Emily Carr

Biography

In 1927 Eric Brown, the director of the National Gallery of Canada, came to Victoria to see Emily Carr. She was fifty-five, had hardly painted for fifteen years and was running a boarding house. Brown invited her to an exhibition of West Coast art in Ottawa, and she sent sixty-five canvases east; thirty-one were included, together with samples of her pottery and rugs with Indigenous designs.

That was the beginning of her reputation.

She was born on 13 December 1871 in Victoria, into an English-Canadian family, the second youngest of nine children. Her father saw to it that the children grew up with English customs and Presbyterian rules. Her mother died in 1886 and her father in 1888, and her eldest sister, Edith, became guardian of the other children. Only after her parents’ deaths did Carr take up painting seriously: from 1890 to 1893 she studied at the California School of Design in San Francisco. In 1898 or 1899 (sources differ) she visited a Nuu-chah-nulth village near Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island; the villagers gave her the name Klee Wyck, which she later used as the title of her first book. In 1899 she went to London and studied at the Westminster School of Art, then at Bushey, and at the artists’ colony in St Ives, Cornwall, and she returned to British Columbia in 1904. In 1905 she drew political cartoons for the Victoria newspaper the Week, and in 1906 she briefly taught in Vancouver.

A trip to Alaska with her sister Alice in 1907 set the task she gave herself: to record what she and many others believed to be the vanishing totems and way of life of the First Nations. Between 1908 and 1910 she made several trips to Indigenous communities and recorded villages and carvings.

In 1910 she went to Paris. With a letter of introduction she met Harry Phelan Gibb in Montparnasse and, by her own account, was delighted by his landscapes and still lifes, though the distortion in his nudes made her rebel. She enrolled at the Académie Colarossi, then studied privately with John Duncan Fergusson, worked with Gibb at Crécy-en-Brie and in Brittany, and in Concarneau studied with Frances Hodgkins. Her palette turned bright and her brushwork broad. Two of her works were accepted by the jury for the Salon d’Automne of 1911.

In March 1912 Carr opened a studio in Vancouver and showed seventy watercolours and oils in her new manner; she was the first to introduce the city to Post-Impressionism. In the summer of that year she travelled to Haida Gwaii, the upper Skeena River and Alert Bay, where she worked on the art of the Haida, Gitxsan and Tsimshian. Her sketches of a carved raven at Cumshewa grew into the painting “Big Raven”. She gave a public lecture on totem poles and ended it with the wish to preserve some relics of the “primitive greatness” of the West. Vancouver did not support the new manner, and in 1913 Carr went back to Victoria. The boarding house she ran there gave its name to her book “The House of All Sorts”. She painted little in those years: the cliffs on Dallas Road, the trees of Beacon Hill Park. She herself felt that she had stopped painting altogether, but that is not quite true.

The exhibition of 1927 ended her isolation. When it travelled to Toronto she met members of the Group of Seven, then the best-known modern painters in Canada. Lawren Harris, who became her friend and mentor, told her: “You are one of us.” He advised her to look in the forest landscapes of the West for an equivalent of the totem poles, and in her correspondence with him Carr discovered Northern European Symbolism. Harris bought her painting “The Indian Church” (1929) and hung it in his dining room. In 1928, at her invitation, the American artist Mark Tobey came to Victoria; with him she tried Cubism and abstraction but, in her own words, she was not ready for abstraction. She took part in the Group of Seven exhibitions in 1930 and 1931, visited New York in 1930 and met Georgia O’Keeffe, and in 1933 was one of the founders of the Canadian Group of Painters. Her late canvases, such as “Odds and Ends” (1939), show cleared land and stumps: Carr was troubled by industrial logging.

From 1937, because of a heart condition, she was less and less able to travel and turned to writing. With the help of a friend, Ira Dilworth, a professor of English, “Klee Wyck” appeared in 1941, and the same year it won the Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction. It was followed by “The Book of Small” (1941) and, later, other books of an autobiographical kind. In 1942 Carr set up the Emily Carr Trust and gave about 170 works to the Vancouver Art Gallery. The only commercially successful show of her life took place in Montreal in 1944.

Emily Carr died on 2 March 1945 at the James Bay Inn in Victoria, shortly before she was to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of British Columbia. She is buried at Ross Bay Cemetery. The Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver is named after her, and the house where she was born is now a museum; in 1952 her work, with that of several other artists, represented Canada at the Venice Biennale.