E.J. Hughes painting goes for record $1.14M

Before dying in 2007 B.C. painter E.J. Hughes very nearly got to witness one of his works enter the rare “million-dollar” sale club for Canadian artists.

Rivers Inlet sold for a personal record $920,000 in Toronto in 2004, and the prolific artist addressed the auction audience from his B.C. home by speakerphone.

According to an auction spokesman Hughes told them how special the sale was for him, since colleagues like Emily Carr never lived to see their works “go for astronomical values.”

Hughes would have been happy to know that perhaps his best work, Coastal Boats Near Sidney, BC, sold for a personal record of $1,140,750, on Tuesday in Vancouver.

The 1948 painting was the high sale of the night at the Heffel Auction of Canadian Post-War and Contemporary Art, at the Vancouver Convention Centre, among total sales of $8.8 million.

“It’s yet another great B.C. artist in the million-dollar club,” said Heffel spokesman Ross Sullivan.

For comparison, Sullivan said B.C. artist Emily Carr has several million-dollar-plus works, including Wind in the Tree Tops, which went for $2,164,500 in 2009.

On Tuesday another Hughes painting, Mouth of the Courtenay River, sold for $789,750.

There were several other works breaking the million-dollar mark: Jean Lemieux’s Les Moniales sold for $1,023,750; Jean-Paul Riopelle’s Sans titre sold for $1,082,250.

Some expected the Riopelle painting to be top seller on Tuesday, as he already has had 10 paintings that have sold for over $1 million.

In Comparison, Tom Thomson also has 10 in the million-plus club.

E.J. Hughes was born in North Vancouver in 1913 and grew up in Nanaimo. He joined the military and after returning from the Second World War honed his west-coast natural style after settling in Shawnigan Lake on Vancouver Island.