B.C. Artist 'Discovered'

Eastern collector snaps up present and future work of pictorialist Edward J. Hughes

Vancouver Sun

September 22, 1951

(Ed note: EJ Hughes had just moved to Shawnigan Lake and lived there for the next 20 years)

By Gwen Cash

THERE’S probably no more typically British Columbian artist than Edward J. Hughes, every bit of whose work not only in the present, but for several years to come, will be owned in Eastern Canada.

Hughes got his art training in Vancouver School of Art, and calls Victoria “home”, but he’s “a prophet without honor” in his home province. It took an art connoisseur from Montreal to discover him.

It’s the story of Emily Carr over again.

In Vancouver and Victoria I queried a list of art lovers about Edward J. Hughes. A very small percentage knew who he was. Most of them hadn’t seen one of his pictures.

Yet Toronto Saturday Night has reproduced several of his paintings, one of them as early as four years ago. His work is represented in the Art Gallery of Toronto, the National Gallery, Ottawa and in Hart House. There is one in Vancouver Gallery.

This summer, while Victoria’s city aldermen have been looking a gift horse in the mouth and examining its teeth, Dr. Max Stern owner of the Dominion Galleries, Montreal, swooped out of the East and bought everything Hughes had, including a couple of pictures on loan to UBC.

The gift horse in question is Miss Sara Spencer’s offer of her spacious home as a permanent Arts Centre for Victoria. Its teeth, a clause in the deed of gift saying it’s for the benefit of Greater Victoria. And custodians of Victoria’s finances are afraid its satellite municipalities won’t kick through with their share of upkeep. So Victoria continues without a permanent arts’ centre and Hughes’ pictures go East.

When and if Victoria finally decides it needs a permanent gallery, it will have to buy any Hughes pictures it wants from Dr. Max Stern of Montreal.

Dr. Stern refuses to call Hughes a genius; says he doesn’t know — yet.

But he’s invested a whacking great sum in him; intends to have an exhibition of his work this fall.

The story of how he got hold of the Hughes stuff is interesting.

In July Dr. Stern was in Vancouver on business and saw the two Hughes pictures on loan to UBC. Both were of ships. One was of fishing boats, the other of a ferry approaching land. Hughes learned the artist lived in Victoria and immediately took a ticket for Vancouver Island.

In Victoria he looked in directories, piled up a large taxi bill searching for Edward J. Hughes.

Now Hughes is shy, very much a recluse, always looking for the right conditions in which he can work and seldom finding them. He moves often. Stern couldn’t seem to catch up with him; “though I’m going to, even if the search takes me to the North Pole” he told me.

I suggested the RCMP. A constable located him at Shawnigan Lake, thirty miles north of Victoria in the mountains.

We drove there on a stinking hot forenoon and found Hughes painting in the attic of a tall old brown board and batten house built on a ledge behind some cottonwood trees overlooking the lake."

“It isn’t very suitable — this place,” said Hughes fussing with some canvases. “I think we’ll have to move.”

“Oh no!” his wife Fern’s voice was filled with horror. “We’ve only just got settled.”

“Don’t move. Just paint,” pleaded Dr. Stern.

Hughes promised to do so.

As I said, Dr. Stern bought everything he had and thirsted for more. There were fourteen oil paintings, thirty-two lovely broad pencil sketches. At least that’s what Hughes calls them. In reality they are very finished. They are the second, sometimes the third movement of a process which finally results in a picture. For as Hughes himself says, he is a very slow worker; proceeds to his final analysis with extreme deliberation.

First he pencil sketches on the spot; occasionally he then does a color sketch. Then in the studio he does these large broad pencil pictures, eliminating everything he feels is not cogent to the composition.

He is a tall slim young fellow with intense blue eyes, a thin black moustache and an air of great, if somewhat wondering, sincerity.

Perhaps he is a genius. Only time will tell.