E.J. Hughes’s home at 2449 Heather Street in Duncan was just a few miles from the seashore of the Cowichan Valley where he found the painting sites he often focused on: Mill Bay, Cowichan Bay, Maple Bay and Crofton. Exploring just about every part of the shoreline, he painted Crofton more often than any other place. At the centre of Crofton is the public wharf where the ferry to Saltspring Island docks. Hughes sometimes parked there and took in the view from the front seat of his car. He could sit for hours at a time without attracting attention, and no one disturbed his sketching.

In preparation for Beside the Public Wharf, Crofton, BC in 1978, Hughes spent two days making a superbly detailed drawing on site. He returned on a third day to create a page of rather cryptic colour notes. In 1981, when the resulting painting was ready to deliver to the Dominion Gallery, he sent an accompanying frame label:

The predominating tree in this canvas is a very old Arbutus, characteristic of this coastal area. The foreground is Vancouver Island, and the land mass in the background is Salt Spring Island. The ferry to Salt Spring Island can be glimpsed on the extreme right edge of the canvas with a row of cars about to go on board. The ferry wharf is also the public wharf, leading to a float (hidden by the central tree mass) for smaller boats.[1]

As Hughes’s frame label notes, Beside the Public Wharf, Crofton, BC centres on a huge arbutus tree (Pacific madrone), a broad-leafed evergreen species native to the coastal areas of southern and eastern Vancouver Island as well as the Gulf Islands and Sunshine Coast. In his usual way, Hughes added a discreet narrative element: four people sit by the shore in a small clearing, watching a fishing boat make its way past Crofton. Perhaps they are two parents and their children who have arrived in the orange sedan to enjoy some quiet moments on a sunny afternoon. At the right behind a bright red railing, cars wait for the ferry that will take them to Vesuvius, on Saltspring Island.

In his original drawing, Hughes included a sign that advised “Please do not loiter on the ramp. Others are waiting” and he added two crows perched in the trees to the left. These are not included in the final painting. Yet he did give his undivided attention to many precious details that give this scene its timeless quality—the tire tracks and fallen leaves on the parking lot, the tiny boats speeding along far out in Stuart Channel. The scene conveys a peaceful quietness. One can almost hear the waves lapping against the wharf pilings and the old-fashioned fishing boat chugging north.

This painting perfectly captures a sunny afternoon by the shore. In its quiet way it shows Hughes to be the definitive painter of the BC landscape of the time and place in which he lived.

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. Frame label by E.J. Hughes, November 26, 1981, Special Collections, University of Victoria.