Emily Carr
Emily Carr was a Canadian artist who was inspired by the monumental art and villages of the First Nations and the landscapes of British Columbia. She also was a vivid writer and chronicler of life in her surroundings, praised for her "complete candour" and "strong prose". Klee Wyck, her first book, published in 1941, won the Governor General's Literary Award for non-fiction and this book and others written by her or compiled from her writings later are still much in demand today.
Carr's keynote paintings, such as The Indian Church, were not widely known in Canada at first. But her stature as one of Canada's most important artists continued to grow. Today, she is considered a cherished, even revered figure of Canadian arts and letters. Scholars and the public alike regard her as a Canadian national treasure and the Canadian Encyclopedia describes her as a Canadian icon. She has been designated a National Historic Person and had a Minor planet 5688 Kleewyck named after her anglicized native name. As one scholar in her 2014 book on Carr, put it, "we love her and she continues to speak to us".
Emily Carr lived most of her life in the city in which she was born and died, Victoria, British Columbia.
Early life
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 home was on Birdcage Walk, in the James Bay district of Victoria, a short distance from the legislative buildings and the town itself. Today it is a museum and National Historic Site of Canada called Emily Carr House.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. The family home was made up in lavish English fashion, with high ceilings, ornate moldings, and a parlour. 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.
Carr's mother died in 1886, and her father died in 1888. Her oldest sister Edith Carr became the guardian of the rest of the children.
Carr's father encouraged her artistic inclinations, but it was only in 1890, after her parents' deaths, that Carr pursued her art seriously. She studied at the California School of Design in San Francisco for three years before returning to Victoria. In 1899, in some ways overcoming her family background, Carr visited Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island. That same year, Carr traveled to London, where she decided to transform herself into a professional artist and to make it her life's calling.
She began her studies at the Westminster School of Art. She then took art classes from John William Whiteley in Bushey, Hertfordshire and afterwards traveled to an art colony in St Ives, Cornwall, studying with Julius Olsson and Algernon Talmage. In 1902, she returned to Bushey, and studied with Whiteley, till she experienced a nervous breakdown and had to convalesce.
She returned to British Columbia in 1904. In 1905, she gave children's art classes as well as creating political cartoons for the Week, a newspaper in Victoria and in 1906, Carr took a teaching position in Vancouver at the Vancouver Studio Club and School of Art for a short time – she was a popular teacher but left to open her own studio and give children's art classes.
First works on Indigenous people
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'. Carr was given the Indigenous name of Klee Wyck and she also chose it as the title of her first book. She later recalled that her time in Ucluelet made "a lasting impression on me".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 and many others perceived as the "vanishing totems" and way of life of the First Nations. She may have met an American artist on this trip, likely Theodore J. Richardson, who described his project of documenting Indigenous art and architecture and that possibly this encounter inspired Carr to initiate her own five–year project of documenting Indigenous villages and their neighbouring forests in British Columbia.
From 1908 to 1910 she made several trips to First Nations communities to record art and villages.
Work in France
Determined to further her knowledge of evolving artistic trends abroad, in 1910 Carr returned to Europe to study. In Montparnasse with her sister Alice, Emily Carr met modernist painter Harry Phelan Gibb with a letter of introduction. Upon viewing his work, she and her sister were shocked and intrigued by his use of distortion and vibrant colour; she wrote:"Mr Gibb's landscapes and still life delighted me — brilliant, luscious, clean. Against the distortion of his nudes I felt revolt."
Carr enrolled at the Académie Colarossi in Paris, then transferred to private lessons with John Duncan Fergusson and followed him to the Atelier Blanche. After a bout of illness, she joined Gibb and his wife in the small village of Crécy-en-Brie and then St. Efflam, Brittany. Carr's study with Gibb and his techniques shaped and influenced her style of painting, and she adopted a vibrant colour palette rather than continuing with the more modified colours of her earlier training.
In Crecy-en-Brie she fully embraced the Fauve style of bold colour and broad brushwork, then traveled to Concarneau on the coast of Brittany to study with Frances Hodgkins. When she returned to Paris she found that two of her paintings had been selected by the jury and hung in the 1911 Salon d'Automne.
Return to Canada
In March 1912 Carr opened a studio at 1465 West Broadway in Vancouver. She organized an exhibition of seventy watercolours and oils representative of her time in France, using her radical new style, bold colour palette and lack of detail. She was the first artist to introduce Post-Impressionism to Vancouver.Later in 1912, Carr took a sketching trip to First Nations' villages in Haida Gwaii, the Upper Skeena River, and Alert Bay where she documented the art of the Haida, Gitxsan and Tsimshian. At Cumshewa, a Haida village on Moresby Island, she wrote in Klee Wyck,
"Cumshewa seems always to drip, always to be blurred with mist, its foliage always to hang wet-heavy ... these strong young trees ... grew up round the dilapidated old raven, sheltering him from the tearing winds now that he was old and rotting ... the memory of Cumshewa is of a great lonesomeness smothered in a blur of rain".
Carr painted a carved raven, which she later developed as her iconic painting Big Raven. Tanoo, another painting inspired by work gathered on this trip, depicts three totems before house fronts at the village of the same name. On her return to the south, Carr organized a large exhibition of some of this work. She gave a detailed public talk titled "Lecture on Totem Poles" about the Aboriginal villages that she had visited, which ended with her mission statement:
"I glory in our wonderful west and I hope to leave behind me some of the relics of its first primitive greatness. These things should be to us Canadians what the ancient Briton's relics are to the English. Only a few more years and they will be gone forever into silent nothingness and I would gather my collection together before they are forever past".
Her "Lecture on Totems" at Dominion Hall in Vancouver is in the Emily Carr Papers at the British Columbia Provincial Archives in Victoria. In the lecture, she said "every pole shown in my collection has been studied from its own actual reality..."
While there was some positive reaction to her work, even in the new 'French' style, Carr perceived that Vancouver's reaction to her work and new style was not positive enough to support her career. She recounted as much in her book Growing Pains. She was determined to give up teaching and working in Vancouver, and in 1913 she returned to Victoria, where several of her sisters still lived.
During the next 15 years, Carr did little painting. She ran a boarding house known as the 'House of All Sorts'. It was the namesake and provided source material for her later book. With her financial circumstances straitened and her life in Victoria circumscribed, Carr painted a few works in this period drawn from local scenes: the cliffs at Dallas Road, the trees in Beacon Hill Park. Her own assessment of the period was that she had ceased to paint, which was not strictly true, although "rt had ceased to be the primary drive of her life".
Growing recognition
Over time Carr's work came to the attention of several influential and supportive people, including Harold Mortimer-Lamb and Marius Barbeau, a prominent ethnologist at the National Museum in Ottawa. Barbeau in turn persuaded Eric Brown, Director of Canada's National Gallery, to visit Carr in 1927. Brown invited Carr to exhibit her work at the National Gallery as part of an exhibition on West Coast art. Carr sent 65 oil paintings east, along with samples of her pottery and rugs with Indigenous designs. The exhibition, which was largely of First Nations art, included works by Edwin Holgate and A.Y. Jackson as well as Carr, traveled to Toronto and Montreal.Association with the Group of Seven
Carr made the trip east for the exhibition on West Coast art: Native and modern at the National Gallery of Canada in 1927. She met Frederick Varley in Vancouver and other members of the Group of Seven, at that time Canada's most recognized modern painters at the show's Toronto venue.Lawren Harris of the Group became an important mentor and friend. "You are one of us," he told Carr, welcoming her into the ranks of Canada's leading modernists and along with other members of the Group into the Group of Seven shows as an invited contributor in 1930 and 1931.
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. Through her extensive correspondence with Harris, Carr also became aware of and studied Northern European symbolism.
Carr's artistic direction was influenced by Harris's work and the advice he gave in his correspondence, but also by his belief in Theosophy. She was deeply interested and struggled to reconcile this with her own conception of God. Carr's "distrust for institutional religion" pervades much of her art. She thought a great deal about Theosophic thought, like many artists of the time, but in the end, remained unconvinced.