A Life of Emily Carr Ian Dejardin

The artist Emily Carr (1871–1945) is a revered household name and feminist icon not only in British Columbia, where she was born and lived, but also throughout Canada. Carr is loved for her highly individual art that is imbued with her powerful personality—a personality that continues to project vividly across the seventy years since her death, through her paintings, her photo- materialgraphs and her writing. She chose compelling subject matter for her art, pursued her vocation with rigour, passion and determination, often against considerable odds, and was a brave and intrepid traveller. Yet, as was the case with the subjects of the first Painting Canada exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2011—Tom Thomson and the artists known as the Group of Seven1—Canada has hugged her fame to itself. Carr is little known out- side her native country, particularly in Europe.2 She is also unfortunately saddled with an image that sticks to her like glue: that of a formidable, large, irascible and sharp-tongued old eccentric in a voluminous homemade smock and a hairnet, stumping through her hometown of Victoria pushing a pram full of pets. There is no denying that Emily Carr’s parents, Richard Carr and Emily Saunders Carr, in studio, c. 1876. Courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, she was a devoted animal lover (p. 33); at various times she owned dozens BC Archives, image A-09184. Copyrighted of dogs (she bred Old English sheepdogs and kept griffons), a famous monkey - (Woo), an equally famous white rat (Susie), parrots, a cockatoo, a crow and many, many other pets.3 Photographs do exist of the young Emily Carr, yet it is the image of the older woman that is imprinted on the Canadian con- sciousness, typically comprising a basilisk stare (she hated being photo- graphed) and often the current favoured dog wielded like a protective shield. To a British audience, this stereotype might seem remarkably familiar: here ONLY surely is a classic English battleaxe, suggesting an amalgam of Beatrix Potter with Ena Sharples, Margaret Rutherford and Barbara Woodhouse.4 For someone so proud of being a Canadian, Carr could indeed appear very English: to people in Toronto, for instance, she sounded English, and at art school in San Francisco she records that “I was not English but I was nearer English than any of the others. I had English ways, English speech, 5 Emily Carr and her sisters; clockwise from bottom right: from my English parents though I was born and bred Canadian.” Her par- Emily, Alice, Lizzie, Edith and Clara, c. 1888. Photograph by Skene Lowe. Courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC ents were indeed English immigrants, albeit via California. Photographs of Archives, image A-02037.

Opposite PREVIEW Harold Mortimer Lamb, Emily Carr in Her Studio, 1939. Silver gelatin print, 7 × 6 cm. 18 Title 19 Promised gift to the Vancouver Art Gallery from Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft. her magnificently bearded father, Richard, her mother, Emily, and the home craved comfort and reassurance and ecstasy in religion; but her comment that they built in Victoria, on Vancouver Island, suggest a family striving also suggests a veiled criticism of Harris’s work (p. 27). to be “more English than the English” in the classic colonial way. Carr’s older On the subject of her painting, Carr’s language is often Whitmanesque sisters fitted the bill too, if the regular use of the dread signifier “prim” to and euphoric; like Harris, she saw landscape as a revelation of the divine in describe them is anything to go by. All in all, there was a lot of oppressive nature. She talks of air, space and light as almost living entities. The great Victorian stereotyping for a natural rebel to set her face against. Nonetheless, trees of the West Coast rainforest that she painted—her own quasi-totems— Carr was clearly taken aback when one of the personal revelations of the seemed to her to vibrate with life force. Occasionally, prompted presumably years she spent in England turned out to be the affirmation of her solidly by the Indigenous art that she so often painted, she would find in a gnarled Overhead, p. 265. Canadian identity. She had nothing against “country England,” as she put tree trunk the likeness of some mythical snarling animal, prefiguring the Graham Sutherland, Green Tree Form: Interior of Woods, it: “It was London & the English worship of traditions that riled me.”6 1940. Oil on canvas, 78.7 × 107.9 cm. Tate, London. later, more overtly surrealist vision of British artists such as Paul Nash or Rebelliousness is one of the keys to Carr’s character, and to her self-image; Graham Sutherland. Sometimes, too, her attempts to express the life she saw the latter is particularly important in Carr’s case because, after a lifetime of in the inanimate led her perilously close to the cartoonish; there are fail- struggle as an artist, her last five years saw her achieve an unexpected fame materialures, something of which she was agonizingly conscious. as the author of a series of autobiographical books in which her feistiness, Carr’s numerous pictures of scenes of logging devastation can perhaps be her humour, her intelligence and the sheer force of her personality simply interpreted as an expression of spiritual loss allied to her sense (commonly leap off the page. Perhaps no more than the rest of us, but to a more articu- held at the time) of the inevitable fading of First Nations culture, which casts late degree, she had a tendency in these stories to self-mythologize, occasion- an interesting shade of meaning on a famous image such as Scorned as ally not letting mere facts or accurate dates get in the way of a good story. Timber, Beloved of the Sky (p. 279). In her images of totem poles she often, She is a biographer’s dream (so much revealing information!) and nightmare through vivid colour and a focus on the expression of the eyes, seems to (not all of it reliable!) combined; but the self that emerges from these stories suggest that the symbolic creatures are in some way alive, despite their dilap- is a powerful construct, one that has occupied Canadian scholars for decades. idation and neglect (Totemic Figure in the Forest, p. 168); and her images Equally important for understanding Emily Carr is an appreciation of of the regeneration of the forest surely say something similar about rebirth her sense of spirituality. Carr often wrote about the powerful aura of spirit and hope. that she sensed in First Nations art. In her autobiography, Growing Pains, Her profound appreciation for the glories of creation did not always she shares her soul-searching interest in comparative religions, though her Copyrighted extend to her fellow human beings. For nearly fifteen years, from 1913 to upbringing had been solidly Presbyterian—indeed, indigestibly so: “I was - 1927, Carr was a landlady in a boarding house that she had built to help her rebellious about religion. In our home it was forced upon you in large, furi- achieve a regular income. This was a role to which she was, to an almost ous helps . . . . Then too there was the missionary blight. My second sister comical degree, unsuited—or so the very funny but sad stories in her book wanted to be a Missionary and filled our house with long-faced samples . . . . The House of All Sorts (1944) would have us believe. Often rejected and disre- Sea Drift at the Edge of the Forest, c. 1931. Oil on canvas. There was the Sunday School blight too. That was very bad.”7 Encountering, spected as an artist by her hometown public in Victoria, she lets us think as she later did, someone who practised the Baha’i faith (the American artist that she gave up art altogether during those years, but this was not the case. Mark Tobey) and several people who practised theosophy (in particular herONLY Carr carried on exhibiting and even painting when she could find the time friend the artist Lawren Harris), she wrestled long and hard with alternative throughout that period, though not to the prolific level of which she was religions—paying special attention to theosophy, which was experiencing capable when in the grip of enthusiasm. Although her art may not always something of a heyday—before falling back on the comfort of her rather tra- have been understood, her status as an artist of note was probably less under ditional Christian faith: “When I tried to see things theosophically I was dispute in her hometown than she would have us believe—or possibly even looking through the glasses of cold, hard, inevitable fate, serene perhaps but than she believed, a certain paranoia being omnipresent in her self-aware- cold, unjoyous and unmoving.”8 Cold serenity was never her thing—she ness as an artist. She recognized, later in life, that there had been many

20 PREVIEW 21 opportunities that she had simply not been willing to take advantage of: she tive, not a record at all. It was essentially a case of mutual incomprehension. found it hard to meet success halfway. Carr had gone to France precisely to acquire a radical new expressive visual Rebelliousness may also have had something to do with her relationship language that would allow her to do justice to what she saw as Canada’s equiv- with Indigenous people. Her attitudes inevitably retained much that was alent of England’s Stonehenge. To her, a merely accurate record didn’t say colonial and patronizing—it would be too much to expect her to be otherwise anything true about the objects. The government, in the person of Charles than of her time—but she genuinely felt comfortable with, and admired, Frederick Newcombe, a distinguished authority on the Indigenous art of even in some cases loved, the Native people she came in contact with. At the the Northwest Coast, recognized the accuracy of Carr’s records of the carv- same time we may suspect that she felt a bat squeak of satisfaction that her ings but felt that the paintings were “too brilliant and vivid to be true to the admirable championship of the First Nations would probably scandalize her actual conditions of the coast villages . . . the materials used have been laid on more hidebound neighbours. Even in 1928, in the first major newspaper with a heavy hand . . . no standard of comparative size has been followed.”10 article featuring Carr, the reporter, one Muriel Brewster (a pseudonym for Muriel E. Bruce), could come up with, under the toe-curling title “Some Emily Carr was born to well-to-do parents in Victoria, in 1871, the year that Ladies Prefer Indians,” a piece of staggeringly patronizing casual prejudice: materialBritish Columbia became a province. The youngest of five daughters (her “Gentlemen, they say, prefer blondes,” trills Brewster, making modish refer- one younger sibling, Richard, died in young adulthood), she was, or liked to The Olsson Student [cape added to cover cloak], c. 1901–1902. ence to Anita Loos’s blockbuster novel published three years before, “blondes Watercolour on paper. think of herself as, the “naughty one,” the “not-clever” one, the non-con- adore cave-men, and the special tastes of cave-men are lost in the mists of formist, the uncontrollable one. This was perhaps inevitable, arriving late antiquity. But a Canadian woman who really appears to have a feeling of more into a family of much older, much more Victorian and prim sisters. Indeed, genuine affection for her dark-skinned compatriots than for those of the she seems to have done perfectly well at school, her artistic talent emerging regular pallid hue is, to say the least, a rarity. Emily Carr. . . is quite frank about early. Both parents died when Carr was still a teenager, and it was after the her deep love for the Indians of her own province. And she cares so little for death of her authoritarian father when she was seventeen that her iron will the opinions of the rest of us that she flatly refuses to have a photograph was free to fully assert itself. In 1890, at the age of eighteen, she persuaded taken, in spite of the fact that she is not at all hard to look at.”9 It is heartening her guardian to allow her to attend art school in San Francisco, from which to note that, even with the promise of widespread recognition after years she returned in 1893 a truly good, if traditional, watercolourist. She then of struggle, Emily Carr could be admirably bloody-minded when confronted taught art in Victoria for some years before deciding in 1899 that she needed with an intrusive photographer and a silly reporter. But the tone of the Copyrighted more study. She set off, dogged and determined as ever, for England, where piece, unthinkable today in a national newspaper, establishes with startling - she enrolled at the Westminster School of Art in London in September. clarity the context of unthinking racism against which Carr’s champion- Her time in England was not happy. She had missed the Westminster ship of Indigenous art and people should be seen. School of Art’s exciting period by a few years (the torch had passed to the However, Carr’s relationship with First Nations people—a subject to which Slade School of Fine Art by this time) and found the teaching pedestrian and much scholarship has been devoted in Canada over the decades—seems, dull. She hated London, finding it oppressive; big cities seem literally to in the context of her career as an artist and consequently of this exhibition, have made her ill. She went to St. Ives, in Cornwall, where she was happier, less remarkable than her undoubted early awed appreciation of their art.ONLY enrolling first with Julius Olsson, with whom she didn’t really get on, and Certainly she did not truly understand it, but within her own culture she was then with Algernon Talmage, with whom she did, though neither left much well ahead of all but the most dedicated anthropologists of the day. The dif- mark on her future output even if, in her late sea-and-sky pieces, there may ference between an anthropologist’s approach and Carr’s is well illustrated be a latent memory of Olsson’s typical seascape subject matter in a very dif- by her failed attempt in 1912 to interest the provincial government in buying ferent style. Neither artist was exactly on the cutting edge. Carr felt that a collection of some 200 of her works; she saw them as “recording” the art of her fellow students laughed at her. There is a funny set of caricatures done the First Nations, but the government saw them as too colourful and subjec- by Carr called The Olsson Student,11 a typical piece of self-ridicule that ends

22 PREVIEW 23 with an image of her setting off into the woods in her eccentric Canadian It was then that she developed the feeling that her great calling required a garb—a particularly pragmatic demonstration of the layer principle of fash- more radical and expressive technique, and to acquire that, there was only ion, topped with a leaky tam-o’-shanter—and with her painting equipment, one possible place to go: France. to the bemusement, and implied mockery, of her fellow students. In 1910 Carr held a show in her studio, with an auction to raise funds for Carr’s time in England, which lasted about five years, reached its nadir the trip. Again with Alice in tow, she set off on July 11, via Quebec City and with a period of eighteen months’ enforced rest spent in the East Anglian Liverpool, for the other side of the Atlantic. In Paris she encountered modern Sanatorium in Nayland, which specialized in the treatment of tuberculosis. French painting and was mentored by the artist Harry Phelan Gibb and Carr’s health was apparently impaired by stress. Her own diagnosis was that his wife. She enrolled in the Académie Colarossi but preferred a period of she had simply been working too hard; today it looks like a nervous break- private study with the Scottish artist J.D. Fergusson until—a recurring life down. Nonetheless, she had to endure the spartan conditions believed at theme—she fell ill again, just as she had in London. After recuperating in the time to benefit those suffering TB, best described as “bracing” and from Sweden in 1911 she next headed for the more conducive rural environment which death might well have been a merciful release.12 By October 1904 of northern Brittany, spending some useful time studying watercolour with she was back at home in Victoria finding occasional work as a cartoonist for materialthe New Zealand painter Frances Hodgkins before returning to Victoria in The Week.13 Then from 1906 to 1910 she established herself in a studio in November. Carr did have some success while in France—two of her paint- Vancouver and taught art at the Crofton House School for Girls. ings, La Colline and Le Paysage, were accepted at the 1911 Salon d’Automne The year 1907 brought a seminal turning point: that summer she and her in Paris—and her experience of Post-Impressionist painting transformed sister Alice went on a trip up the West Coast to Sitka, Alaska. It was on this her style. journey that she saw totem poles for the first time. She recorded the trip in a On her return she threw herself into her work, producing hundreds of very funny illustrated journal, long known about but lost sight of until 2013, Native-themed paintings in her new, vibrant and colourful modern style. when it turned up in a Montreal basement (pp. 120–121). An incidental reve- At this moment Carr was likely the most advanced Modernist artist in Can- lation of the journal is that such a trip had more of the tourist than the pioneer ada, not that anyone in her community was qualified to register this. She about it. One image shows Carr and Alice struggling with armfuls of Native held an exhibition of these new works in Vancouver in March 1912 before artifacts clearly bought as souvenirs and presumably manufactured as such. Skidegate, p. 147. embarking in July on an ambitious six-week trip exploring coastal northern Nonetheless, the experience lit a fire in her—she had found a mission, British Columbia, including the Alert Bay area, the Skeena River valley and which was to record the totems in situ before, as she saw it, they were lost Copyrighted Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands). An annus mirabilis of astonish- forever. She was right to be concerned: by the time of her final visit, in the - ing creative output ended abruptly in 1913, when her large exhibition of late 1920s, she was horrified to see how many of the poles had disappeared, Native-inspired work failed to attract buyers—her new style falling on stony, either through natural disintegration or by being removed to museums. uncomprehending ground—and when her enterprising offer of sale to It cannot be stressed enough how challenging this mission was. Access the provincial government was declined. A wall of poverty and disillusion to remote villages, sometimes fully or partially deserted, reachable only by loomed, and was hit. trail or by fishing boat or canoe (and Carr suffered terrible seasickness) was In despair Carr returned to Victoria and came up with a money-making extremely difficult. With the mosquitoes and the torrential rain, the livingONLY scheme. She borrowed some funds to build a small apartment house at 646 conditions—whether among the few indigenous inhabitants or entirely on Simcoe Street (close to Beacon Hill Park, which she loved). The timing, not her own in quasi-jungle conditions—would have defeated many. Neverthe- that she could have foreseen it, simply couldn’t have been worse. The First less, in 1908 to 1909 there were more summer trips, to Alert Bay (‘Ylis), World War broke out the very next year, and rents inevitably nosedived. Far Campbell River and other southern Kwakiutl villages. Carr sketched also from making money, Carr couldn’t afford the help she needed and had to in nearby reserves, Sechelt and North Vancouver, as well as Vancouver’s get up at the crack of dawn, run the place, feed the tenants and do mainte- Eagle’s Nest Pole at Gitex, Nass River, p. 124. famous Stanley Park, a slice of rainforest within easy reach of her studio. nance work largely by herself.

24 PREVIEW 25 These years, 1913 to 1927, were Carr’s darkest. The studio she had built for world religions that saw the presence of the divine in the landscape. His herself at the heart of the Simcoe Street apartment building was little used, simplified forms, his grandeur of composition and beauty of colour, the and she was constantly battling grinding poverty. She came up with other divine light in his work penetrating the clouds and bouncing off endless schemes to keep afloat—some quite successful. For instance, she bred sheep- sweeps of Lake Superior, hit her like a thunderbolt. She felt intimidated by dogs, an activity that suited her down to the ground, since she infinitely it, but it also galvanized her enthusiasm. She returned to the West Coast preferred the dogs to her tenants. She also—with a guilty conscience—made rejuvenated, ready to be an artist again, pistons firing. She was now fifty-six pottery using Native designs for the tourist trade,14 using for a brand name and not as strong as she once had been. She was to manage only one more the nickname given to her in the 1890s, and which she would later use as the taxing trip up to Alert Bay, the Queen Charlotte Islands and the Nass and title of her first book, Klee Wyck (the laughing one). Carr collected the clay Skeena Rivers—again a nightmare of torrential rain and mosquito torture. Installation view of Canadian West Coast Art: Native for these pots (the pram again!) from an abundant natural supply in Beacon Lawren S. Harris, North Shore, Lake Superior, 1926. Oil on Her ideas received an additional Modernist jolt through contact with the and Modern at the Art Gallery of Toronto, January 1928. canvas, 102.2 × 128.3 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, E.P. Taylor Research Library and Archives, Art Gallery purchased 1930. 3708. of Ontario. 1444/LN 331. Hill Park. The enterprise was quite successful, with her ceramic pieces find- American artist Mark Tobey, with whom she had exhibited in Seattle in 1924 ing buyers across Canada. She also hooked rugs, again using Indigenous and 1925 and who led her to engage with Cubism and Abstraction. motifs.15 The picture she paints of these years, in her book The House of All materialWhat followed was an astonishing and productive period of painting, Sorts, is a brilliant mixture of depression, unrelenting hard work and hilarity. nearly fifteen years of intense creativity and prolific production, like that She did continue to paint, albeit intermittently, and exhibited locally and unleashed in 1912 to 1913. A new, formal, more controlled, more cerebral in Seattle (in 1924 and 1925), but without hope of achieving a career as an style emerged, fully formed with astonishing speed. The works of this period, artist. That ship, she bleakly assumed, had sailed. clearly influenced by Tobey and particularly by Harris,16 are as if done by Then, in 1927, one of the miracles of Carr’s career happened. Eric Brown, a different artist; one is reminded of the sheer technical experience and the English director of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa—he who resources of acquired skill that she now could fall back on. She returned did so much to support the Group of Seven—saw her work on the advice of to her 1912–1913 sketches anew, producing sophisticated oils based on her ethnologist Marius Barbeau and asked her to send paintings to the gallery earlier observations of Indigenous life. Trees are “Harrised” into carved for its exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern. As it turned shapes; of course, she must have been aware that in doing this she was draw- out, Carr would be the principal contemporary exhibitor (showing twenty-six ing a comparison with the carved smooth planes of the totem poles she oil paintings and a selection of her pottery and hooked rugs), none of the was also painting. It is as if, in these paintings, she is putting two and two other artists having dealt with the Indigenous subject matter with anything Copyrighted together, marrying her love of Indigenous art to her new spiritual sense of like the intensity and focus that she had. Travelling to Ottawa and Toronto, - the landscape, fostered by her intense correspondence with Harris. For the she had her first encounter with the Group of Seven—that inspiring band of first time, Carr’s use of Indigenous motifs feels like the recognition of a Blunden Harbour, p. 170. Modernist landscape painters who had won over the art establishment in shared sense of place. Catalogue cover of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern by Emily Carr (Klee Wyck). Canadian Museum of Toronto with their dazzling and bold interpretations of the vast Canadian To give him his due, it was Harris who ushered in what was to be her History, IMG2013-0183-0040-Dm © CMC/MCC, CDA-2004-2-14, Archives, electronic fonds. wilderness. Carr visited some of the Group of Seven members in their studios. greatest, final and most distinctive phase. In one important letter, he says: Although she received praise in the national press and from fellow artists “The totem pole is a work of art in its own right and it is very difficult to for the first time, she declared that the exhibition opening was an unmitigatedONLY use it in another form of art. But how about seeking an equivalent for it in disaster, unleashing a bitter tirade of imagined neglect and incompetence, the exotic landscape of the Island and coast, making your own form and as was often her practice. forms within the greater form?”17 He understood that Carr’s intense feeling More crucially, she met Lawren Harris, quasi-leader of the supposedly for Indigenous art was ultimately allied to her feeling for the West Coast leaderless Group of Seven and an inspiring man and artist, someone who itself. Carr recognized that Indigenous art—with its formalized human, ani- shared her almost religious feeling for the landscape of Canada. In Harris’s mal, bird and fish forms rendered beautiful through the power of recur- case inspiration came via his belief in theosophy, a complex amalgam of ring ovoid shapes and sheer beauty of line—was really a different culture’s

26 PREVIEW 27 response to the same landscape. Carr’s intense feeling for, and love of, the If everything was alive in this way, Carr needed speed to capture it then and forests, coastline and skies of British Columbia eventually led her to claim there: “What I am after is out there in the woods—even sketches to me are them as her subject matter. She saw that the trees were in effect her “totems” canned food. I like it fresh.”19 She was also, as usual, extremely poor. The and that her sense of the mystery held in the forest or the endless sky was answer? Oil paint, large sheets of paper, and petrol (gasoline). Using white what she needed to express. house paint coloured with pigment, and petrol as a thinner, she created a The 1930s saw a new technical development in Carr’s work—and a caravan. watercolour-like effect on large sheets of cheap manila paper where the As she became older and more infirm (her health was never good), she could speed and assurance of the brush strokes were not impeded by an overly no longer embark on gruelling journeys up the coast and into the interior. fast drying or viscous medium. Unfortunately Carr also created a nightmar- Broom, Beacon Hill, p. 285. But for someone who loved the forest and the sea, there was no need to travel ish legacy for conservators across Canada struggling to preserve what is far. Those motifs were readily available near at hand, in sumptuous abun- very often her best work. dance. In 1933 she acquired “the elephant,” a caravan that, with the addition Partly through this late-flowering ecstatic feeling for the life in the land- of draped tarpaulins, could be set up in forest settings not too far from home. scape around her, partly through the immobility caused by age and illness Surrounded by the trees, even if only a few yards from the road, and with all materialand partly through the liberation of this new, rapid technique, Carr’s last her animals along for the ride, plus the occasional sketching companion, work saw her move from the forest to the sea and, in particular, to the sky. Carr was arguably at her happiest in this extraordinary contraption (p. 227). In these later works, where huge skies shimmer and buckle above the sea or The technical development Carr made in her work at this time was in coastal landscape, she seems to capture the distilled essence of the West direct response to her burgeoning freedom of expression. She was always an Coast that she loved so much. Happiness, p. 225. accomplished watercolourist, but that medium did not permit her the free- Success came late for Emily Carr, and so did fulfillment as an artist. Her dom of movement and immediacy that she now required. She was painting early works—beautiful as many of them are—cannot prepare a viewer for very fast in a whirlwind of brush strokes. Her subject matter had become the scintillating, vibrant masterpieces of her later years, when she comes not just the trees, sea and sky but more importantly the sense of life, of move- within hailing distance of Vincent van Gogh while remaining distinctly her- ment, of light that quickened everything in the universe. Here was Carr’s self. But time was running out. Her first heart attack came in 1937. She could equivalent of Harris’s “god in the landscape,” in the quivering light beneath no longer cope on her own in the elephant, which she sold, no doubt reluc- the branches, in the sense of wind moving through the dense woodland, and tantly. By 1943 it had become impossible for her to paint at all—her last in the shimmering light and air in the sky. As she puts it, in rhapsodic vein: Copyrighted paintings are dated 1942—and she was spending long periods of recovery - at home and in the hospital. However, Carr’s energetic spirit did not fade. What do these forests make you feel? Their weight and density, their Instead, in these years, she turned to writing, and here, in the last few years crowded orderliness. There is scarcely room for another tree and of her life, Carr pulled off her final miracle. yet there is space around each. They are profoundly solemn yet uplift- Always a storyteller to friends and family, and a prolific letter writer as ingly joyous; like the Bible, you can find strength in them that you well, Carr had taken a correspondence course in short-story writing as early look for. How absolutely full of truth they are, how full of reality. The as 1924. She had been quietly writing for some years before she finally pub- juice and essence of life are in them; they teem with life, growth and ONLY lished her first book in 1941. Klee Wyck is made up of a series of autobiograph- expansion . . . . Tossing in the breezes, glowing in the sunshine, bath- ical vignettes about her Indigenous encounters and travel experiences and ing in the showers, bending below the snow piled on their branches, is dedicated to her Salish friend Sophie Frank. Suddenly, the name Emily drinking the dew, rejoicing in creation, bracing each other, sheltering Carr exploded on an astonished Canada. The book was a triumph, winning the birds and beasts, the myriad insects.18 a Governor General’s Literary Award and garnering rapturous reviews. After a life of struggle, Carr became very famous quite abruptly—and famous in a particular way, as herself, or at least as the self she had crafted in her com- pelling stories.

28 PREVIEW 29 The Book of Small followed in 1942 and is surely one of the great mem- 1 L awren Harris, J.E.H. MacDonald, Frank no-nonsense methods and ringing cry of oirs of childhood. A total of seven books would appear over time, including Johnston, A.Y. Jackson, Franklin Carmi- “Sittttt . . .” made her a very British house- chael, Arthur Lismer and Frederick H. hold name. an autobiography, Growing Pains (1946). She did not live to see them all Varley (later members being Edwin Hol- 5 Emily Carr, Growing Pains: The Autobiogra- gate, A.J. Casson and Lionel LeMoine published (her third book, The House of All Sorts, was the last that she saw phy of Emily Carr (Vancouver: Douglas & FitzGerald—though these artists did not through to publication, in 1944, a year before her death), but her friend and McIntyre, 2005) e-book, part 1, chap. 5. First feature in the Dulwich show). literary executor Ira Dilworth was a true and reliable trustee of her legacy. published 1946 by Oxford University Press. 2 Her featured appearance at dOCUMENTA 6 L etter from Carr to Humphrey Toms, Emily Carr’s final, fatal heart attack occurred on March 2, 1945. She died (13) in Kassel, Germany (June 9–September March 12, 1944, quoted in Edythe Hem- 16, 2012), and of course this exhibition, a famous and honoured Canadian. Her books bring her vividly to life and broff-Schleicher, Emily Carr: The Untold may indicate that this is about to change. continue to do so for every generation that discovers them. Her legacy Story (Saanichton, BC: Hancock House, of paintings was honourably and sensibly dealt with by her two executors, 3 At the East Anglia Sanatorium in Nayland, 1978), 296. recovering from illness, she even bred 7 Emily Carr, Growing Pains, part 2, chap. 1. Dilworth and Lawren Harris, who ensured that her work was represented songbirds from eggs stolen from hedgerow at its best in the galleries of Canada.20 Carr’s literary fame facilitated the nests with a plan to transport them to 8 Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr (Toronto: Clarke, growth of her fame as an artist. Today Emily Carr, Lawren Harris and Tom materialBritish Columbia for release in the rain- forest. She was successful in breeding Irwin, 1966), entry for September 15, 1934. Thomson are probably the three most highly valued and revered artists them, but fortunately saw the irrationality 9 Muriel Brewster, “Some Ladies Prefer in Canada, their paintings commanding millions among collectors and at of the plan in time and had them put Indians,” Toronto Star Weekly, January 21, auction. But I suspect that Carr is the most loved of the three. down. The story is told in her book Pause: 1928. A Sketch Book (1953). 10 From C.F. Newcombe’s report to the minis- 4 Beatrix Potter (1866–1943), an author and Ian A.C. Dejardin is the Sackler Director of Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. Born in Edinburgh, ter, “Miss Carr’s Collection of Paintings of accomplished artist, though in a different Scotland, he graduated with an MA (Hons) in History of Art from Edinburgh University. From Indian Totem Poles,” 30 November 1912, vein, came into her own later in life and 1990 to 1997 he was English Heritage’s Curator of Paintings for the London region, having started quoted in Edythe Hembroff-Schleicher, rose above a famously restrictive Victorian his career at the Royal Academy of Arts. Appointed Curator at Dulwich in 1997, he became the Emily Carr: The Untold Story, 75. New- childhood to a dogged independence as gallery’s Director in 2005. Presiding over a varied and international exhibition program, he has combe’s professional reservations did not a sheep farmer and pioneering conserva- also continued to curate exhibitions himself, most recently Painting Canada: Tom Thomson prevent him, incidentally, from buying tionist; she had a similar love of animals. and the Group of Seven (2011). several paintings; he became a friend. Ena Sharples is a fictional character who 11 The Olsson Student, 1901–1902. Waterco- appeared during 1960–1980 in the longest- lour on paper, 29.3 × 23.1 cm. British Colum- running television soap opera in Britain, bia Archives collection, Royal BC Museum Copyrighted Coronation Street. Notoriously sour-faced, Corporation, Victoria. There are three she was noted for an omnipresent hairnet - images, with accompanying verses. This not dissimilar in effect to that favoured by verse accompanies the third image: Carr in later life. This Northern battleaxe “These are the students / Who laughed at was played by the decidedly genteel actress her gear / But now they have left / Doth Violet Carson (1898–1983), who, when not she wish they were here / To jeer at the terrorizing the other inhabitants of “the clock / To tell her the time / That swings street” as Ena, appeared regularly on Sun- from her belt / On a stout piece of twine / day-night religious programs singing That ticks o’er the shoes / In the wet she hymns in a high soprano. Margaret Ruth- doth use / Put on by the mitt / of no spe- ONLY erford (1892–1972) was one of the more cial fit / That put on the cap / That got wet unlikely stars of British cinema, a formi- through the gap / In the side of the gamp / dable eccentric with multiple chins, in a For a rainy tramp / That covered the cape voluminous cape, famous for playing Miss / Of an antique shape / That covered the Marple (a fictional character in Agatha cloak / Of a date remote / That covered Christie’s crime novels) as . . . Margaret the gown / with a hole burnt brown / That Rutherford. Barbara Woodhouse (1910– was worn by an / Olsson student.” 1988) taught the nation how to train dogs on television in the 1980s. Her brusque,

30 PREVIEW 31 12 A t the sanatorium, fresh air, and lots of 18 Sus an Crean, ed., Opposite Contraries: it, was considered essential. A later book, The Unknown Journals of Emily Carr and Pause: A Sketch Book (Toronto: Clarke, Other Writings (Vancouver: Douglas & Irwin, 1953), was published after Carr’s McIntyre, 2003), e-book, 54. death and recounts the full story of this 19 L etter from Carr to Eric Brown, director episode, including descriptions of glass- of the National Gallery of Canada (NGC), less windows, brushing snow from the March 2, 1937, NGC files, Ottawa. bed, lukewarm hot-water bottles and sit- ting outdoors whatever the temperature. 20 Their role deserves considerable praise: a wide disparity exists in the quality 13 Emil y Carr was a rather good cartoonist— of Carr’s work owing to the nature of her her illustrated records of the trip to Alaska output—her inability to purchase the best with her sister Alice and other episodes materials, her habit of painting outdoors from her life make an interesting and very and her furious spurts of creativity. funny addition to her autobiographical books. 14 She would no doubt be horrified to find material examples of this pottery, of which she was rather ashamed, collected and conserved in museums and private collections across Canada. “I ornamented my pottery with Indian designs—that was why the tourists bought it. I hated myself for prostituting Indian Art; our Indians did not ‘pot,’ their designs were not intended to ornament clay—but I did keep the Indian design pure.” Carr, The Complete Writings of Emily Carr, introduction by Doris Shadbolt (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1993), 439.

15 While she felt bad about using these motifs in such completely inappropriate contexts, she at least prided herself on the accuracy of their rendition. Copyrighted 16 The extent of her awareness of, and influ- - ence by or on, other artists apart from these two is hard to assess. Intriguingly, she bumped into Georgia O’Keeffe in Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery on a trip to New York, and one would love to have been a fly on the wall at that encounter, but there is no evidence of any exchange of ideas. 17 L awren Harris, quoted in Doris Shadbolt, ONLY The Art of Emily Carr (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin; Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1979), 76. Shadbolt says the letter is undated but probably sent in the late autumn of 1929.

PREVIEW Emily Carr and pets in her garden at 646 Simcoe Street, Victoria, British Columbia, c. 1918. 32 33 Courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives, image C-05229. Why Emily Carr Matters to Canadians Sarah Milroy

The famous Canadian problem of identity may seem a rationalized, self-pitying or made-up problem to those who have never had to meet it, or have never understood that it was there to be met. But it is with human beings as with birds: the creative instinct has a great deal to do with the assertion of territorial rights. materialNorthrop Frye, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination, 19711

How does a person belong to a place? This question was on my mind as I stood in the light rain on Fir Street, a strip of weathered asphalt that skims the waterfront in the northern British Columbia community of Alert Bay (‘Ylis), some 300 kilometres up the coast of Vancouver Island from Victoria. The sea air here is a brine of cedar and salt and seaweed, tinged with the scent of tar from the wharf pilings. If you were born in this part of the world, as I was, that smell is a balm to the soul. I’m told that in the summertime— Untitled, c. 1907. Watercolour on paper. when the warmth is penetrating and the twilight stretches on for hours—the streets here bustle with tourists, but now, in the January quiet, the mind spirals outward to catch the flecks of sound that signal urban life. Finding Copyrighted none, it unclenches. - At the edge of town the dark evergreen trees throng in a shaggy, sodden congregation, their tips stirring the sullen skies, dripping. It’s not uncom- mon here to see a pod of killer whales travelling by, just offshore, or to spot eagles perched in the treetops, surveying the comings and goings in town with their acerbic, laser-eyed stares. When a crow caws, it’s like a wet, black brush stroke against a blank page of silence. When you walk, you hear the ONLY gravel beneath your boots. These sounds, these smells, these feelings are dear to me, as they were to Emily Carr, who travelled this coast a century ago and painted this harbour at Alert Bay, its totem poles and its people. As far as we know, she visited the community six times: first in 1907 on her way up to Sitka, Alaska, while she was still working in the English watercolour tradition; then in 1908 and 1909; again in 1912, following her period of artistic training in France; and finally

Opposite PREVIEW Alert Bay, 1901. 35 Courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives, image PN02785. in 1928 and 1930, after her life-changing encounter with the Group of Seven nous communal life, she found much to esteem in Native values. At times in Toronto and Ottawa, a meeting that galvanized her creativity and encour- understanding the limitations of her own people better than they did, at aged her to engage afresh with Native subject matter after her fourteen-year other times succumbing to the patronizing prejudices of her day, Carr hiatus from active artistic pursuit. Alert Bay is a place where settler and was unsure which side of the cultural divide she wanted to be on. Indigenous communities have cohabited, at times uneasily, for more than In Alert Bay today, remnants of British Columbia’s colonial past can be a century. One of the big fish canneries in the region was located here, its found everywhere, like the three London-style double-decker buses owned Native workers recruited from the ‘Namgis villages on Vancouver Island. An by a local hotel keeper that await refurbishment by the side of the road—a early way station for the BC tourism industry, Alert Bay served as a prime comically surreal image of imperialism sputtering out in the knee-deep staging ground for the colonization of the coast. seagrass. Or there is the white Victorian clapboard church Carr would have Like Carr—like any person of sensitivity who comes here from somewhere known, with its delicate wooden trim and prim steeple. Little churches like else—you find yourself wondering: What would it be like to belong to this this were erected up and down the coast in the nineteenth century, planted place as the Kwakwaka’wakw people do, with their centuries-old family lin- like flags triumphing Christian conversion. Carr painted one in Friendly eages? What would it mean to be in this landscape if your identity was rooted materialCove (Yuquot), further north on the Pacific coast of Vancouver Island, in her in the clan identifications of the wolf, the eagle, the whale, the raven? And canvas Indian Church (p. 78), its austere geometries set against the encroach- how might it be to regard these creatures if your people had experienced ing vortices of trees. The totem poles she painted in Alert Bay, such as the from time immemorial a sense of morphosis and flow between the animal famous Wakas’ Thunderbird house front pole (visitors would enter and exit Carr, aged 16, with pet crow, c. 1887. Courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives, image B-07510. and human realms? through the beak of the giant raptor) or the whale pole of the ‘Namgis chief In her time Carr appreciated that distinction. Describing the Native Indian Church, p. 78. Tlakwagila, its one-time neighbour, are gone now, subject to rot or to the guides who had escorted her to Tanu for a sketching trip (in her 1941 book acquisitive grasp of museum curators, ethnologists and their benefactors.5 of collected stories, Klee Wyck), Carr remarks that the feelings they “had Likewise the old cedar-plank houses Carr would have seen on her first trip, in this old village of their own people must have been quite different than long since replaced by Victorian-style cottages and contemporary sheds. ours. They must have made my curiosity and the missionary girl’s sneer At the far end of town, though, stands a more obdurate relic, and the seem small.”2 An empathetic, inquisitive outsider, Carr was concerned by community’s largest building: the derelict St. Michael’s Residential School, what she saw as a loss of a way of life for Indigenous people, at times fulmi- which opened in 1929, the year before Carr’s last visit here. (Its doors closed nating about the arrogance of the settler culture to which she belonged. “It Copyrighted finally in 1974.) These days its battered facade is shedding bricks, its win- is indeed always an honour and a privilege to be taken in an Indian’s confi- - dows shattered and shuttered, its stories and secrets still whispering in the dence,” she declared in her 1913 Lecture on Totems, “for they are and have abandoned classrooms and dormitories where water pools on the floor. good reason to be suspicious of the whites.”3 Klee Wyck contains many som- Starting in the 1870s, generations of young First Nations children from up bre references to infant and child mortality (including her description of a and down the coast were forcibly taken from their parents and brought for dying child in her story “The Stare”),4 registering her distress at the fate of re-education to Alert Bay (first to a series of smaller wooden buildings in Indigenous people and her awareness of their losses. (In the decade before the village and then here), stripped of their language and often subjected to Carr’s birth, more than half of the province’s Indigenous inhabitants hadONLY physical and psychological abuse in a program of forced assimilation. Mor- died of smallpox, tuberculosis and other contagious diseases.) Yet Carr was tality rates were high from the infectious diseases that flourished in the also at pains to describe what she saw as Native strength, skill and resource- unsanitary institutional conditions (more than 100 residential schools were fulness. Whether admiring the trustworthiness of Native children, the deft in operation across the country), with malnutrition and forced labour con- seamanship of a female Haida guide, or the patience, generosity and sense tributing to the death toll.6 In her time Carr protested the inhumanity of the of community she observed in the one-for-all-and-all-for-one ethos of Indige- colonial project, this system, in particular what she saw as the tight-lipped

36 PREVIEW 37 sanctimony of the missionaries and their air of racial supremacy. Passages Emily Carr is arguably Canada’s most beloved artist, and she is notable for of dissent were excised from her writings at their first publication. The cen- many things: her driven artistic experimentation, her pioneering refusal to sored manuscript of Klee Wyck, for example, was not fully restored for the be constrained by the gender norms of her day, and even her much-storied public record until a 2003 reprinting.7 Unusual among her own people, Carr eccentricity. But her prime role in Canadian collective consciousness arises was inspired to record these communities during this period of difficulty principally from three key attributes. and change. First is her uncanny ability to capture the essence of this distinctive land- Look next door to St. Michael’s today, though, and you can see that Alert scape in her art. Like the work of the Group of Seven, her paintings embody Bay has turned a page. The U’mista Cultural Centre, which opened in 1980, a fledgling sense of imaginative occupation in a new land, whether she is is an inspiring place, its governance overseen by the Kwakwaka’wakw com- capturing her encounter with the unnervingly alive presence of a cedar tree munity. Here objects once confiscated during the government-enforced pot- (Cedar, p. 74); the rapture of reflected light in one of her magnificent ocean- latch prohibition (which lasted from 1884 to 1951) have been brought back scapes (Overhead, p. 265); the reverential, grey-toned hush of an old village home to stay, displayed in the museum’s wood-lined gallery. A huge, multi- site (Skedans Poles (In Rain), p. 127); or the exhilarating dazzle of a sapphire day ceremonial event to which neighbouring groups were invited to receive materialmorning sea (Yan, Q.C.I., p. 155), when the wind blows in bright weather and lavish food and gifts, the potlatch was the occasion when stories and dances the promise of good fishing. In the annals of Canadian art, Tom Thomson were transmitted from generation to generation while providing the economic described brilliantly the bleached light of early spring in his paintings of the Arbutus Tree, p. 284. mechanism through which prosperity was distributed between communi- Algonquin woods, Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté was a master of melting ties. Potlatches marked important marriages, deaths and chieftainships, as ice along the embankments of Quebec forest streams, and William Kurelek well as the conferral of privileges and hunting entitlements. At earlier cere- aced the stinging shock of a winter blue prairie sky. But Carr is the definitive Cedar, p. 74. monies, valuable objects—from pelts and silver bracelets to masks and chronicler of British Columbia, uniquely evoking its astonishing fecundity frontlets—were gathered to be given to honoured visitors; later these objects and its primal rhythms of regeneration and decay. were replaced by store-bought dry goods laid out in generous displays. Second, Carr’s art is important as a record of a singular artist’s grappling During the prohibition these ceremonies went underground, persisting but with that great unanswerable question of the settler imagination: Where do restricted. Today they are once again proudly practised in this community I belong? Carr was born into a staunchly Anglophilic family, and her British-

and in others up and down the coast. Yan, Q.C.I., p. 155. born parents created for her and her siblings a world ordered by measured At U’mista the coffee is on, the staff are a welcoming bunch and there Copyrighted rounds of churchgoing, boiled sweets, Sunday roasts and wholesome consti- are gems to be discovered, like the Peace Dance headdress that once sat prom- - tutionals. Her recollections of her childhood are redolent of the aroma of inently on the writing desk of André Breton,8 the French Surrealist, who— the British Isles, from the smell of her father’s camphor-scented chests, which along with his Parisian confrères—was a keen appreciator of the Indigenous rounded the Horn with him, to the tender perfume of the English flowers art of the Northwest Coast. An Echo mask now in the U’mista collection, he planted in their Victoria garden. One could never be quite English enough. attributed to Kwakwaka’wakw artist Bob Harris, was once the trophy of the Yet Carr was torn in her cultural allegiances. Her writing often bristles Canadian civil servant and poet Duncan Campbell Scott, whose policies had with insurrection against Britain and its air of superiority. (“Little Arthur’s led to its confiscation in 1922 (along with a raft of other ritual regalia). HavingONLY History of England in its smug red cover,” she snorts in her autobiography, orchestrated its seizure, Scott would then exhibit the mask proudly in his Growing Pains, “ugh, the memory of it!”)10 The great city of London would private collection in Ottawa to serve as an exemplar of Northwest Coast be her temporary undoing, and in 1903–1904 she spent eighteen months of aesthetic refinement.9 I am learning: these objects hold stories not only about her five English years holed up in an East Anglia sanatorium. Tellingly, as Indigenous people and their beliefs but also about the beliefs, blind spots she chronicled in her book Pause, she occupied herself there by fostering and assumed entitlements of the settlers who sought to displace them. British songbirds, with a view to eventually transporting them to the rain- forests of BC, where (she imagined) their delicate song would be heard amid

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