Coastal Boats Near Sidney, B.C., is now the fourth most expensive Canadian work of art sold at auction
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The E.J. Hughes painting Coastal Boats Near Sidney, B.C., sold for $5,701,250 at a Heffel auction in Toronto on Thursday, a record price for an artist from B.C.
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The 1948 painting was consigned by the Emily Carr College of Art and Design, which had received it as a donation from prominent Vancouver businessman Peter Brown and his wife Joanne.
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Coastal Boats Near Sidney, B.C., is now the fourth most expensive Canadian work of art sold at auction. It supplants another Hughes painting, Entrance to Howe Sound, which sold for $4,801,250 at a Heffel auction on Nov. 19, 2025.
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When the Browns purchased Coastal Boats Near Sidney, B.C., in 2011, it set a new record for Hughes at the time, $1.14 million.
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The striking depiction of two old steamships plying the coastal waters is considered one of Hughes’s finest paintings. It was on the cover of former Vancouver Art Gallery curator Ian Thom’s 2002 book on Hughes.
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“If you wanted one painting of Hughes, that’s the one,” said the late Hughes collector Jacques Barbeau in 2011. “If you want the esthetic footprint of E.J. Hughes, I don’t think you could have a better example. That is British Columbia. The strength, the power, the scenery, it’s all in there.”
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