Painted in 1935, Looking from Savary Island is a rare early work which dates from the period when Hughes was completing his studies at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts. That summer, Hughes joined fellow students for a camp on Savary Island, a retreat that became a formative experience for many of the young artists who studied there. According to Ian Thom, it was Frederick Varley, then teaching at the school, who first introduced students to the use of wood panels as supports, a practice Hughes employed here. The painting demonstrates Hughes' emerging mastery of atmosphere and form with an immediacy and romantic nostalgia, a preservation of a formative summer.

Robert Amos, Hughes’s official biographer, notes that between 1933 and 1939 students regularly spent ten days each summer on Savary Island, lodging at the Royal Savary Hotel. During this time, Hughes produced works such as Trees on Savary Island and an etching of a fellow student—images that testify to the convivial and memorable nature of these excursions. This Savary Island subject would continue to resonate with Hughes across his career. Drawing upon an early etching from 1935, he reinterpreted the motif in several later works: a pencil sketch in 1952, an oil on canvas in 1953 (now in the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts), and, decades later, a watercolour in 2004. The persistence of this imagery underscores the lasting impression Savary Island left on Hughes and the deep continuity in his practice, where early experiences were revisited and refined over time.

This work comes from the collection of Jacques Barbeau, one of Hughes’s most significant collectors. His interest was first piqued in 1958 when he encountered a Hughes painting reproduced on the cover of the Vancouver telephone directory. A decade later, in 1969, he acquired his first work from the Dominion Gallery in Montreal, which had represented Hughes since 1951. That initial purchase - a set of preparatory graphite “cartoons” for oil paintings, marked the beginning of a lifelong engagement. Over the years, Barbeau and his wife, Margaret Ann (née Owen), assembled a remarkable collection of some eighty works spanning Hughes’s career, from early sketches and prints to mature paintings in oil, acrylic, and watercolour. The painting itself has an intriguing provenance, Barbeau discovered it in the home of Charles H. Scott, the artist and long-time director of the art school. In 2016, fifteen highlights from their collection entered public view through a long-term loan to the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, where they remain on display in the dedicated Barbeau–Owen Gallery.

The Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts (VSDAA) opened on October 1, 1925, marking the beginning of formalized art education in the city. Founded through the efforts of the British Columbia Society of Fine Arts, the school was a response to Vancouver’s rapid growth and the need for cultural institutions. Under its first director, Charles H. Scott, and with prominent faculty including Jock Macdonald and Fred Varley, the VSDAA quickly became a centre of artistic activity. A vibrant social and intellectual community grew around the school, supported by figures such as John Vanderpant and Harold Mortimer Lamb. In 1933 the school was renamed the Vancouver School of Art, and over the decades it continued to expand, eventually becoming Emily Carr University of Art + Design. In 2025 the institution celebrates its centenary, a testament to its enduring role in shaping the cultural landscape of Vancouver and beyond.