Jacques Barbeau, the first owner of the watercolour Hopkin’s Landing, Howe Sound, called the view it depicts—that of Howe Sound as seen from a small community near Gibsons, BC—“a stunning combination of snow-capped mountains and sculpted islands.” Barbeau further described Howe Sound as “Vancouver’s magic corridor, which has justifiably seized the imagination of B.C. artists over the years. It is the near-perfect template of the West Coast.”[1]

Hopkins Landing is on the Sunshine Coast just beyond Bowen Island and looks out to Howe Sound. E.J. Hughes first saw this view in 1935, just as his years at the Vancouver School of Art were drawing to a close. The mother of his painting partner Orville Fisher owned a guest house at nearby Granthams Landing, and Hughes visited there with the third member of the Western Brotherhood, Paul Goranson. At that time he made a pencil sketch, which, once back home, he translated into a drypoint etching. Years later this became the source of his 1952 oil painting Hopkin’s Landing, Howe Sound.

The painting of Hopkins Landing is certainly a coastal landscape study, in which the waters of Howe Sound and the headlands of Gambier Island lead to a view of the jagged peaks of the Garibaldi Ranges north of Vancouver. But for all of his realist tendencies, Hughes was also a modernist painter. The lower margin of the painting is inscribed with a striking red triangle carrying a pale grey square upon which is superimposed a black rectangle. These can be explained as a roof and a chimney, but their abstract effect is unmistakable. This red arrow shape directs the eye up to a pale grey form standing on alternating black and grey vertical stripes. It is capped by another red arrow—a shed on a dock. A man in a rowboat seems suspended between the two in a neat compositional gesture. These geometric effects float on an ocean of cobalt blue inscribed with undulating wave motifs.

In 2002, sixty-seven years after he completed the initial sketch, Hughes revisited the scene in watercolour. While he was painting Hopkin’s Landing, a book on Hughes had just been published by the Vancouver Art Gallery. Robin Laurence interviewed the artist for the Globe and Mail, writing:

Hughes’s paintings have been described as nostalgic, picturesque, idealized. “Thinking so much about the construction of the picture prohibits it from being a picture of the moment,” Hughes says. “Sometimes the lighting is not quite exactly the same as in nature. It might be from two sources at the same time, and that’s what gives it an idealized look.”… Watercolour, he notes, is a very difficult medium, one that he feels he is still learning how to use.[2]

Some 15 months after that article appeared, Wendy Welch reviewed the Vancouver Art Gallery’s retrospective exhibition when it was seen in Victoria and she stated her appreciation succinctly: “The decorative surface treatment captures our attention and the usually complex compositions encourage us to stay with the work for much longer than a passing glance.”[3] Her words apply well to the exquisite watercolour Hopkin’s Landing, rendering a vivid coastal view that captivated Hughes for all of his adult life.

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. (Douglas & McIntyre, 2005), 97.

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

3. Wendy Welch, “Getting Past the Superlatives,” Monday Magazine, March 25, 2004.

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