Emily Carr once wrote, “I could not paint in the old way - it is dead - meaningless - empty.” Because of these strong views, she was ostracized for years by her family and the people of British Columbia. Now, 50 years after her death, she is recognized as one of Canada’s greatest painters - male or female - and numerous books, besides her own autobiography, have been written about her work and about her personal life-style that differed greatly from expectations for a woman in Victorian times.

Born in 1871 in Victoria, British Columbia, Emily had four older sisters and a younger brother. She was 12 when her mother died and, on the death of her domineering father two years later, her eldest sister ruled in similar fashion, even, on occasion, whipping her rebellious youngest sister.
 
 

Following her 1910 visit to France, an invigorated Emily Carr returned to British Columbia, bringing with her a postimpressionist style that marked the end of her earlier anachronistic English water colour mode. By 1932, after encouragements from the likes of Lawren Harris and still other Group of Seven members, Emily Carr's canvases began stressing themes of nature rather than recording the vanishing villages, houses and totem poles of First Nation Peoples of the northwest, themes which earlier had predominated her canvases for 20 years. [Photo, courtesy The Art Gallery of Ontario]

To escape such tyranny, Emily rode her pony to nearby Beacon Hill Park where she first sensed the joy of the forest. Like many young women of the era, she took art lessons and, while still in her teens, enrolled at the California School of Design in San Francisco. There she painted the basics: antiques, still life, and scenery, but was too shy to take the “life” class that posed nude females.

In 1893 she returned to Vancouver and opened a studio in the loft of the cow barn on the family property. She happily taught children and painted, spending the summer of 1898 at Ucluelet, an Indian village on the northwest coast of the island where she met the native peoples and experienced their day-to-day culture. Because she could not speak their language, she resorted to pantomime. The ensuing laughter caused them to call her “Klee Wyck” or Laughing One.

Emily, realizing that she needed more training, enrolled the following year at the Westminster School of Art in London, England. She did not enjoy the city and found the countryside too manicured, but she studied and worked hard for four years until illness forced her into a sanitarium for 18 months.

Fascinated by nature's pulsating energy, Emily Carr's later career examines the mysterious, undulating vibrations of nature as portrayed in "Sombreness Sunlit," circa 1937-40. [Photo, courtesy The Province of British Columbia Archives]

Back in Canada in 1905, she opened a studio in Vancouver – again gave art lessons and spent summers with the native people, often sleeping “in tents, in roadmaker’s tool sheds, in missions, and Indian houses.” Her friendship with the native people gave her new insights into their creativity, but again she felt more training was needed and, in 1910, went to Paris to study at the Académie Colarossi.

Once more, however, Emily became ill and spent “three hellish months” in hospital. A doctor advised her to stay out of large cities and, since Harry Gibb, her teacher, held “new school” classes at Crécy – a two-hour trip from Paris – she went there. Gibb was supportive, once predicting, “You will one day be one of the women painters of your day.” Before she left to return to Vancouver in 1911, two of her paintings were shown at a Paris salon.

On her return, Emily refused to paint the fashionable pretty scenery then in vogue but, instead, created sweeping scenes with bold and vivid colours. These embarrassed her sisters and caused the public to laugh at her work. The art school did not rehire her and parents stopped sending their children for private lessons. Despite this, she carried on and, in the summer of 1912, travelling with only a sheepdog for a companion, sketched and painted other remote villages on the Queen Charlotte Islands and Skeena River.

With no money coming in, Emily was forced to return to Victoria where the family property was divided among the sisters (her sickly brother had died). With her share, Emily, now over 40, decided to build and run a boarding house.

For the next 15 years she cooked, cleaned, and did most of the repair work. To earn extra money, she also raised and sold sheepdogs, hooked rugs, and created pottery based on native designs to sell to tourists while most of her paintings remained in the attic. Her eccentricities were a source of amusement for she surrounded herself with pets – dogs, birds that included a parrot and a cockatoo, a white rat, and a monkey named Woo that she often wheeled about in a baby carriage.

From an earlier period in the career of Emily Carr, "Indian Village with Totem Poles," oil on canvas, documents her passion to record the vanishing visual history of British Columbia's westcoast First Nation Peoples. [Photo, courtesy The Collection of Power Corporation of Canada]

In 1927, however, her life changed dramatically. In 1926, Ottawa’s National Gallery decided to exhibit “Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern,” and asked Marius Barbeau, an anthropologist, to help find exhibits. Barbeau, who had learned of Emily through the Indians, visited her and recommended her work to Eric Brown, the gallery’s director. He, too, visited her, was impressed with the power and originality of her work, and asked her to send 50 paintings as well as some of her rugs and pottery to Ottawa. He also arranged a rail pass for her to see the show and suggested she read a book about a Toronto-based group of artists known as the Group of Seven.

She had never heard of them but obtained Fred Housser’s A Canadian Art Movement and, before heading east, visited Frederick Varley, then teaching in Vancouver. He wired his colleagues and she met A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald, and, finally, Lawren Harris, whose work so excited her that after the opening of the Ottawa show – at which 26 of her paintings were exhibited and praised – she returned to Toronto to revisit Harris who became one of her staunchest supporters.

On her return to Victoria she immediately resumed painting. Within weeks she was encouraged when Harris, after seeing her work in Toronto, wrote, “I really have, nor can have, nothing to say by way of criticism.... The pictures are works of art in their own right.”

Emily worked with renewed energy and skill, repainting many of her previous pieces and revisiting some of the Indian villages to paint them afresh. She was invited to exhibit paintings in a Group of Seven show where further praise was lavished on the improvement and greater freedom of her work. “I am astonished,” A.Y. Jackson wrote. Harris went further and, by suggesting she broaden her scope “to create forms for yourself, direct from nature,” he thereby stimulated her to paint the forests and vast scenery of British Columbia with greater verve and creativity.

Over the next decade her work was exhibited in numerous shows in Victoria, Vancouver, Eastern Canada, the USA, and at a Commonwealth exhibit at the Tate Gallery in London where the Times critic considered her Indian Church “one of the most interesting pictures in the exhibit.”

By then she had sold the boarding house and moved into a cottage, where she suffered her first heart attack in 1937. When her doctor insisted she live more quietly, she turned to writing stories about Indians she had visited over the years. Her first book she called Klee Wyck. When a publisher rejected it, she put it aside until a friend, a previous student boarder who had become a math professor, showed it to Garnett Sedgewick, professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He read some of the stories to his classes and to a wider audience over CBC Radio.

Ira Dilworth, then head of CBC’s Western region, also read her stories over the air and sent Klee Wyck to Clarke, Irwin & Company in Toronto where it was soon published and became an instant success. Suddenly Victoria was proud of her. A local woman’s club celebrated her 70th birthday in December 1941 with a huge tea party with messages from various dignitaries. Klee Wyck also won the Governor General’s Award for Literature for that year. She made light of the newfound success but enjoyed it.

Like Harris, Dilworth also became one of her trusted friends and supporters. He edited her subsequent books: The Book of Small (1942) about her childhood published a year after Klee Wyck; and The House of All Sorts (1944) about her boardinghouse experiences. After her death, there were four more volumes including Growing Pains, an autobiography she had started at Lawren Harris’ suggestion.

Before she died in March 1945 – after several heart attacks and two strokes – she created an Emily Carr Trust  – naming Harris and Dilworth to select 45 of her paintings for the Vancouver Art Gallery. The rest of her work was to be sold as needed for the upkeep of the Trust. Any leftover money was to be used for the education of Canadian artists. The Trust remained in effect until 1969. The Vancouver Art Gallery now exhibits in a special room almost 200 pieces of her work. Many thousands of residents and tourists visit annually to admire – not laugh at – her remarkable talent as an artist.

Mel James