Emily Carr was a Canadian painter and writer, born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1871 and dead in 1945. She trained in San Francisco, London and Paris, painted the Indigenous villages and the forests of the Pacific coast, and spent years as a landlady while Victoria ignored her. She is remembered for her swirling green forests and for Klee Wyck, the book that won the Governor General’s Award.
The forests are what people come to see: trunks that twist like smoke under skies that heave. Almost no one outside British Columbia had seen them until she was well past fifty.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
In 1913 she rented a hall in Vancouver and hung about two hundred paintings of villages on Haida Gwaii and the Skeena River. It was the largest solo show an artist had mounted in the city. Little sold, the new provincial museum refused her paintings, and the minister of education would not help.
She went home to Victoria, built a boarding house behind the family house and became a landlady. For about fifteen years she painted rarely. She sold pottery to tourists, bred dogs, and in 1923 she paid thirty dollars and one of her griffons for a monkey named Woo.
Then a visitor from Ottawa came to her studio and saw what she had stopped showing. A year later the National Gallery invited her east. On that trip one of the best-known painters in Canada looked at her work and told her she was one of them.
What You’ll Discover
Why Victoria shut her out.
Who ruled her boarding house.
What a famous painter told her.
What she saw in a mission church.
What she mixed into her paint.
Why she put down the brush.