Emily Carr

Emily Carr was an acclaimed Canadian painter and writer – her own person.

She went against her upbringing and the society around her by following her want and need to paint, especially the First Nations people of Canada’s West Coast.

Born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1871, the year British Columbia joined Canada, Emily Carr was the second youngest of nine children born to English parents Richard and Emily Carr.

The Carr children were raised in an English tradition. Her father believed it was sensible to live on Vancouver Island, a colony of Great Britain, where he could practice English customs and continue his British citizenship.

Carr was taught in the Presbyterian tradition, with Sunday morning prayers and evening Bible readings. Her father called on one child per week to recite the sermon, and Emily consistently had trouble reciting it.

Doris Shadbolt, in her Preface to Carr’s book Fresh Seeing, a book that has both of the only two public talks that Emily Carr ever gave, writes:

“She was not verbal or analytical about her art…she could become very impatient with those who were…she felt she should not be giving the talk at all because she was only a worker, ‘and workers should work and talkers should talk, and both had best stick to their own jobs and avoid getting mixed up.’”

Shadbolt continues,

“The speeches are, statements of her own hard-won convictions and insights as artist and person, they ring passionate and true. For, as someone who ‘hates like poison to talk’ this must be the basis of her willingness to do so: she was a person of intense conviction…”

Carr was known as Klee Wyck, the laughing one. In the chapter Ucluelet, from her book Klee Wyck, she writes,

“The Chief, old Hipi, was held to be a reader of faces. He perched himself on the top of the Missionaries’ drug cupboard: his brown fists clutched the edge of it, his elbows taut and shoulders hunched. His crumpled shoes hung loose as if they dangled from strings and had no feet in them. The stare of his eyes searched right through. Suddenly they were done; he lifted them above me to the window, uttered several terse sentences in Chinook, jumped off the cupboard and strode back to the village.
I was half afraid to ask the Missionary, “What did he say?”
“Not much. Only that you had no fear, that you were not stuck up, and that you knew how to laugh.”

She studied at the California School of Design in San Francisco for three years from 1890 to 1893. In 1899 she travelled to and studied at the Westminster School of Art. After London on to Bushey, Hertfordshire in 1900 studying under John William Whiteley. She spent an interesting and eventful time studying in St Ives, Cornwall in 1901 before returning home to Canada.

Of her return she writes in the chapter Cariboo Gold from Growing Pains,

“And so, I came back to British Columbia not with “know-it-all” fanfare, not a successful student prepared to carry on art in the New World, just a broken-in-health girl that had taken rather a hard whipping and was disgruntled with the world.”

In 1910 she returned to Europe, again to study, this time in Paris at the Académie Colarossi. There she studied with John Duncan Fergusson and followed him to the Atelier Blanche. After a bout of illness she then joined Harry Phelan Gibb in the small village of Crécy-en-Brie and in St. Efflam, Brittany. Next she went to Concarneau on the coast of Brittany to study with Frances Hodgkins.

Much later, in 1928, Mark Tobey came from the U.S. to visit her in Victoria to teach a master class in her studio. Carr worked with Tobey furthering her understanding of modern art.

Ira Dilworth writes in his introduction to Carr’s 1930 speech, Fresh Seeing, made at the Victoria Women’s Canadian Club. “Her speech…reflects the philosophy of her whole life as a painter, a philosophy which was centred around an insistence on complete integrity, independence, and honesty, a philosophy which she adhered to, lived and worked within throughout her whole career. She believed firmly that the artist must speak clearly to people, must speak in terms of actual experience but must address particularly the spirit and the soul.”

"Art is art, nature is nature, you cannot improve upon it . . . Pictures should be inspired by nature but made in the soul of the artist; it is the soul of the individual that counts." She is quoted as saying in 1912.

From Klee Wyck, the Greenville chapter,

“Every clan took a creature for its particular crest. Individuals had private crests too, which they earned for themselves often by privation and torture and fasting. These totem creatures were believed to help specially those who were of their crest.
When you looked at a man’s pole, his crests told you who he was, whom he might marry and whom he might not marry - for people of the same crest were forbidden to marry each other.
You knew also by the totem what sort of man he was or at least what he should be because men tried to be like the creature of their crest, fierce, or brave, or wise, or strong.”

In 1898, at age 27, Carr made the first of several sketching and painting trips to Aboriginal villages. She stayed in a village near Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island, home to the Nuu-chah-nulth people, then commonly known to English-speaking people as “Nootka”.

In 1907, Carr made a sightseeing trip to Alaska with her sister Alice and decided on her artistic mission of documenting all she could of what she perceived as the "vanishing totems" and way of life of the First Nations people.

One of her last trips north was in the summer of 1928, when she visited the Nass and Skeena rivers, as well as Haida Gwaii. She went to Yuquot and the northeast coast of Vancouver Island in 1930, and then to Lillooet (Cariboo) in 1933.

“My sister owned a beautiful mare which she permitted me to ride. On the mare, astride as I had ridden in Cariboo, …No woman had ridden cross-saddle before in Victoria! Victoria was shocked! My family sighed. Carrs had always conformed; they believed in what always has been continuing always to be. Cross-saddle! Why, everyone disapproved! Too bad, instead of England gentling me into an English Miss with nice ways I was more me than ever, just pure me.” From Caribou Gold, Growing Pains.

Her early studies in England and France encouraged her to paint en plein air giving her an immediacy and intensity of experience. She continued to practice this method throughout her career.

Emily Carr did little painting during the 15 years after her return to Victoria in 1913. To make ends meet she ran a rooming house that she named The House of All Sorts. That became the title of one of her books where she describes the many different types of people who stayed in the house. Those years were difficult for Carr financially and during that time art was not the focus of her life.

She met Frederick Varley in Vancouver and in 1927, in Toronto, other members of the Group of Seven. At that time the group were Canada's most recognized modern painters.Lawren Harris became an important mentor and friend. "You are one of us." he told Carr. Harris bought The Indian Church and showcased it in his home. He considered it Carr's best work.

Indian Church by Emily Carr — Indian Church

Her encounter with the Group ended the artistic isolation of Carr's previous 15 years, leading to one of her most prolific periods, and the creation of many of her most notable works.

Two of her paintings had been selected and hung in the 1911 Salon d'Automne in Paris.

Her iconic paintings of forest interiors and monumental Indigenous totems became particularly well known to the Canadian public in the late 1920s, when her work was presented in the exhibition Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern, shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada.

An exhibition– A Century of Canadian Art at the Tate Gallery in London in 1938 - brought her some international acclaim. The only successful commercial show of her career was held at the Dominion Gallery in Montreal in 1944.

In 1942 Carr established the Emily Carr Trust and donated close to 170 paintings to the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Klee Wyck, her first of seven books, published in 1941, won the Governor General's Literary Award for non-fiction. Her other books include The Book of Small, 1942, The House of All Sorts, 1944, Growing Pains, 1946.

Other writings by and about her include, Fresh Seeing, Pause: A Sketchbook, The Heart of a Peacock, This and That. The Lost Stories of Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr.

From Klee Wyck, Sophie,

“They were thrilling, those very, very tiny babies. Everybody was excited over them. I sat down on the floor close to Sophie.
“Sophie, if the baby was a girl it was to have my name. There are two babies and I have only one name. What are we going to do about it?”
“The biggest and the best is yours,” said Sophie.
My Em’ly lived three months. Sophie’s Maria lived three weeks. I bought Em’ly’s tombstone. Sophie bought Marias’s.”

There are a number of films and videos of Carr’s life. Klee Wyck The Story of Emily Carr was produced at the National Film Board in 1946 with Crawley Films. A Woman of All Sorts: The Life and Times of Emily Carr. Winds of Heaven is a feature-length documentary film directed by Michael Ostroff and narrated by Diane D’Aquila. The videos can be found on YouTube.

In Victoria there is both a National Historic Site called the Emily Carr House and the Emily Carr Branch of the Greater Victoria Public Library. There is a plaque at 207 Government Street in Victoria designating Carr as a National Historic Person.

The Emily Carr University of Art + Design is located in Vancouver. Also, there are public schools named after her in Vancouver, B. C.; Toronto, Oakville, Woodbridge, London, Ottawa in Ontario and in Montreal, Quebec.

On the B. C. coast an arm of Chapple Inlet is named the Emily Carr Inlet. In 1994, the Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union adopted the name Carr for a crater on Venus.

Emily Carr was audacious in her life-long struggle to pursue her art and develop its technique and form. Working against the society’s and art world’s view that she was a “woman” painter and not a painter - Carr persevered. The work she produced – painting and writing - and her strength of conviction, is what makes us regard this West Coast artist so highly.

She suffered her last heart attack and died on March 2, 1945, at the James Bay Inn in her hometown of Victoria shortly before she was to have been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of British Columbia.

Carr is buried at Ross Bay Cemetery.

From Klee Wyck, Kitwancool

When I got back to Kitwangak the Mounted Police came to see me.
“You have been in to Kitwancool?”
“Yes.”
“How did the Indians treat you?”
“Splendidly.”
“Learned their lesson, eh?” said the man. “We have had no end of trouble with those people - chased missionaries and drove surveyors off with axes – simply won’t have whites in their village. I would never have advised anyone going in – particularly a woman. No, I would certainly have said, ‘Keep out.’”
“Then I am glad I did not ask for your advice.”, I said.