The late Cowichan Valley artist E.J. Hughes has moved into the big time, with a work selling at auction recently for almost $1.6 million.
The Post Office at Courtenay, B.C., which the Heffel Fine Art Auction House called a “historically significant” 1949 post-war canvas, set “an artist record” in May in Vancouver selling for $1,593,000, far exceeding its presale estimate of up to $800,000.
Hughes was an official Canada war artist and relatively unknown until his work was taken up by Montreal dealer Max Stern in 1951. Stern saw the genius in it and took everything the Cowichan Valley painter produced.
According to Heffel’s sale notes, “Hughes relied on supplies left over from his Second World War service to paint The Post Office at Courtenay, B.C. — a work he created over the course of three years.”
In an interview with the Citizen at his Heather Street home in 2004 Hughes talked about the now-famous painting.
He admitted that he did enjoy bright colours, but didn’t always use them.
“I just choose the bright days. But, I also went too far in the other direction for a while. You’ve probably seen my painting of the Indian Church in North Vancouver with the two steeples. The sky is almost black. That was going a bit too dark.
“There’s several others around the same time, like the The Post Office at Courtenay, B.C. The skies are always black to get the contrast and also to get the feeling of the coast. We occasionally get dark skies like that, but maybe that’s the reason I look for brighter subjects because I overdid it and went too far,” he said.
Stern asked Hughes at the time to lighten his paint a bit.
“That was because the clients [thought] the paintings were all night scenes. I didn’t realize that myself. So I started painting brighter, then I went a bit too far the other way, but now I hope I’ve got a happy medium,” Hughes said.
