“One of the main reasons I paint is because I think nature’s so wonderful that I want to try to get my feeling down about that on canvas, if possible,” E.J. Hughes said on the CBC television program The Lively Arts in 1961, as quoted by BC Booklook. “I feel that, when I am doing my painting, it is a form of worship.”
Two years earlier he had painted Okanagan Lake, a 32-by-48-inch oil of the lake and the hills around it. Decades later, someone picked it up at a yard sale in southern Ontario for C$200.
From a yard sale to the auction room
The canvas went to auction at Heffel in Vancouver on May 23, 2007. According to Heffel’s results newsletter, it “was acquired by the vendor at a yard sale in southern Ontario for $200” and sold for C$402,500, triple the top of its presale estimate of C$90,000 to C$120,000. Hughes had died earlier that year.
That price includes Heffel’s 15% buyer’s premium, so the hammer price was C$350,000, about 1,750 times what the yard-sale buyer paid. The seller’s own proceeds were not published, and Heffel does not name the seller.
The painting had a long history before the yard sale. Heffel’s catalog listing traces it from the Dominion Gallery in Montreal to the Steel Company of Canada, later Stelco, in Hamilton, and then to a private collection in Hamilton.
A summer trip to Penticton
The listing says a Canada Council fellowship paid for a trip through British Columbia’s Interior in 1958, and that in June Hughes was in Penticton, at the south end of Okanagan Lake. A pencil sketch he made there in 1958, covered with notes, came before the finished canvas.
His biographer, Robert Amos, has described what made that kind of work stand out. “His real difference is his incredible powers of concentration,” Amos told CBC News. “He gives every distant hillside and every blade of grass in the foreground equal and loving attention, and it shows.”
A war artist who wanted quiet
Hughes was born in North Vancouver in 1913. From 1943 to 1946 he served as one of Canada’s official war artists, and his war work is now held by the Canadian War Museum. He later settled at Shawnigan Lake on Vancouver Island.
“He needed silence. Peace and quiet,” filmmaker Jenn Strom told Freshet News of his years there. Earlier in the same interview she described him as “humble and painfully shy.” “He didn’t have it in him to be out there promoting his own work,” she said.
That is where a dealer came in. Ian Thom, then senior curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery, wrote in his 2002 book on the painter that for Hughes, “who was never good at meeting the public or promoting himself, a dealer provided not only the assurance of a steady income and a degree of protection from the world at large but also, for most artistic purposes, his public face.”
Strom’s documentary, The Painted Life of E.J. Hughes, produced by Optic Nerve Films, opened at Vancouver’s VIFF Centre in February 2026.
The market kept climbing
Hughes’ prices have soared since 2007. Entrance to Howe Sound sold for about C$4.8 million in November 2025. Then, on May 21, 2026, Coastal Boats Near Sidney, BC, painted in 1948, brought C$5,701,250 at Heffel, a new auction record for the artist, according to the auction house. Emily Carr University of Art + Design consigned it to fund student awards. That record is about 14 times the 2007 price of Okanagan Lake.
“The passion has always been there, but the price of Hughes’s works has changed as other things in life become more expensive and rare,” David Heffel, the auction house’s president, told CBC Arts.
Photo: Joe Mabel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
