This Week in History, 1951: A Montreal art dealer discovers E.J. Hughes, with help from the RCMP


Dr. Max Stern also put on Emily Carr’s only commercially successful exhibition in her lifetime

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In 1951, artist E.J. Hughes was so broke he was thinking about getting a job at the post office or going back into the army.

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But then Montreal art dealer Dr. Max Stern went to lunch with artist Lawren Harris at the UBC Faculty Club.

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Hanging on the walls were two Hughes paintings, and Stern was intrigued.

“Both were of ships,” said a Sept. 22, 1951 story in The Vancouver Sun. “One was of fishing boats, the other was a ferry approaching land.”

Harris told Stern that Hughes lived in Victoria, and Stern took a ferry there to try to find him. In the B.C. capital, he “piled up a huge taxi bill” going to several addresses searching for Hughes, to no avail.

But Stern was determined, telling the Sun’s art writer Gwen Cash, “I’m going to catch him if it takes me to the North Pole.”

Cash suggested Stern try the RCMP, which found Hughes was living in Shawnigan Lake, about 50 km north of Victoria.

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Cash went along for the search.

“We drove there on a stinking hot afternoon and found Hughes painting in the attic of a tall old board and batten house built on a ledge behind some cottonwood trees overlooking the lake,” she wrote.

Cash wrote Hughes was “a tall slim young fellow with intense blue eyes, a thin black moustache and an air of great, if somewhat meandering, sincerity.”

Stern purchased every artwork Hughes had, 14 oil paintings, four oil sketches and 32 “lovely broad pencil sketches.” The price was $500.

But it wasn’t a one-off deal. Stern agreed to buy every painting Hughes produced in the future, providing the artist with some much-needed financial security.

Story on the discovery of B.C. painter E.J. Hughes by Montreal art dealer Dr. Max Stern in the Sept. 22, 1951 Vancouver Sun.
Story on the discovery of B.C. painter E.J. Hughes by Montreal art dealer Dr. Max Stern in the Sept. 22, 1951 Vancouver Sun.

Stern would remain Hughes’ dealer until Stern died in 1988, and worked with Stern’s Dominion Gallery until it folded in 2000. Hughes went on to become one of Canada’s most prominent artists — one of the paintings hanging at UBC, “Fish Boats, Rivers Inlet,” sold for $2,041,250 at a Heffel auction in 2018.

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Cash wrote that “there’s probably no more typically British Columbian artist than Edward J. Hughes,” but he had been “a prophet without honour” in his home province until Stern came along — “It took an art connoisseur from Montreal to discover him.”

“It’s the story of Emily Carr all over again,” Cash wrote.

Indeed, Stern was Emily Carr’s art dealer as well. In 1944, he met a 72-year-old Carr in Victoria, and persuaded her to have an exhibition in Montreal.

“I took a taxi and drove out to her house and found her sitting in the sun, cat on her lap,” he told Maclean’s magazine in 1966. “I said ‘I would love to see your paintings.’ These were in a large room with one wall entirely stacked with them — there were more than 400 there. We took them out and I was speechless.”

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Carr predicted he would “not sell one painting” because “my paintings do not sell.” But Stern sold 54 of the 60 works he took back East and quickly sent Carr a cheque.

“She wired back, ‘NEVER SEEN SUCH A FAT CHEQUE,’ and in a following letter described it as a ‘joyful shock,’” wrote Dorothy Eber in Macleans. “She died the following March. Her Stern show was the only public (commercial) success she knew as a painter.”

Stern was born and raised in Germany, where his father owned a prominent art gallery in Duesseldorf. Stern earned a doctorate in art studies before joining his father at the gallery, but after the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Jewish family was persecuted and had to close the gallery and liquidate its assets.

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Stern fled to England in 1937 and Canada in 1940, but was interned as an “enemy alien” until 1941, when a member of the Birks jewelry family sponsored him and obtained his release.

In Montreal, he joined the Dominion Gallery and decided to promote Canadian artists, rather than the European artists that were popular at the time.

He and his wife had no children and most of their estate was donated to McGill and Concordia Universities in Montreal and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The estate began the Max Stern Restitution Project, which aims to recover 400 works of art that Stern lost during the Nazi era.

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September 1952. “Dr. and Mrs. Max Stern returned this week in the Empress of Canada from a three months trip to England, France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.” But as this photograph, taken before their departure, makes clear, it was no ordinary trip. Stern, a pioneering Montreal gallery owner, was on a mission to find paintings stolen from his family’s gallery in Duesseldorf, Germany, by the Nazis. In the uncredited photo, Stern and his wife Iris are looking at reproductions of some of the missing paintings. During the trip, they located one work: Judgment Day by 15th century master Hieronymus Bosch. “Another — St. Anthony — by an unknown 15th-century painter, is being contested by Hamburg law courts,” the caption said.
September 1952. “Dr. and Mrs. Max Stern returned this week in the Empress of Canada from a three months trip to England, France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.” But as this photograph, taken before their departure, makes clear, it was no ordinary trip. Stern, a pioneering Montreal gallery owner, was on a mission to find paintings stolen from his family’s gallery in Duesseldorf, Germany, by the Nazis. In the uncredited photo, Stern and his wife Iris are looking at reproductions of some of the missing paintings. During the trip, they located one work: Judgment Day by 15th century master Hieronymus Bosch. “Another — St. Anthony — by an unknown 15th-century painter, is being contested by Hamburg law courts,” the caption said. Montreal Gazette archives
Max Stern with an Emily Carr painting at the Dominion gallery. Courtesy Concordia University.
Max Stern with an Emily Carr painting at the Dominion gallery. Courtesy Concordia University. jpg
E.J. Hughes Fish Boats, Rivers Inlet (1946) at Heffel gallery in Vancouver, B.C., Oct. 24, 2018. This was one of the paintings Max Stern saw at UBC that led him to seek out Hughes and become his art dealer. It sold for $2 million at a Heffel auction in Nov., 2018, a record for the B.C. artist.
E.J. Hughes Fish Boats, Rivers Inlet (1946) at Heffel gallery in Vancouver, B.C., Oct. 24, 2018. This was one of the paintings Max Stern saw at UBC that led him to seek out Hughes and become his art dealer. It sold for $2 million at a Heffel auction in Nov., 2018, a record for the B.C. artist. Photo by Arlen Redekop /PNG
Montreal Gazette review of a Emily Carr exhibition at the Dominion Gallery on Oct. 21, 1944. Max Stern sold 56 works at the show, the only commercially successful show in Carr’s lifetime. The painting in the review, Street, Alert Bay (1912) sold for $2,401,250 at a Heffel auction in 2019.
Montreal Gazette review of a Emily Carr exhibition at the Dominion Gallery on Oct. 21, 1944. Max Stern sold 56 works at the show, the only commercially successful show in Carr’s lifetime. The painting in the review, Street, Alert Bay (1912) sold for $2,401,250 at a Heffel auction in 2019.
The Emily Carr painting Street, Alert Bay (1912).
The Emily Carr painting Street, Alert Bay (1912). Photo by Heffel Inc /PNG
Ad for Emily Carr’s only commercially successful art show in her lifetime at the Dominion Gallery in Montreal in 1944. This ran in the Oct. 21, 1944 Montreal Gazette.
Ad for Emily Carr’s only commercially successful art show in her lifetime at the Dominion Gallery in Montreal in 1944. This ran in the Oct. 21, 1944 Montreal Gazette.

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