Emily Carr: The Complete Story
Emily Carr (1871-1945) was the Canadian painter and writer who hauled a caravan into the British Columbia forest to paint totem poles and heaving green skies, was ignored for decades, and became a national icon in her late fifties.
Hers is one of the great late-bloomer stories in art, and it very nearly did not happen.
Emily Carr at a glance
1871. Born in Victoria, British Columbia, the year the province joined Canada.
1907. An Alaska trip with her sister set her life project: recording the totem poles of the coast.
1913. Showed nearly two hundred northern works in Vancouver. Almost nothing sold, and she nearly stopped painting for a decade.
1927. Took the train east, met the Group of Seven, and heard Lawren Harris say the words that restarted her: you are one of us.
1941. Won the Governor General’s Award for Klee Wyck. She was seventy.
Trained in three countries, mocked at home
Born in Victoria in 1871, Carr trained seriously: San Francisco in the 1890s, London around 1900, then Paris in 1910, where she absorbed the bright palette of the Fauves. In 1912 she travelled up the coast to First Nations villages and painted their carvings and poles with that new colour.
Victoria shrugged. The work was too modern for local taste, sales were nonexistent, and the mockery stung. The myth says she was an untrained eccentric discovered by luck. The truth is harder: she was a trained modern painter whose public simply arrived thirty years late.
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The boarding house years
For about fifteen years she nearly stopped painting. She ran a Victoria boarding house she later skewered in her book The House of All Sorts, bred sheepdogs, made pottery for tourists, and kept a menagerie that included Woo, a Javanese monkey who appears in her self portraits of the period.
The 1927 train east
In 1927 the National Gallery of Canada put her in its Canadian West Coast Art exhibition. On the train trip east, at 56, she met the Group of Seven, and Lawren Harris told her plainly: you are one of us.
She went home and painted the strongest decade of her life, swirling forests and skies, working from a battered caravan she nicknamed the Elephant.
Klee Wyck and the late books
When her heart weakened, she wrote instead. Klee Wyck, her 1941 book about her time among First Nations communities, won the Governor General's Award when she was 70. She died in Victoria in 1945, famous at last in the country that had ignored her.
Woo, the monkey in the studio
In 1923 Carr bought a Javanese monkey and named her Woo.
Woo wore dresses Carr sewed, rode in the caravan on sketching trips, and once ate a tube of yellow paint and survived.
The dogs, the rat, the parrots, and Woo were her household. The boarding house tenants came second.
The caravan called the Elephant
In 1933 she bought a battered trailer, painted it, and named it the Elephant.
Each summer it was towed to the woods outside Victoria. She slept inside with the animals and painted from first light.
No rent, no tenants, no interruptions. Some of her best forest canvases came out of those cheap summers.
Oil paint thinned with gasoline
In the 1930s Carr worked out a technique for a painter with no money: oil paint thinned with gasoline, brushed fast onto cheap manila paper.
It dried quickly, cost almost nothing, and let her work outdoors at the speed of weather.
Galleries now frame those paper sketches behind glass, next to the oils they fed.
Where to see Emily Carr
The Vancouver Art Gallery holds the Emily Carr Trust, the largest collection of her paintings anywhere, and shows them in rotation. The Royal BC Museum and the National Gallery in Ottawa hold strong groups as well.
The Emily Carr questions that keep coming up
What is Emily Carr famous for? Paintings of British Columbia forests and First Nations villages, and a shelf of prize-winning books.
Did Emily Carr stop painting? Almost, for about fifteen years, while she ran a boarding house to survive.
What is Klee Wyck? Her 1941 book of sketches from her travels; it won the Governor General's Award.
Where can I see her paintings? The Vancouver Art Gallery, home of the Emily Carr Trust.
Who was Woo? Her Javanese monkey, bought in 1923, who wore handmade dresses and traveled with her on sketching trips. Carr wrote about her in her memoirs.
What is the Elephant? The caravan Carr bought in 1933 and had towed into the woods each summer, sleeping inside with her animals and painting all day.
More secrets to unlock
Her name on the door
Vancouver's art school renamed itself after her: the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. The city that once found her too strange now sends its artists to a school with her name on the door.