There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness . . . the eternal big spaceness of it. Oh the West! I’m of it and I love it.
—Emily Carr, journal entry (1927)
We may not believe in totems, but we believe in our country; and if we approach our work as the Indian did with his singleness of purpose and determination to strive for the big thing that means Canada herself, and not hamper ourselves by wondering if our things will sell, or if they will please the public or bring us popularity or fame, but busy ourselves by trying to get near to the heart of things, however crude our work may be, it is liable to be more sincere and genuine.
—Emily Carr, Modern and Indian Art (1929)
The work of Emily Carr and the circumstances in which it was achieved are unique in Canada.
—Lawren Harris, “The Paintings and Drawings of Emily Carr” (1945)
George-Étienne Cartier and Sam Steele are classic Canadian heroes: nation builders with robust egos. Thanks to men like them, by the end of the nineteenth century, Canadians had a sturdy political system, a unique law enforcement institution, and a dawning awareness of nationhood.
Everything was going well in the young Dominion: railways snaked across the map, linking scattered settlements as a decades-long depression ended. Liberal leader Wilfrid Laurier, who became prime minister in 1896, was a silver-tongued promoter of harmony who managed to smooth over friction between Quebec and the other provinces. The financial capital of the country, Montreal, hummed with money deals. In the rapidly expanding city of Toronto, sharp-elbowed entrepreneurs built factories, department stores, and insurance companies.
No wonder outsiders began to see this large chunk of North America as united, prosperous, and optimistic. No wonder thousands of immigrants—more than 2.5 million between 1903 and 1913—arrived by ship at Halifax, Quebec City, and Montreal, eager to board Canadian Pacific Railway cars and head west.
But would today’s Canadians recognize it, let alone want to live here? Yes and no. Then as now, this country represented a new world for immigrants seeking a life free from the poverty, class structures, and religious persecution many had left behind. Nevertheless, work in sweatshops, in factories, and on prairie farms was backbreaking, and if you fell ill or had an accident, you could turn only to family and neighbours because employers or the state would offer no help.
Women who worked outside the home were mostly domestic servants, and no women had the right to vote. Even the fashions were constricting and offensive: corsets, hobble skirts, and hats trimmed with feathers from endangered bird species. And Canada was the Gobi Desert of culture, with artists and collectors looking to the United States or Europe for their models. Aesthetically, this was still a colony. Poets borrowed the rhythms of Tennyson or Swinburne; painters made Canadian maples look like British oak trees. Ambitious writers, creators, and performers fled to New York City or London.
At Confederation, the new country had only six museums, and thirty years later there were few art galleries (the Art Association of Montreal’s Art Gallery was a fine exception), no publishing industry, and only a handful of outlets for creative writing. Today we recognize that there were some rich cultural traditions: the music and songs of rural Quebec; the extraordinary artistic skills of Indigenous peoples, particularly in the North and West; the fiddlers and dancers of Cape Breton and Nova Scotia. But this wasn’t the kind of creativity valued by tastemakers in Montreal and Toronto. In small-town Ontario, most people’s idea of a culture seems to have been community evenings for hymn singing, charades, and amateur skits.1
Yet people who were the polar opposite of Cartier and Steele were doing as much as they were to shape the way we see our country and ourselves. One such pioneer was Emily Carr.
As a woman, a westerner, and an artist, Carr had none of the advantages that Cartier and Steele enjoyed, and she painted for years in obscurity before being recognized as a genius.2 Nevertheless, she presented Canadians with a new and original way to look at and think about not just British Columbia but also the whole country—and she persevered despite the dispiriting sexism of her day.
Of all the artists who made the wilderness a powerful element in the Canadian identity, I view Carr as the most important: she acknowledged that the landscape was peopled and alive before Europeans arrived, not vast and empty as most settlers liked to pretend. She was the first to try to capture the spirit of Canada in a modernist style. Her formidable canvases of skies, forests, and First Nations carvings are not macho records of discovery and conquest, but haunting and occasionally erotic paintings of mystery. Her perceptions and images have slowly seeped into the national memory bank. She is our Georgia O’Keeffe.
Too often, women have been written out of our standard histories because the work of nation building was such a masculine business. Only men could be elected to Parliament, where George-Étienne Cartier spent his career. Only men could join the North West Mounted Police and serve alongside Samuel Benfield Steele. Until recently, there was little space in public life for women. But in the privacy of homes, churches, temples, and studios, women have always been busy expressing their creativity and strengthening the bonds of community. Usually, nobody noticed. However, one woman who did have a wider impact, and who added a unique layer to our sense of this country’s potential, was Emily Carr.
If you want to feel entirely marginal, try being the youngest daughter of deeply conventional English immigrants on the outer fringes of the British Empire. Emily Carr was born on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, the fifth daughter and second youngest of nine children in 1871—the year that British Columbia entered Confederation, changing its status from British colony to Canadian province. The odds were stacked against Carr becoming a major artist. She had to fight her own insecurities as well as the philistinism of her society, with its careless disregard for the questions her paintings asked.
Emily’s father, Richard Carr, appears in biographies of his daughter as a prosperous merchant. However, he sounds a bit of a rascal: he was involved in the Klondike Gold Rush (fertile ground for a scam artist) and, according to the documentary maker Michael Ostroff, may have been a bootlegger.3 But by the time he settled in Victoria in 1863, he oozed respectability. As Carr would write at the end of her life, “He thought everything English was much better than anything Canadian. . . . He saw that nearly all the people in Victoria were English and smiled at how they tried to be more English than the English themselves, just to prove to themselves and the world how loyal they were being to the Old Land.”4
Carr grew up in a society dominated by British settlers, customs, and pretensions. Although a quarter of Victoria’s eight thousand residents were of Chinese origin, most were hidden away in Chinatown; in the homes that Emily visited, pictures of Queen Victoria hung in the parlours and tea was served in Wedgwood china. The city boasted a surfeit of churches (her father attended the stern First Presbyterian Church; her gentle mother, Emily, worshipped in Christ Church Episcopal) but no art school, city public library, theatre, or concert hall. During Carr’s childhood, Victoria grew and evolved, but Confederation, and the new Canadian Pacific Railway link to central Canada, did little to dilute the relentless Britishness of the province’s stuffy new capital. Nor did it lose its aggrieved sense of geographic isolation.
Westerners’ grudge against the East, which was based on more than complaints about CPR freight rates and Ottawa’s indifference, is easy to understand. But there is a larger issue here. The conventional way of exploring our past usually begins with the question “When does history begin?” Maps and texts in school histories start with the arrival on the East Coast of Europeans—Vikings, French explorers, Portuguese and Spanish fishers, English and Scottish fur traders, Irish refugees.
However, there is an equally valid question: “Where does history begin?” And westerners like to point out that one answer is “On the West Coast, millennia earlier.” One of the first groups of humans to appear in North America was the Clovis people, who arrived via a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska and present-day Yukon about fifteen thousand years ago, then made their way down the continent from north to south. By the time Europeans arrived and started grabbing land and naming colonies, several hundred thousand people were already occupying territory from sea to sea. Without the help of these Indigenous inhabitants, many European newcomers would not have survived the harsh climate and brutal topography.
But a Eurocentric approach to Canadian history has never allowed a longer time frame or a 180-degree reorientation. No matter that human habitation began on the Pacific coast, or that West Coast peoples like the Haida, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nisga’a, and Tlingit had languages, economies, and ways of life that had endured for generations before the British Empire claimed their land for British emigrants. Until recently, the province and its Indigenous cultures have been peripheral to the way we tell our story. For early-twentieth-century decision makers in Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto, British Columbia was too far away and underpopulated to merit much attention. (Many of its twenty-first-century residents grumble that little has changed.)
So from its early days, British Columbia resented its sense of irrelevance. And that frustration finds an echo in Emily Carr’s simmering rage about being snubbed. Carr was the product of her upbringing on the continent’s Pacific rim in more ways than one.
When did Emily Carr decide to become an artist, and why was that West Coast frustration so important? That is not clear from either The Book of Small and Growing Pains, the two memoirs written half a century after the childhood they describe, or the several biographies of her. Nobody in her family painted, and Victoria’s idea of “art” was timid watercolours. What is clear is that Carr was a determined, volatile little girl who had a strong visual sense and a huge curiosity about the natural world. A square-chinned, obstinate tomboy who preferred animals and flowers to people, she got into fights with her sisters and “mussed up” her pinafores. In her memoirs, she made much of her early resistance to authority, insisting that she did not excel in school: she decorated her math textbooks with pigs labelled “arithmetic” and donkeys labelled “Emily Carr.” In fact, she did perfectly well in school.5
Emily Carr was fascinated by aspects of Victoria that most of its residents tried their best to ignore. Through the back fence of the Carr property she could reach Beacon Hill Park, with its ponds, virgin stands of arbutus and fir trees, and abundant birdlife. And beyond that was the thrilling menace of untracked forest. “The silence of our Western forests was so profound that our ears could scarcely comprehend it. . . . The birds who lived there were birds of prey—eagles, hawks, owls. Had a song bird loosed his throat the others would have pounced. . . . Gulls there had always been; they began with the sea and had always cried over it. The vast sky spaces above, hungry for noise, steadily lapped up their cries. The forest was different—she brooded over silence and secrecy.”6
Carr could look across Victoria Harbour and see the Songhees, members of the Coast Salish people, who regularly came door to door, selling fish, berries, and handwoven baskets. On May 24 each year, Victoria’s two disparate communities presented a bizarre contrast at the regatta celebrating the Queen’s birthday. While the city’s professional elite, dapper in boaters and white ducks, strolled along the wooden sidewalks or participated in sailing contests, members of First Nations from as far away as Haida Gwaii came to compete in canoe races. A highlight was the race between Indigenous women, paddling with fierce intensity under the Gorge Bridge. Imagine the impact this display of female athleticism had on a tomboy forced to wear starched pinafores!
But starched pinafores were the only world Carr knew, and her resentment began to build. In the accounts she wrote of her childhood at the end of her life, she poured scorn on Victoria’s citizens who clung to their English origins and on British-born schoolmarms who regarded colonial manners as “crude, almost wicked.” “Politeness-education ladies had migrated to Canada, often in the hope of picking up bread and butter and possibly a husband, though they pretended all the while that they had come out on a very special mission—to teach the young of English-born gentlemen how not to become Canadian, to believe that all niceness and goodness came from ancestors and could have nothing to do with the wonderful new land.”7 Carr’s biographer Paula Blanchard argues that her fury with such women was crucial to her adult self. It had “a strong negative shaping influence on her personality, accounting for much of her permanently embattled stance.” But that fury was also a constructive force, “urging her to question everything around her, to break free and discover her own creativity.”8
Carr’s mother was always sickly; she died of tuberculosis when Carr was only fourteen. Carr describes her father as a rigid autocrat who would not allow her to have a dog and who made his daughters recite sermons and read the Bible together (“begat chapters and all”) every Sunday. But Richard Carr recognized his youngest daughter’s special talent. When Emily, aged eight, drew an impressive charcoal portrait of her father’s dog, Richard arranged drawing lessons for her plus a supply of paints and brushes.
Emily Carr had a difficult relationship with her father. Once the plump, curly-haired little girl started school, she often met him when he was walking home from his store in the evening—much to the relief of the rest of the family because young Emily could jolly him out of black moods. But it wasn’t in Emily’s nature to be a family peacemaker. As soon as she realized that she was “being used as a soother for Father’s tantrums, like a bone to a dog,” she started to question his authority and his right to impose his will on everybody. Her waywardness, she decided later, infuriated him. “He turned and was harder on me than on any of the others. His soul was so bitter that he was even sometimes cruel to me.”
Richard Carr died only a few years later. His eldest daughter, thirty-year-old Edith, was left to raise her four younger sisters and brother. Emily’s relationship with Dede, as she was known, was thorny: an intense and angry adolescent, Carr felt trapped by her family. “Outsiders saw our life all smoothed on top by a good deal of mid-Victorian kissing and a palaver of family devotion, the hypocrisy galled me. I was the disturbing element of the family. The others were prim, orthodox, religious. . . . I would not sham, pretending that we were a nest of doves, knowing well that in our home bitterness and resentment writhed.”9
What rage! Yet that fierce anger and contempt for “sham” was perhaps one source of her creative genius. Her biographer Blanchard points out that throughout her life, Carr exaggerated the indifference, slights, and setbacks she had faced because a sense of alienation nourished her unique creativity. “Nothing is so deadening to an artist as to be trivialized and women artists have often been patronized to death,” observes Blanchard. Emily Carr was raised in a culture that discouraged both anger and artistic vitality in women. “If she was difficult, as she certainly was,” writes Blanchard, “at least we can applaud her for not allowing Victoria to make her into an anonymous pleasant lady.”10
Emily Carr never completed her teacher’s certificate, but she kept up her art lessons. She received no encouragement from Dede, who squelched any idea that her youngest sister might study painting in London, England, with a friend. But Emily pestered their guardian, a lawyer called James Lawson, until he finally agreed that she could attend the California School of Design, down the coast in San Francisco. By 1890, she had decided she was serious about art, and she had escaped Victoria’s stifling conformity.
The artistic challenge for Emily Carr was to find her vision and capture it on canvas. How could she learn to channel and depict her passionate response to the world around her?
Carr would spend a little over three years at San Francisco’s California School of Design, housed in a squalid building on Pine Street over the old public market. Founded in 1874, the school was well attended but conservative. Nineteen-year-old Carr benefited from instruction in portraiture and drawing, learned that she had a good colour sense, and enjoyed the weekly outdoor sketching sessions. By now, she was an attractive woman with large grey eyes, thick brown hair, and a wide smile, but she was insecure—too shy to attend the life drawing classes, with their nude models, and too timid to explore San Francisco. According to the art historian Doris Shadbolt, “Nothing . . . happened at the California school to give her a vision of what art might be for her—nothing at least that showed in her work.” But she clung to her ambitions.
The return home in late 1893 was hard. Victoria hadn’t changed. Carr was back in the role of mouthy baby sister; she found her sisters’ activities (Bible study, good works, church attendance) suffocating. She determined to pursue her art studies elsewhere, this time in Europe, and she raised the money to go to England by giving art lessons to neighbourhood children.
However, Carr had an eye-opening experience before she left Victoria—her first serious exposure to British Columbia’s “other” culture. Along with her sister Lizzie, she went to visit their friend May Armstrong, who taught at the Presbyterian mission at Ucluelet, a remote Nuu-chah-nulth community on Barkley Sound, halfway up the west coast of Vancouver Island and reachable only by water. The Nuu-chah-nulth (then known as the Nootka) hunted whales and seals from open canoes, and they lived in flat-fronted community houses made of thick, hand-hewn cedar planks. Carr was oblivious to the poverty, dirt, and smells that offended her sister, and fascinated by the hammocks hanging from the ceiling, the cedar mats and baskets, the Nuu-chah-nulth people themselves, and their respect for their surroundings. Soon she was busy with her brushes, sketching both stark exteriors and dim, smoky interiors of the houses. The villagers warmed to this polite young woman, who introduced herself with smiles and gestures. Carr was delighted when her hosts gave her the name Klee Wyck: “the laughing one.”
The watercolours that Emily Carr brought home from this trip were unremarkable. But the choice of subjects held a hint of the future. She sensed the Nuu-chah-nulth people’s bond with the natural world: their belief that they were part of a larger pattern of change and continuity overlapped her own spiritual connection to wild, rugged nature. She was still a nicely raised Victorian lady, but the private Emily was starting to churn.
A few weeks later, Emily Carr arrived in London and enrolled at the Westminster School of Art. The delights of the imperial capital that other visiting Canadians drooled over—the glittering window displays of department stores, the top-hatted equestrians in Hyde Park’s Rotten Row—had no attraction for Carr, and the imposing museums and galleries intimidated the young art student. More to the point, the city’s art scene was untouched by the modernism that held Paris artists in thrall. Since Carr had never been exposed to modern art, she probably didn’t realize that her teachers were numbingly pedestrian—but she knew something was missing.
Carr finally overcame her prudery and took life classes, along with lessons in design, anatomy, and clay modelling. But she abhorred the rat-infested warren of Westminster streets behind the school and “the breath of the monstrous factories, the grime and smut and smell of them.”11 At every opportunity she fled to the countryside, where her most fruitful art education took place. She enrolled in courses in the Cornish seaside village of St. Ives, then an artists’ colony, and later in Bushey, Hertfordshire, where “everything was yellow-green and pearly with young spring. Larks hurried up to Heaven as if late for choir practice.”12
At Bushey, Carr finally found a sympathetic teacher who encouraged her to do what she most enjoyed: work in the woods by herself. John Whiteley, a conservative landscape painter, taught her to see light, shadow, and movement in trees: “The coming and going of foliage is more than just flat pattern.” His advice to observe nature and Carr’s own recognition that her artistic instincts were most inspired by nature were probably the most useful art lessons that Carr absorbed in England. But the tame English countryside was not her landscape.
Otherwise, Carr’s five years in England were unhappy, reinforcing all her insecurity. She felt despised by some of her fellow students as a “colonial.” She suffered bouts of ill health including a breakdown, apparently triggered by exhaustion, emotional stress, and insecurity, that required a miserable eighteen-month convalescence in a Suffolk sanatorium. Her favourite sister, Alice, visited and stared at Emily’s paintings in a silence that the latter interpreted as indifference. Recalling the event years later, thin-skinned Carr wrote: “It was then that I made myself into an envelope into which I could thrust my work deep, lick the flap, and seal it from everybody.”13
Something else had happened in England too, although it is hard to find exact details as Carr destroyed most of her personal papers. There was apparently a suitor who followed her from Victoria to London, an eligible young man who later became a wealthy and successful businessman. To the shock of Carr’s family and acquaintances, she turned him down. Why? Here biographer’s bias takes over. One biographer, Maria Tippett, has argued that Carr’s sex life was irrevocably strangled by her father’s clumsy attempt to explain human sexuality to her: the “brutal telling,” Carr called it in a letter late in life. Tippett goes so far as to suggest Richard Carr might have behaved inappropriately to his daughter.14 Others have suggested that perhaps Carr was a lesbian.
Along with Paula Blanchard, I prefer a different explanation: I think Carr realized that if she became somebody’s wife, she would have to give up any hope of a serious painting life. Many leading female modernists during these years, like Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe, chose to fulfill their dreams by turning their backs on conventional lives in favour of unconventional partnerships or the despised “spinsterhood.” It was a brave choice for Carr, who was still a young woman fighting for an education, let alone recognition of her talent. But she was a realist, who could see that marriage would frustrate all her hopes. I think that she chose to suppress her sexuality, until it erupted in a handful of her later paintings.
Nevertheless, it must have been a tough decision, particularly as London had not worked out for her. By October 1904 she was back in Victoria, convinced that she had wasted her time, money, and talent in England.
Despite Emily Carr’s single-minded pursuit of an artistic career, her creativity seemed to be stunted. Yet alongside new technical skills was a dawning awareness, conscious or unconscious, that she must root her art in her own environment. A hint of this recognition comes in a profile of her that appeared in a Victoria magazine in February 1905. The reporter, Arnold Watson, interviewed Carr, now thirty-four, in her teaching studio on Fort Street as she brewed tea on the wood stove. Afterwards they walked over to the barn behind the Carr family home, where Carr kept a menagerie of squirrels, chipmunks, and canaries. Carr made it plain that she did not enjoy interviews, and her mumbled answers were understatements. Watson asked if she was glad to be home. She said she was, because England was too pretty and orderly. “One misses the mountains and woods.”15
But Victoria still did not offer her much. Although technology was transforming society, it was slow to arrive at Victoria’s shores. Elsewhere in the Dominion, horse-drawn carriages gave way to automobiles, Toronto finally established a public art gallery, and the prairies were becoming the breadbasket of the empire. But Victoria insisted on its “Olde England” quaintness, despite its growth and the splendid new Parliament Buildings and Empress Hotel. There were no kindred artistic spirits for Emily Carr, let alone art patrons. She decided to move across the Strait of Georgia to Vancouver, a larger and more vibrant city, where she was offered a teaching job.
Carr taught in Vancouver for several years. She was hopeless with adult pupils: she regarded the women by whom she had originally been hired as “a cluster of society women [who met to] drink tea and jabber art jargon.” (They probably made her feel scruffy and inadequate.) However, her classes for children were soon oversubscribed. “Children loved her imaginative approach to teaching,” writes Blanchard. “She would begin with very young ones by asking them to illustrate nursery rhymes, encouraging freedom and fantasy rather than skill.”16 She frequently took her classes to the wharves, the back lanes, or beautiful, forested Stanley Park for outdoor sketching classes. Her young students enjoyed her encouragement and her menagerie (there were always animals around Carr), which included a sheepdog named Billie, a cockatoo named Sally, a green Panama parrot named Jane, and two white rats, Peter and Peggy. Large audiences attended her end-of-year shows. “Miss Carr gave a most successful exhibition of her students’ work in her studio on Granville Street,” reported the Province on March 30, 1907.
None of this was doing much to advance Carr’s own painting, although she soldiered on with portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. Her favourite subject appears to have been the towering cedars of Stanley Park, where the “appalling solemnity, majesty and silence was the Holiest thing I ever felt.” But she was exasperated by her inability to move beyond the conventionally picturesque or to capture the forest as she felt it. Her paintings were similar to those of other semi-professional artists in Vancouver at the time, who exhibited regularly. Carr’s work often merited special mention. In 1909 the Province art critic noted: “An artist of strong personality, which finds expression in vigorous work is Miss M. E. Carr, the quality of whose work improves steadily.” But within the art community, Carr remained a loner—insecure, hypersensitive to snubs from male peers, yet deeply competitive.
The most important event in these years, as far as Carr’s art was concerned, was the trip that she and her sister Alice made in 1907 to Alaska. (Carr wrote and illustrated a witty journal of this trip, which was discovered in a Montreal basement in 2013 after being lost for years.) The two women took a steamer up the Pacific coast to Sitka, Alaska. Originally a Tlingit village, Sitka had then been a Russian trading post and was now an American naval station. As a tourist attraction, its main street featured a contrived “Totem-Pole Walk,” consisting of carved poles moved from elsewhere and doused in bright paint. Carr discovered more carvings, weathered and authentic, behind the town when she stumbled into the Sitka village. There the drowsy silence and the smells of woodsmoke, rotting fish, and human waste reminded her of the 1899 Ucluelet trip that had been such an eye-opener.
As the Carr sisters sailed south, Emily brooded over what she had seen. Finally, she had a purpose that she knew would fire her imagination. “The Indian people and their art touched me deeply. . . . By the time I reached home my mind was made up. I was going to picture totem poles in their own village settings, as complete a collection of them as I could.”17 There was another motive too: she hoped to sell these reproductions of Indigenous art to the new provincial museum in Victoria. She might at last make some money. But nobody at the museum took her art seriously.
In the next two years, Carr travelled to several Kwakwaka’wakw settlements on Vancouver Island and the southern mainland, and inland along the Fraser River. Accompanied by her dog Billie and undeterred by mosquitoes and torrential rain, she spent her days in open-air sketching in pen or watercolour, and her nights in mission houses, tents, cabins, Kwakwaka’wakw homes, and utility sheds. Back in her Vancouver studio, she expanded the images into large oil paintings that the Province’s art critic praised for their “strength and genuineness.”18 Over the next six years, Carr would complete two hundred paintings documenting the villages, carvings, and peoples of the First Nations of Canada’s Northwest Coast. However, few of these canvases sold. Vancouverites preferred portraits of the royal family and tidy European landscapes, preferably with cows.
Meanwhile, the dramatic simplicity of Sitka and Kwakwaka’wakw carving made Carr aware of the limitations of her own careful brush strokes and fussy detail. She knew that the most innovative art of the day, and therefore the most interesting teaching, was in Paris. Artists from the United States and central Canada had been travelling there since the 1880s, and she herself must have seen reproductions of post-impressionist painters like Van Gogh and Gauguin. She found the “new art” confusing. “I heard it ridiculed, praised, liked, hated. Something in it stirred me but I could not at first make head or tail of what it was all about. I saw at once that it made recent conservative painting look flavourless, little, unconvincing.”19
It was a big step for Emily Carr to go to Paris. She didn’t speak French and knew no one there. Her years in London had scarred her: she was not a woman who embraced change or liked being too far from home for long. What would Parisians think of this dowdy, middle-aged, reticent woman? But she hungered for inspiration and recognized the suffocating provincialism of her life in British Columbia. On June 10, 1910, the Province announced to its readers: “Miss Carr intends to leave in a few weeks for a year’s stay in Paris, where she will pursue her studies in art.”
In France, in the words of the art historian Doris Shadbolt, Carr would finally shake off “old-world shackles and [join] the ranks of modern painters.”20 Exposure to post-impressionism would enable her to abandon Victorian concepts of art and the remnants of her genteel education, and express what she found unique in her own environment. The process of integrating modernist techniques with her own deeply Canadian imaginative vision would begin.
Paris would lead to Carr’s epiphany—but it would prove a shock.
In the early years of the twentieth century, modernism had overtaken every artistic endeavour in Paris: music, ballet, literature, and the visual arts. The shift in aesthetic values was as dramatic as the shift to digital technologies has been in our own day. For visual artists, the emergence of photography had caused an existential crisis. Why paint anything when a camera could capture images more easily and accurately? Artists had been compelled to find something within painting that justified its existence. Painting could no longer be about visual likeness: it had to express something about the visual world that went beyond a photographic recording. Younger artists in France had already cast aside the techniques and examples of figurative art that were drilled into Emily Carr in San Francisco and England. They were surfing through successive waves of innovation: impressionism, pointillism, post-impressionism, abstraction—all attempts to show us how we see, rather than what we see.
Products of this new experimentation initially intimidated Carr. She was no more adventurous in Paris than she had been in San Francisco or London: she did not spend hours in the Louvre or seek out bohemian companions with whom she might discuss Picasso’s cubist paintings or Matisse’s fauve canvases. I doubt that she ever even entered a Montmartre bar, let alone tasted a pastis. But she knew she was searching for something.
Carr’s only entrée into the art world was a letter of introduction to an English artist named Henry Phelan Gibb. The tall, thin, and well-connected Gibb was much celebrated in his own day: he was part of Gertrude Stein’s circle and a friend of Cézanne. Although his reputation has faded since then, he would prove an enormous help to Emily Carr. During her first visit to his studio on Boulevard Raspail, she was thrilled and shocked by the vivid colours, bulging bodies, and abstract forms in his paintings. “There was rich, delicious juiciness in his colour, interplay between warm and cool tones. . . . He intensified vividness by the use of complementary color. . . . [His] landscapes and still lifes delighted me—brilliant, luscious, clean.” Still a prim Victorian, she enthused about everything but the sex: “Against the distortions of his nudes I felt revolt.”21 These canvases sparked Carr’s reassessment of all her assumptions about perspective, scale, and colour.
On Gibb’s advice, Carr enrolled at the Académie Colarossi. But working conditions were unpleasant there, instruction was in French, and Carr was the oldest student and only woman in her classes. All her old insecurities surfaced. After three months in Paris she became stressed and “nearly demented with headaches. . . . I began to feel myself going, going as I had in London.” She spent three months in hospital, then fled the capital. The remaining weeks of her French adventure would be spent in villages.
This time, Carr did not let physical or psychological problems shackle her progress as they had in England. She knew she had found her teacher. Phelan Gibb was now giving a landscape class in Crécy-en-Brie, a little canal town close to Paris; she joined him there. One day, she watched with awe how he sketched the scene in front of them. “It was not a copy of the woods & fields it was a realization of them. The colours were not matched. They were mixed with air. You went through space to meet reality.” She now understood the modernist approach to painting—the “expressive possibilities of paint itself,” in Shadbolt’s words.22 Concern for detail was replaced by bold brush strokes and direct patches of colour on the canvas. She was no longer transmitting information: she was simplifying form, using figures as compositional units, and playing with tone and hue, light and shadow. She finally began to feel that what she had in her head and what she put on canvas were starting to mesh.
What a thrill for Carr to see the way forward. Her work, in both oil and watercolour, became steadily more spontaneous, original, and vigorous. When she returned to Paris in the fall of 1911, she discovered that two of her paintings had been accepted for the Salon d’Automne, the large, juried show held each year in the capital’s Grand Palais. The show included hundreds of works, and critics focused on canvases by Matisse, Bonnard, Léger, Rouault, and Vlaminck. Nevertheless, Carr’s inclusion was an important milestone: she had shaken off the constraints of nineteenth-century art and been accepted as a practitioner of modernism. She returned to Canada eager to apply her new style in the New World. But for Emily Carr, nothing was ever that easy.
One of my favourite gifts for foreign visitors is a set of four mugs, featuring twisted pine trees, tangled forests, scarlet fall foliage, and rugged rocks, purchased at the gift shop in Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada. The images are taken from paintings by Tom Thomson, prototype of the Canadian backwoodsman artist and forerunner of Canada’s most famous artist collective, the Group of Seven. Who can name the group’s seven members? Few of us manage more than three—and we often include Thomson, who died before the Group was established. (In case you need a quick primer, they were A. Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, Frederick Varley, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, Frank Johnston, and Franklin Carmichael.) But we all know the canvases painted by Thomson and the Group—exuberant celebrations of the Canadian landscape, invariably described as “iconic.” The critic Robert Fulford called their work “our national wallpaper,” although their most popular paintings depict only Ontario.
The story of Thomson and the Group of Seven is an interesting counterpoint to the story of Emily Carr. When, aged forty, she returned from France in 1911, eager to realize the potential of her vision, most members of the future Group of Seven were still in their twenties and had barely begun their own careers, let alone developed their collective identity. But in addition to their talent, they had advantages of gender and geography. They had the chutzpah to decide that their country needed a uniquely Canadian artistic movement—and they were going to be it.
How did the Group of Seven form? Let’s start with Tom Thomson, the moody, dark-haired son of a Scottish immigrant who was born in 1877, grew up on an Ontario farm, and died too young to be a member of the group he helped inspire. A hunter and fisherman from a young age, Thomson drifted around the continent, working as a graphic designer, before ending up in Toronto in 1907. There, at a commercial design firm called Grip Limited, he met a lively group of fellow designers, including at various times Franklin Carmichael from Orillia, Frank Johnston from Toronto, and the immigrants Arthur Lismer and Fred Varley. (I have a particular affection for the latter two artists because they grew up in the grubby English industrial city of Sheffield, my hometown too.) Thomson’s first boss at Grip was a good-tempered, dishevelled supervisor called James E. H. MacDonald. MacDonald was already a serious painter who in 1911 had a solo show of landscape oils at Toronto’s Arts and Letters Club.
At the Arts and Letters Club, then an exclusively male institution, MacDonald’s paintings were seen by his fellow member Lawren Harris, a scion of Ontario’s manufacturing elite. Harris’s grandfather Alanson had successfully manufactured agricultural implements, then merged his company with his rival Hart Massey’s firm in 1891, forming Canada’s largest corporation, Massey-Harris. Sales of threshers and reapers yielded a huge fortune for the Harris family, enabling Alanson’s descendant Lawren, an aspiring artist, to study art in Berlin. There he was exposed to new currents in European art, both exuberant canvases by French post-impressionists and darker images by Scandinavian artists like the Norwegian Edvard Munch. (He would see more of Munch, plus work by Gustaf Fjaestad from Sweden, at a show of Scandinavian art in Buffalo that he and J. E. H. MacDonald visited in 1913.) As Emily Carr had done in Paris, Harris learned how modernists had abandoned the Old Masters’ attempts to recreate detailed, three-dimensional scenes and instead were experimenting with flat planes, bright colours, and manipulation of materials. Back in Toronto, Harris perceived in MacDonald’s landscapes what he described years later as “intimations of something new in painting in Canada, an indefinable spirit which seemed to express the country more clearly than any painting I had yet seen.”23 Harris began to muse about developing a style that represented “Canada painted in her own spirit.”
At first, Harris confined his efforts to paintings of smokestacks and industry, similar to those being painted in Germany. But in 1912, Harris and MacDonald set off together on a sketching trip that would prove momentous. They headed north by train, into logging country. The drawings and paintings produced during and after this trip were not particularly innovative, but the idea of Canada’s “wilderness” as an appropriate subject for Canadian artists took hold. The facts that logging country is not wilderness, and that other artists including Paul Kane, William Hind, and Frances Anne Hopkins had got there before them, did not dampen the fervour of Harris in particular. Nor did the fact that European artists were moving away from landscape and engaging in fierce debates around figuration and abstraction. Harris saw landscape, particularly uninhabited terrain, as the subject that could be quintessentially Canadian.
The boys had fun. “We lived in a continuous blaze of enthusiasm,” Lawren Harris wrote later. “We were at times very serious and concerned, at other times, hilarious and carefree. Above all, we loved this country, and loved exploring and painting it.”24
The outdoorsman Tom Thomson was also canoeing regularly through Algonquin Park and northern Ontario, to paint and fish. He took Jackson, Varley, and Lismer along with him and introduced them to the region’s Jack pines and starry night skies. Thomson picked up from Grip colleagues who had trained abroad tips about the application of paint to canvas and the manipulation of light. In return, he infected them with his passion for the magnificent countryside within a short train ride of Toronto. The following year he painted A Northern Lake for the Ontario Society of Artists’ annual show, where it hung alongside landscapes by Harris, MacDonald, and a fiery young Montreal painter named Alexander Young Jackson. The Toronto Daily Star reviewer admired the forcefulness of works by these younger artists, noting their “virile work, fearless brushing, strange, crude colour.”25
The group was coming together, and members started giving each other the support Carr had never experienced. Lawren Harris fired up his fellow painters with enthusiasm for a distinctly Canadian school of art, and he built a studio in Toronto’s Rosedale ravine to provide working spaces for friends including Thomson, Jackson, and Carmichael.
Best of all, a Star reviewer jeered at a small show of A. Y. Jackson’s work and suggested that Toronto’s innovative young painters “believe in Explosions, Outbursts and Acute Congestions of Pigments.”26 The reviewer, whose regular beat was politics, not art, facetiously referred to Jackson’s paintings as “Hot Mush.” Instead of suffering Carr-like chagrin or dismissing the derision as ill-informed splutter, the artists leaped at this opportunity for public outrage. Positioning themselves as rebels, fighting to establish a real “Canadian” art, they “swaddled their art in the flag of the Dominion,” in the art historian Ross Howard’s words.27 They were building a new mythology for a new country. At the time, nobody asked why the Group of Seven ignored the old mythology of the original inhabitants, now displaced.
The First World War interrupted the group’s evolution. Jackson and Varley became official war artists. Tom Thomson’s death by drowning in Algonquin Park in 1917, just as he was reaching his artistic peak, shocked the entire Toronto artistic community. But in May 1920, the loose fraternity of Harris and friends reunited for their first exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto under the name they had chosen for themselves: the Group of Seven.
In Ottawa, Eric Brown, the National Gallery’s first director, heard about the show from his friend Arthur Lismer. Brown was a tweedy, monocled Englishman who had arrived in Canada in 1910 and surprised everybody by becoming an eager outdoorsman. Under his direction the gallery had already acquired works by several Canadian artists, including Harris and Thomson. Lismer wrote Brown that the artists’ intention was to demonstrate in the Group of Seven show “the ‘spirit’ of painting in Canada.”28 Brown warmly applauded the initiative, purchased three of the canvases for the National Gallery, and helped to organize a smaller touring show in the United States.
Members of the Group were less homogeneous than they seem from today’s perspective. Johnston left Toronto for Winnipeg soon after the 1920 show; several others travelled beyond Ontario’s borders and went in different stylistic directions. Varley turned to portraiture while Harris became an abstract painter. But they remained loyal to the patriotic goal of affirming Canada’s uniqueness through depictions of its rugged landscape—a landscape dramatically different from the well-tilled fields of Europe. Yet their best-known paintings convey no evidence of an Indigenous presence and little trace of the urbanization and industrialization that were profoundly reshaping Canada.
By 1930, the Group of Seven was acknowledged as the “National School.” Like it or not, as the painter Harold Town would later put it, we had “something identified as Canadian art, a cohesive lump in our national gut—seemingly rough painters who said to hell with trends and gave us an assessable, simple beginning, a fire for some, dying embers for others. We could love them or hate them, but we had a starting line.”29 The Group had successfully replaced the style and standards of European Old Masters with a quasi-modernist approach to the grandeur and immensity of the North. But it wasn’t the artists’ undoubted talent alone that underlay their success: curators, collectors, and art lovers embraced them because of their nationalistic agenda. As the historian Daniel Francis puts it, “The Group claimed to be creating not just art but a new national consciousness. . . . In this respect, the Group perfectly matched the spirit of their times.”30
While the Group of Seven was exploding onto the art scene in central Canada, Emily Carr was going nowhere. Nobody on the West Coast noticed her “fearless brushing” or her “strange, crude colours,” let alone raved about “virile work.”
Carr had returned to Vancouver from France eager to continue recording Indigenous cultures. In 1912, the year after her return, she travelled to Haida Gwaii and the Skeena River, documenting the art of the Haida, Gitxsan, and Tsimshian. Many of the villages she visited were almost deserted—on Haida Gwaii several were abandoned—because a smallpox epidemic in the 1860s had laid waste the population. Few poles had been carved once newly arrived Christian missionaries began to preach that the carvings were barbaric. Many First Nations practices, such as the great feasts or potlatches, had been declared illegal. At least twenty-five residential schools had already been established in the province, so Carr rarely saw children in the communities. There is no evidence that she knew much about the cruel government policies, but she saw their impact and assumed (along with most people in her generation of settlers) that the Indigenous inhabitants were vanishing peoples—like ancient Greeks.
Carr’s trip was arduous. She was always an outsider in the villages, staying with missionaries or camping out in deserted houses, and now much more interested in artistic technique than in ethnography. Back in Vancouver, she developed her sketches of villages, carved poles, and the exteriors and interiors of houses into canvases, trying to apply the ways of seeing she had acquired in France. Then she organized a public showing of about two hundred paintings, including these paintings along with avant-garde canvases from France, with their brilliant use of colour, completed during the previous fourteen years.
The show included some of her best-known works, including The Welcome Man, Tanoo, and Alert Bay. She prepared a talk about her own experiences and what she knew of the culture she had painted, trying to explain her self-appointed mission: “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 Britons’ 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.”31
Words such as “relics,” “primitive,” and “silent nothingness” sound horribly insensitive and ill-informed to modern ears, expressing the convenient assumption within Canada’s settler society that Indigenous peoples were close to disappearance. Yet Carr was a woman of her period, and the conventional wisdom about the vanishing First Nations must have seemed even more convincing to her after her travels through depopulated villages, with their abandoned carvings. For all her conventional upbringing, Carr did show a great respect for Indigenous traditions and culture, especially when compared with the brutal and ugly racism of government policy and popular culture that depicted Indigenous peoples as less than human.
Sadly for Carr, her contemporaries weren’t so keen; they still didn’t want “relics” hanging on their nicely painted walls. The 1913 exhibition was neither the critical nor the commercial success for which she had hoped. Carr immediately decided that Vancouver had rejected her. She packed up her apartment and took the ferry back to her family in Victoria, although she recognized that the city was an “impossible field for work.”32 She was the most advanced modernist artist in Canada, but nobody in her province could appreciate it.
For the next fifteen years, she faced grinding poverty as she scraped a living from a bizarre range of activities. Much of her time was spent running a three-apartment building that she had built; she also bred dogs, hens, and rabbits for sale. She incorporated First Nations designs into rugs and pottery that she made and sold, but as Shadbolt put it, art “had ceased to be the primary drive of her life.”33 Now middle-aged, dressed in shapeless clothes, with her wiry greying hair scraped untidily into a bun, she trudged along the beach with her pack of dogs or trundled a child’s pram filled with groceries or supplies through the neighbourhood of James Bay. Her menagerie kept expanding: dogs, birds, chipmunks, a white rat, and from about 1923 an incorrigibly mischievous capuchin monkey called Woo. A small cluster of human friends knew her as warm and funny, but with strangers she could be shy, abrupt, or just plain hostile.
Carr would write later that she felt only “a dead lump . . . in my heart where my work had been.”34 When she did allow the public to see any of her work, she was stung by reviewers’ reactions, which ranged from uncertainty to rejection. While Group of Seven painters were being boyish, charming, optimistic, and sharp-elbowed, she earned a reputation for bad-tempered eccentricity. For fifteen years, her painting skills atrophied. In fifteen years, a person can lose a second language and forget most of what they learned in school. In this wretched period, Carr deliberately turned her face away from the drawing and painting skills she had acquired in France and from her completely original vision of how she wanted to engage her country.
The good news for Carr was that the young country was slowly generating an elite that was looking for a truly Canadian vision, to distinguish this country from both Great Britain and the United States. Institutions with an obligation to reflect the whole country appeared. In Ottawa in 1926, Eric Brown of the National Gallery, along with the prominent ethnologist Marius Barbeau, began to plan an exhibition to be titled Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern. Barbeau had already seen Carr’s works, during trips to British Columbia. He urged Brown to include some Carr canvases, along with work by painters from central Canada (Edwin Holgate, A. Y. Jackson, Pegi Nicol) who had made brief trips to West Coast settlements. In the end, Carr dominated the “Modern” selections in the 1927 show, with twenty-six oil paintings as well as rugs and pottery.
Carr took the train east, to Ontario, thanks to a ticket provided by Brown. There she met the Group of Seven; Harris, Lismer, Jackson, and MacDonald all invited her to their Toronto studios. The warmth of their welcome and their obvious admiration for her work (“You are one of us,” Harris told her) were the trigger she needed to rejuvenate her painting career once more.
She was particularly struck by Lawren Harris’s work. In his studio, she sat silent in front of his austere, smoothly modelled Above Lake Superior, “getting a glimpse . . . into the soul of Canada, away from the prettiness of England and the modernity of France, down into the vast, lovely soul of Canada, plumbing her depths, climbing her heights, floating in her spaces.”35 On her third visit there, she broke through her shyness and had the kind of discussion with him on techniques and aesthetic values for which she had always hungered. She returned to Victoria determined to be bolder in her documentation of First Nations carving and more concerned with putting herself into her painting. She was ready, as she put it, to go off on a “tangent tear.” Doris Shadbolt notes, “Never again would the sense of isolation be crippling nor would she suffer the loss of spirit that had retarded her art for nearly fifteen years.”36
Lawren Harris had reactivated Carr’s drive. Another artist teacher, the American Mark Tobey from Seattle, helped her to achieve the bolder, more authoritative style of her mature years. A cocky, red-haired firebrand nineteen years younger than Carr, Tobey was free with his advice to her to “pep up” her canvases with brighter colours, more light and shade, and greater attention to shape and volume.
Emily Carr adopted what she needed from these teachers to consolidate her own intensely held vision. As she abandoned faithful realism and began to experiment, some of her work shows the influence of cubism (of which Tobey was an admirer) and futurism. She continued to make trips north to sketch in First Nations villages, but from 1928 onward her paintings focused not on the literal characteristics of carvings and scenes but on their expressive power within the dense forests or expansive skies of their settings. She tried to depict in her art the spiritual force that she had always found in nature and that she now understood was embodied in Indigenous carvings. Theatrical grandeur suffuses paintings like Indian Church (1929) and Big Raven (1931). In the words of Doris Shadbolt, “She took on the Indian [material’s] darkness in her canvases, closing them in with weighty and darkened skies, or with claustrophobic forests even when fidelity to her subject did not require her to do so. . . . She was drawn deeply into nature’s dark side.”37
It was Lawren Harris who prompted Carr to embark on her greatest and most distinctive phase. In 1931 he suggested to her in a letter that underlying her intense feeling for Indigenous art was her own deep response to the West Coast landscape itself. “The totem pole is a work of art in its own right and it is very difficult to use it in another form of art. But how about seeking an equivalent for it in the exotic landscape of the Island and coast, making your own form and forms with the greater form.”38 Carr took his advice, but she never let go of her deep love for Indigenous forms and culture. Some years later, while convalescing from a heart attack, she jotted down brief memoirs of her encounters with different groups. Published in 1941, Klee Wyck won the Governor General’s Award for Non-fiction. In her own lifetime, she was better known for this slender book of short stories than for the paintings that today overwhelm us with their sophisticated compositions and raw energy.
Carr now sought to capture on canvas the mystery and movement of nature. The Group of Seven’s style of the 1920s was the new orthodoxy; she took only what was needed from them for her own adamantly personal aesthetic. Her canvases are infused with what art critics have called “vitalism.” Rainforests, beaches and driftwood, logged hillsides, sky, open fields—her eye was omnivorous and her rapture like Wordsworth’s. She described in notebooks and her journal what she wanted to achieve, and these entries reflect the role religion played in her art. “A picture equals a movement in space. Pictures have swerved too much towards design and decoration. . . . The idea must run through the whole, the story that arrested you and urged the desire to express it, the story that God told you through that combination of growth. The picture side of the thing is the relationship of the objects to each other in one concerted movement, so that the whole gets up and goes, lifting the looker with it, sky sea trees affecting each other.”39
Sometimes the movement is flowing and serene; in other canvases there are coils and cascades of growth. Skies pulsate with energy; seas swirl. Carr’s paintings reflect her own violent mood swings and intensity. One painting that is almost lasciviously sensual is Tree Trunk (1931)—yet her contemporaries chose to ignore its eroticism. Elsewhere, particularly in the euphoric sky paintings or the depictions of churning forests, there is a note of mysticism. I have too many favourites to catalogue; I am in awe at the way she captures not just wild nature but also Gothic, mysterious grandeur.
Carr loved to sketch in the woods. Each summer, she would rent a cabin or have a rickety trailer (which she called “the Elephant”) towed to an isolated spot on the edge of the forest. In the mornings she would pack up her folding stool, easel, notebook, and materials, and stomp off to find a good vantage point; then she would sit down, look around, light a cigarette to keep off the bugs, and let the scene enfold her. “Slowly things begin to move, to slip into their place. Groups and masses and lines tie themselves together. Colours you had not noticed come out, timidly or boldly. In and out, in and out, your eye passes.”40 In order to achieve the freedom of watercolour with the colour fixity and depth of oil, she began to thin her oils with gasoline and paint on inexpensive manila paper. (This technique was also cheaper than oil on canvas but would prove a nightmare for conservators trying to preserve her best work.)
At last! Public acclaim began to come her way (although it was critical, not commercial: the wolf was never far from the door). Launched into this final, triumphant stage of her career, Emily Carr was almost oblivious to it. In 1938, the Vancouver Art Gallery mounted a solo show of her work that became an annual event. Months later, four of her paintings went on display at London’s Tate Gallery in a show entitled A Century of Canadian Art. Eric Newton, art critic of the Manchester Guardian, suggested she was a genius. He noted how Carr had dug much deeper into Canada’s vast wilderness than the Group of Seven had done. “Where the Eastern Canadians have been content to stylize the outward pageantry of the landscape, she has symbolized its inner meaning, and in doing so has, as it were, humanized it. Her trees are more than trees: they are green giants and slightly malevolent giants at that.”41 Carr brushed off accolades and praise, fretting that they might make her “smug and stagnant.”42 In 1943 there were solo exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Association of Montreal, the Art Gallery of Toronto, and the Seattle Museum.
Carr died in Victoria in 1945, aged seventy-four, after producing her best-known and most powerful work in the last fifteen years of her life. She had proved, as Doris Shadbolt put it, that “art of great strength and conspicuous individuality could be produced in a remote corner of the country if the artist had the necessary qualities and a little bit of luck.”43 It was even more remarkable that in this case the artist was a woman who grew up without either colleagues or an audience in a proudly colonial and horribly philistine city on the far edge of the empire. Her strength of character and vision were extraordinary. “This is my country. What I want to express is here and I love it. Amen!”44
Why did I choose Emily Carr to be part of this book? Why not Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris, or any other member of the Group of Seven pantheon, since they were recognized a decade before Carr and their work is equally well-known? These were all artists who wrenched the attention of Canadian art lovers away from pallid imitations of European art and focused them on the dramatic spaces of our own country.
I asked myself “Why Carr?” recently as I stood in front of one of her best-loved works, Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky (1935), in the Vancouver Art Gallery, which now holds the bulk of her paintings. The canvas shows a lone, spindly tree, surrounded by brutally logged land, reaching up to a pearly pale sky painted with undulating circular strokes. The scorned tree could almost be a self-portrait for this defiant artist—her solitary, single-minded reach to self-fulfillment, while the landscape is desecrated around her.
Carr is here partly because she had a pioneer’s resolve to make this land hers and to become part of it herself. Thomson and the Group of Seven were evolving their nationalist mission with the support of each other and the new nation’s small cultural elite. Carr developed her vision in isolation, while on the other side of the country. Once she was discovered by the eastern establishment, her art and her national reputation exploded.
But she’s also here because she tells Canadians, then and now, about far more than the awesome magnificence of Canadian space. By looking inward, she gave us an outward identity. She began with a terrain denser and wilder than anything seen in Algonquin Park; her forests were brooding and claustrophobic. In mid-career, she painted the carvings and cultural artifacts made by the Indigenous inhabitants of North America, who were ignored by the Group of Seven. In her later works, she infused her works with an erotic sensibility that few Canadian artists have equalled. And she captured not only the lush colours of the Pacific rainforest but also its despoliation by the logging industry. Carr never romanticized the wilderness, and she recorded how the resource industries—the basis of Canada’s prosperity—were already gobbling up the scenery.
In the 1990s, Emily Carr’s depictions of coastal Indigenous culture were criticized as cultural appropriation. Marcia Crosby, a Haida/Tsimshian art critic, argued that Carr invested carved poles with “a meaning that has to do with her national identity, not the national identity of the people who own the poles. . . . The colonization of images in order to create a new Canadian mythology is parasitic.”45 But these days, scholars are more likely to point out that Carr had great empathy for dispossessed peoples, even if she romanticized their culture. Gerta Moray, a Carr scholar, points out that Carr championed First Nations in the face of Anglo-Canadian derision and asserted “their honour, dignity and the coherence of their traditional way of life and beliefs.”46
Today, there is a certain ennui with our national wallpaper—a feeling that our obsession with landscape stifled any Canadian shift to the new kinds of art that Carr had seen in Paris in 1910 and 1911. Perhaps that is why no Canadian artists from the early twentieth century ever established international reputations or foreign sales: while they were still painting landscapes, the art world moved on. It took a completely different group of artists—the Quebec intellectuals and artists, including Paul-Émile Borduas and Jean-Paul Riopelle, who in 1948 published Refus global—to launch surrealism and abstraction in Canada.
Yet Emily Carr’s reputation has quietly grown. In 2012, a small selection of her work was included in Documenta XIII in Kassel, Germany, in an international exhibition of pioneering female modernists. In 2014, the first European solo exhibition of her work, mounted by London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, was ecstatically reviewed: “The best artist nobody knows,” according to one British headline writer; “Canada’s very own Van Gogh,” according to another.47 An exhibition entitled Radiant Visions: From Monet to Carr will be shown at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris in 2017.
As a child, Carr developed her artistic vision of this “wonderful new land”; today, her vision is recognized as richer and more complex than that of her contemporaries. By finding her place, she gave Canadians then and now a larger sense of ours.
