Revelstoke stands at the western end of Rogers Pass, where the Columbia River is joined by the glacier-fed Illecillewaet River. The building of the Canadian Pacific Railway through Revelstoke in 1885 marked the beginning of the town’s settlement history, but with the later arrival of the Trans-Canada Highway, the town became a recreational destination.

E.J. Hughes’s sketching trips through the Interior of British Columbia coincided with the opening of this major auto route, though at first he did not own a car. During his first summer in the Interior in 1958, Hughes, age 45, traveled by bus with his wife, Fern. That trip concluded with a visit to Revelstoke, from where he wrote to his dealer, Max Stern: “I find this hiking back and forth to the motif 4 or 5 miles sometimes each way, and sometimes, like now, in 95-degree weather, cuts into my sketching time and energy a great deal.”[1]

Hughes began Eagle Pass at Revelstoke with a pencil study done on site and densely annotated with colour notes. Another pencil study concentrated on the mountains and Rogers Pass in the distance. He took these back to his studio and in 1961, working up to the eventual painting, he drew Eagle Pass at Revelstoke, a complete tonal study or “cartoon” in graphite, which is offered here for sale. The resulting large oil painting, Eagle Pass at Revelstoke, was painted later that year.

Hughes began to create highly resolved tonal studies during the last years of his service as an official Canadian war artist, in preparation for his striking paintings, and carried on with this process until 1961. Eagle Pass at Revelstoke was the ultimate example. In all Hughes created approximately 53 such cartoons, and they are regarded as some of the finest of all Canadian drawings. Examples are in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian War Museum, the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Sir George Williams University, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Vancouver Art Gallery as well as numerous prestigious private collections.

When he shipped the oil painting Eagle Pass at Revelstoke to the Dominion Gallery on September 11, 1961, Hughes described it in a letter to Stern as follows: “This view of the outskirts of Revelstoke and the Columbia River is from the famous Mt. Revelstoke Ski Jump, which of course is deserted in the summer time. I believe soon, or even already, a third bridge is being built to the right of the 2 in the picture for the new Trans-Canada Highway.… The domed building is the Court House and the main part of the city is out of the picture to the left.”

While Hughes was at work on this canvas, a television crew arrived to film him in his studio at Shawnigan Lake. As he reported to Stern in the same letter, “This painting with its cartoon and original small pencil sketch will be featured along with their producer [Hughes] in a CBC TV production.”

After filming the artist at Shawnigan Lake on Vancouver Island, the crew traveled across the province to film Revelstoke from the very viewpoint Hughes had chosen. Thus, onscreen they were able to merge their view of Revelstoke with Hughes’s cartoon of Eagle Pass at Revelstoke, which then dissolves into the oil painting that was on his easel at the time. The film, a CBC Television episode of The Lively Arts, first aired on December 26, 1961.[2] Hughes recreated this memorable image as a watercolour in 2006.

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. E.J. Hughes to Max Stern, August 24, 1958, and other correspondence, Special Collections, University of Victoria.

2. Daryl Duke, dir., Henry Comor, host, “Five BC Painters,” The Lively Arts, CBC Television, Vancouver, scheduled November 28, aired December 26, 1961.

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