This portrait is a detail from one of several murals painted by
E.J. Hughes, Paul Goranson and Orville Fisher, known collectively
as the Western Canada Brotherhood, on the wall of the dining room
of the Malaspina Hotel on Front Street in Nanaimo,
a small city on the east coast of Vancouver Island and the home
of the Alexandro Malaspina Research
Centre at Vancouver Island University. It depicts a mythical event - Malaspina
sketching what are now known as the "Malaspina
Galleries," a water-sculpted sandstone overhang on nearby
Gabriola Island. Such a
sketch was in fact made by Ferdinando
Brambilla (Museo
Naval, Madrid) during the expedition of Dionisio
Alcalá Galiano and
Cayetano Valdés to the Georgia Strait. Malaspina himself
did not visit the area, the closest he came being Yuquot on Nootka
Island, off the west coast of Vancouver Island. The mural is a youthful work of E.J. Hughes, and was for many years covered up after renovation work on the hotel. Remodelling of the building brought the works back to light, but also led to the destruction of most of them. This one, however, has been restored as a joint project of the Nanaimo Community Archives and the City of Nanaimo, for installation in the Vancouver Island Conference Centre.
Image courtesy of the Centro
di Studi Malaspiniani, Mulazzo, Italy. Notes
by John Black, based in part upon Patrick Dunae: "Malaspina:
The Hotel, the Murals & the Madness of Modernity" in Alexandro
Malaspina: Enlightenment Thinker?, Proceedings
of the Inaugural Symposium of the Alexandro Malaspina Research
Centre, Nanaimo, Malaspina University College, 2000.
Updated:
March 8, 2020