The E. J. Hughes Book of Boats

By Robert Amos

Winner of the 2021 BC and Yukon Book Prizes' Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award

Boat lovers of all ages and people who enjoy the scenery of BC’s coast will delight in this charming gift book, a worthy addition to books about BC’s art history.

In the course of his career, one of BC’s most beloved painters, E. J. Hughes (1913–2007), depicted paddle wheelers, steamships, fishing boats, and car ferries. Now The E. J. Hughes Book of Boats brings many of his coastal paintings of boats together in one handsome volume—a book for art lovers and boating enthusiasts alike.

Robert Amos is the official biographer of E. J. Hughes, and works with the participation of the Estate of E. J. Hughes. The Book of Boats follows the success of his two geographically-based volumes, E. J. Hughes Paints Vancouver Island (2018) and E. J. Hughes Paints British Columbia (2019). This new compendium features never-before-seen sketches and photographs accompanying full-page illustrations of some of the artist’s finest works.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Touchwood Editions
• Release date: Oct 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781771513371

Robert Amos

Robert Amos has published eleven books on art—including four bestselling volumes on the life and work of beloved Canadian artist E. J. Hughes—and was the arts columnist for Victoria’s Times Colonist newspaper for more than thirty years. Amos was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1995 and is an Honorary Citizen of Victoria. He lives in Oak Bay, British Columbia, with his wife, artist Sarah Amos.

Book preview

A rough pencil sketch of a freighter being towed by a tug boat. A broad hillside is in the background. There is semi-legible writing indicating the artist’s intentions for colours to be used in the final painting.An oil painting of a steamship with three yellow funnels, travelling toward the left. Several seagulls hover near the back of the ship. In the background is a mixed woods and beyond that snow-capped mountains. To the left is a small wharf with white buildings on it. The sky is a vivid turquoise shifting to yellow near the horizon.

The Car Ferry at Sidney (1952). Pencil. Photo by Sarah Amos. Detail of Nanaimo Harbour (1962). Oil, 32 × 45 (81 × 114.3 cm).

A pencil sketch with a large coniferous tree in the right foreground, and the top edge of a wooden fence, with a seagull perched on the top of a post attached to the fence. In the background is a wooden dock and a ferry boat at the dock. There are small clouds in the sky. Partially legible notes indicate the colours the author had in mind for the final painting to be based on this sketch.

THE

E.J. Hughes signature

Book of Boats

A thick pencil sketch of a freighter on the water, with steam coming from its funnel.

Robert Amos

With the Estate of E. J. Hughes

TouchWood Editions logo

Table of Contents

Cover

Introduction

Start of Text

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

About the Author

A black and white photo of E. J. Hughes, a white man with curly hair, dressed in a loose short-sleeved shirt and pants, in his early 20s, sitting in a rowboat. He’s holding one of the oars. In the background are thick trees along the shore.

E. J. Hughes in a rowboat (1944). Photo by Fern Hughes.

A colour photograph of E. J. Hughes, a white man in his early 70s, balding head, wearing a white shirt, dark tie, and grey sweater vest. He’s seated at a wooden chair in his studio, in front of a large painting showing tall trees.

E. J. Hughes (1986). Photo by J. Neil Newton.

Introduction

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