan Lake Historical Society in 1967.

The 2004 watercolour of Old Baldy, which may seem like a simple record of a summer vacation, abounds with unexpected details. Ian Thom, referring to the similar canvas, noted “the variety of treatments of the surface of the lake: areas of blue water are contrasted with blue-black, and, in the distance, a small area of ripples suggests a gust of wind on an otherwise quiet day. Through such relatively simple but carefully calculated means, Hughes makes the broad expanse of the water visually interesting…”[2]

While Hughes is justly renowned for his dark post-war works full of brooding intensity, the paintings that followed slowly take on an Arcadian light and a serene clarity that looks like the work of a man increasingly at peace with himself. This late-career watercolour, created when Hughes was 91 years old, is steeped in fond memories.

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. Letter in Special Collections, University of Victoria, along with other correspondence quoted.

2. Ian M. Thom, E. J. Hughes (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2002), 155.