Text copyright © 2020 by Robert Amos
All artwork and ephemera copyright © by the Estate of E. J. Hughes.
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Cataloguing Data Available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 9781771513371 (electronic)
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THE
Book of Boats
E. J. Hughes was a landscape painter, and by choice his paintings almost always included water. Naturally, this led him to include boats in the scene. On February 25, 1966, Hughes wrote to his sister Zoë about one of his recent works: “glad you liked the painting. . . . It is strange, everyone seems to know it is my painting, even though there is nothing in type to say so. Perhaps I am becoming noted for my boats.”
Though no one would ever have claimed that Hughes had the sea in his blood—he never learned to swim and was seasick on the Atlantic crossings he made during wartime—he certainly spent his share of time on the water.
In fact, in the years before the War, he spent two summers gill netting for salmon at Rivers Inlet on bc’s Central Coast. Later he owned a couple of boats while living on Shawnigan Lake and, indeed, for a time his small one-cylinder motorboat was his only means of transportation to and from Shawnigan Village. In retrospect there is no doubt that Hughes liked painting boats and took a great deal of pleasure from the elegant curves of their design.
Rather than painting en plein air (outdoors), his approach was to make detailed drawings in pencil, on location, often while sitting in the front seat of his car. Back in his studio—sometimes years later—he took up these careful drawings as the basis for his full-sized paintings.
I saw my first Hughes painting when I came to Victoria in 1975. View from the Old Coal Dump, Ladysmith, BC (1970) caught my eye in the Special Collections reading room of the library of the University of Victoria. From then on, I watched for his work and wrote about it in my newspaper column.
Hughes noticed, and one day in 1993 his assistant, Mrs. Pat Salmon, called and invited my wife and me to lunch with him in Victoria. Though he had a reputation as a recluse, we discovered that Hughes was quite sociable. Mrs. Salmon called again in 1996 and invited us to visit Hughes at his home and studio in Duncan, and afterward we had lunch and toured Maple Bay. In subsequent years, we exchanged a few letters, but mostly I didn’t want to intrude on his privacy.
With the assistance of Mrs. Salmon, Hughes was able to live by himself and remain out of the limelight. He continued painting with unabated concentration until his death at the age of ninety-three, on January 8, 2007.