Sold for: $82,600

PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Heffel Gallery Limited, Vancouver
Private Collection, Vancouver
Sold sale of Canadian Post-War & Contemporary Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, June 17, 2009, lot 44
Peter and Joanne Brown Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
E.J. Hughes: Paintings, Drawings & Watercolours, Heffel Gallery Limited, 1990, the 1959 graphite drawing of the same scene entitled Museum Ship, Penticton, BC reproduced, unpaginated
Leslie Allan Dawn and Patricia Salmon, E.J. Hughes: The Vast and Beautiful Interior, Kamloops Art Gallery, 1994, the 1959 graphite drawing of the same scene entitled Museum Ship, Penticton, BC reproduced page 41, this work listed page 72
Jacques Barbeau, A Journey with E.J. Hughes, 2005, the 1959 graphite drawing of the same scene entitled Museum Ship, Penticton, BC reproduced page 6
Jacques Barbeau, The E.J. Hughes Album: The Paintings, Volume 1, 1932 - 1991, 2011, the 1959 oil entitled Museum Ship, Penticton, BC reproduced page 30

EXHIBITED
Kamloops Art Gallery, E.J. Hughes: The Vast and Beautiful Interior, September 22 – November 6, 1994, traveling to the Grand Forks Art Gallery; the Vernon Art Gallery; the Art Gallery of the South Okanagan, Penticton; the Kelowna Art Gallery; and the Prince George Art Gallery, 1994 – 1995, catalogue #46
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference, Vancouver, November 24 - 25, 1997

E.J. Hughes was awarded a Canada Council fellowship in 1958 to fund sketching trips within British Columbia and traveled to the Interior that same year, spending two weeks in Penticton in June. One of the works that resulted from this trip was a 1959 finished tonal graphite drawing, known as a cartoon, entitled Museum Ship, Penticton, BC, which formed the basis for this magnificent watercolour. The scene is of the old sternwheeler, the SS Sicamous, which formerly plied Okanagan Lake, but had been beached at the south end of the lake in Penticton and converted into a museum. Boats were always an important and sought-after subject in Hughes’s work, and this superb watercolour reflects his interest. It is precisely detailed and colourful, with the line of rowboats, people at the rental shack and the piled-up paddles providing great visual interest. In all the elements of this superb watercolour, from the depiction of the historic boat embedded in the textured sand to the background of dry hills and distinctive cliffs above the west shore of the lake, Hughes exhibited his virtuoso technical ability and his deep understanding of the essence of British Columbia.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars