EJ Hughes

Kathy E. Zimon is a fine arts librarian (emerita) at the University of
Calgary. She is the author of Alberta Society of Artists: The First 70
Years and coeditor of Art Documentation Bulletin of the Art Libraries
Society of North America.

Edward John Hughes was born in North Vancouver in 1913 and, with the
exception of his years as a war artist (in England, Alaska, and Ottawa),
brief trips on behalf of commissions, and a few visits to New York, has
spent his life drawing and painting the landscape of British Columbia.
The retrospective exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2002, and
this accompanying book, firmly establishes Hughes not only as an
important B.C. artist but also as a unique talent among 20th-century
Canadian painters.

Hughes’s paintings have a universal appeal that requires no
sophisticated knowledge of art for their appreciation. His vision
transforms the familiar, mostly inhabited coastal landscape into a
picturesque world with echoes of the primitivism of Henri Rousseau, but
without Rousseau’s exotic subject matter. Yet, as Ian Thom elucidates
here, the engaging scenes of boats, ferries, inlets, and hamlets are the
result of a deliberate, complex process that begins with careful pencil
drawings and extensive color notations, altered by subtle changes from
realistic scenes into a realism with supernatural overtones. Hughes was
trained at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts, and
during the 1930s worked on murals in Vancouver and San Francisco that
honed his eye for design and composition.

Thom traces the development of Hughes’s art over eight decades,
noting his critical years as a war artist, and his crucial long
relationship with the Dominion Gallery in Montreal that allowed him the
freedom to live in relatively isolated locales on Vancouver Island,
close to his preferred subject matter.

Thom’s analysis of Hughes’s work is a tour de force of art
historical scholarship, with all the required apparatus of a scholarly
text: notes, bibliography, painting locales and maps, chronology, and
index of works. Astonishingly, each of the 125 reproductions is
full-page: the drawings and prints are in black and white, and all 100
paintings are in color.

The book is sumptuously produced on archival-quality matte paper, its
design as impeccable as its scholarship. This is one of the best and
most beautiful books ever published on a Canadian artist—indispensable
for all collections.