LOT 42 EDWARD JOHN HUGHES, R.C.A.
ABOVE MORAINE LAKE, oil on canvas, signed and dated 1964
32" x 45"; 81.3 cm x 114.3 cm
Auction Estimate: $150000 / $200000
Provenance:
Dominion Gallery, Montreal.
Private Collection, Toronto.
Literature:
Lisa Christensen, A Hiker’s Guide to Art of the Canadian Rockies, Calgary, 1999, page 30.
Ian M. Thom, E.J. Hughes, The Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2002, page 145.
In 1963, E.J. Hughes was the recipient of a second Canada Council Fellowship. He planned to spend the grant on several important sketching trips, one of which was a visit to the Canadian Rockies. It was during this trip that Above Moraine Lake was conceived.
The reception of this award was certainly liberating for Hughes. As Ian Thom states, Hughes “looked forward to being able to drive his car to the sketching locales. He would no longer be restricted to those destinations within reach of public transport or to which he could walk.”
Hughes’ decision to depict the splendour of Moraine Lake, a glacial lake in Banff National Park, is not surprising. This locale was first happened upon by alpinist Walter Wilcox in 1893, during his effort to reach the apex of Mount Temple. In 1899, Wilcox reminisced:
“No scene has ever given me an equal impression of inspiring solitude and rugged grandeur. I stood on a a great stone of the moraine where, from a slight elevation, a magnificent view of the lake lay before me, and while studying the details of this unknown and unvisited spot, spent the happiest half-hour of my life.”
Hughes’s luminous colour palette, consisting of intense tones and high contrasts, is most evident in his much sought-after artwork of the 1960s. The natural, seamless spatial progression seen in Above Moraine Lake is also a distinct trademark of Hughes. Each mountain crevice is carefully composed; the melting ice and silt and rows of larch trees lead the eye through the meticulously arranged composition, far into the distance. Undoubtedly, Hughes’s 1963 sketching excursion proved fruitful. Above Moraine Lake truly captures the panoramic majesty of the Rockies.
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