by Lewis Desoto
The ancient Romans did not think of themselves as ancient; the Haida fisherman on the Queen Charlotte Islands knew his world to be new each time the sun rose; the child walking to school in 1881 did not think it was quaint to live in the Victorian age. All of them lived in the present, in what was for them the most modern era yet, in the most advanced of times.
When we look at photographs of Emily Carr and the world she lived in, we are apt to smile condescendingly at the rather comical fashions: the silly hats and uncomfortable dresses, the tightly buttoned gentlemen in their top hats, the horse-drawn buggies and paddle steamers. But it was all modern in its day.
The same can be said of the art of the past. The bright colours of Monet and Van Gogh and the daring geometry of early abstraction are part of the history of art now. We are accustomed to them. But in their time they all had the shocking strangeness of the new. So, too, with the paintings of Emily Carr. No matter how much a part of our world they are now, each one as it appeared on her canvas was something the world had not seen before.
Today we embrace originality in art and in life. If Emily had been born into our time, with her talent, her independence, and her ambition, she almost certainly would have been famous at a young age rather than remaining an unknown artist for most of her life. The Emily Carrs of today have cell phones and computers. Some of them become celebrities who represent Canada in international exhibitions like the Venice Biennale, give interviews to glossy magazines, command high prices for their work, set trends, and define styles. That they are able to do so, women as well as men, in a way that Emily Carr never dreamed of is due in no small part to the example of her courage and determination to be an artist.
CHAPTER THREE
Victoria
So, let us take a walk with Emily, back and forth through time, starting outside the Carr house in the neighbourhood of James Bay, a quiet residential area on the southern side of Victoria’s Inner Harbour, a short stroll from the city centre.
The house is now a museum, on a small plot on Government Street, which used to be known as Carr Street, and before that, when the house was first built on its eight acres of land, was just a grassy country lane. Woods stood here, flower and vegetable gardens, an orchard, a barn for cows and pigs. To the left as we go down the street is Beacon Hill Park, now mostly landscaped but still wild and uncultivated in parts, as it was when the young Emily wandered here.
After a couple of blocks, we reach the Pacific Ocean. A marker on the shoreline denotes Mile Zero of the Trans-Canada Highway. Some say that Canada begins here, others that it ends at this spot.
Most maps of Canada terminate at this point, but just across the Strait of Juan de Fuca are the Olympic Mountains of Washington State and a coastline that extends to San Francisco and beyond. Travel west across the Pacific Ocean and the first landfall will be Japan. To the east, across another body of water (the Strait of Georgia), reminding us that Victoria is on an island, lies Vancouver and the vast mainland of Canada. A journey north up the coast will take you to the Queen Charlotte Islands—or to give them their original name, Haida Gwaii—and onward to Alaska.
On her walk in the 1880s, Emily might have seen some Native canoes pulled up at a campsite on the shore, beached there by people coming from up the coast to either trade or visit. Today we see a line of buses waiting at the dock for the giant cruise ships that bring tourists to Victoria in their thousands each summer. A Coast Guard station sits at the entrance to the harbour now. The float planes that make the trip to Vancouver in a half-hour buzz overhead and then skim into James Bay. A trip across to Vancouver would have taken Emily a full day.
At Laurel Point, where the shoreline turns into the harbour proper, a meandering walkway lined with flowerbeds passes in front of the deluxe hotels. We can look across the bay to Songhees Point, where tall, luxurious condominiums have spread along the shore. The Songhees First Nation used to live there, part of the Salishan people, and in Emily’s youth the Songhees reserve had some two thousand inhabitants.
Our walk brings us to the provincial parliament buildings, which were completed in 1896, just a year after Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. At the terminus of the harbour stands the Empress Hotel, another reminder that this was, after all, an outpost of the British Empire.
In the days of Emily’s youth, Victoria was still something of a frontier town. The sidewalks were wooden and transportation was by horse and coach. But the city was growing rapidly. There were many new buildings of stone and brick, including warehouses, churches, and hotels. Today it has a university, an art gallery, a symphony orchestra, and is Canada’s fifteenth-largest city.
Near the legislature stands the Royal B.C. Museum and Thunderbird Park, which contains a Native long-house and a number of totem poles. This is probably Victoria’s most popular stop for tourists. If Emily could see the park today, she might view it with some irony. She once offered a collection of her paintings to the museum, but the proposal was rejected. In the years after Emily’s death her paintings would be exhibited here many times, but at the time of her passing only one of her works was in the provincial collection.
Emily’s path would have brought her now to a bridge leading into the city proper, where the little girl used to walk hand in hand with her father each morning, and meet him again at the end of the day when he returned from his place of business.
The Carr family was a respectable, Victorian colonial household of comfortable means. The parents were English born, and had lived for some years in California before settling in Victoria. Emily was the youngest of five girls. Her brother, Dick, the last child, was four years younger. When Emily was born her father was fifty-three and her mother thirty-five. There was a difference of fifteen years between Emily and her eldest sister, Edith. Emily was called Milly, to distinguish her from her mother, who had the same name. Sometimes she was also called Small, a name she would resurrect when she wrote about her childhood in The Book of Small many years later.
Richard Carr left his home in England as a young man and travelled in Europe and then on the American continent, from Peru to northern Canada, working at a variety of occupations. He saw much of the rough side of life, but always retained his British manner and ideals. He made his money as a merchant in California and then in Victoria, with a warehouse on Wharf Street within walking distance of the house he built in James Bay.
Little is known about Emily’s mother. She met Richard Carr in California and returned to England to marry him there, where they lived for five years. But as his daughter was to do later, Richard Carr chafed at the confines of English society, disliked the dreary weather, and longed for the openness of North America. The Carrs settled in Victoria. Like their fellow citizens, finding themselves positioned between the unruly United States and the wild North, they clung to their British heritage. They became in many respects more English than the English themselves.
Childhood was a happy time for Emily. She was adventuresome and lively. She was very fond of animals and spent as much time outdoors as she could. Her usual companions were her sisters Lizzie and Alice, who were closest to her in age. The two older girls, Edith and Clara, were practically adults. The youngest child, Dick, was sickly, and was kept close to his mother.
As the youngest girl Emily was indulged and pampered. She was the favourite of her father, but that ended when she entered her teenage years, when father and daughter became estranged from each other. For the remaining years of Richard Carr’s life a distance existed between them, laying the foundation for Emily’s always unresolved relations with men in later life.
Under Richard Carr’s guidance, the household was pious, and religion played an important part in their routine. They said prayers each weekday morning and attendance at church on Sundays was obligatory. Sunday was not for leisure or picnics, but was filled with hymn singing, Bible readings, and Sunday school for the children. Emily would always have deep spiritual yearnings that would be an important element in her art and life
, but they would not be satisfied in orthodox Christianity.
We are all shaped by our beginnings. However much we strive to make our own way, the circumstances of early life are the markers setting the course of our life’s journey. For Emily, childhood ended when her mother died at the age of fifty, probably from tuberculosis. Emily was fifteen years old. Two years later her father also died. Edith, the eldest sister, aged thirty-two, became the head of the family. Edith had always occupied a position of authority and there had been strife between her and Emily, who, despite being shy, was already something of a rebel. She possessed a restless and independent spirit quite different from that of her sisters.
The Carrs were suddenly a household of four women on their own with one small sickly boy. The house was willed to Edith and the finances of the family were entrusted to a guardian. Clara had left home and married six years earlier. (She would be the only one of the Carr sisters to do so, and would later divorce.) Lizzie was studying to be a missionary, and Alice to be a schoolteacher. Emily had finished elementary school, but had completed only one year of high school.
A photograph of Emily in 1890, aged eighteen, shows a pretty young woman with long curly hair, intelligent eyes in a round face, arched eyebrows, and a shy smile. An interest in drawing had manifested itself in Emily over the years, and had been encouraged with lessons. Her declared aim in life was to be an artist. As her father had been something of a traveller before settling down, she may have inherited his wanderlust. In any event, she decided to escape what was now an oppressive and broken household and go to San Francisco to study art.
It would be the first of numerous departures and returns. Victoria’s location, on the edge between the old British society and the new Canada, would have a profound effect on Emily Carr, remaining a source of pride and conflict, becoming both the cause of her failure and the reason for her success.
More than the city, it was the landscape that would call to her—the forests, the mountains, and the sea. Always they would call to her, wherever she was. In their mystery and their wildness she would find herself, she would find her art, and she would find something of Canada itself. Later, she put it this way in her journal Hundreds and Thousands:
I am always asking myself the question, What is it that you are struggling for? What is the vital thing the woods contain, possess, that you want? Why do you go back and back to the woods unsatisfied, longing to express something that is there and not able to find it? This I know, I shall not find it until it comes out of my inner self.
In the years to come Emily would leave this landscape many more times, in search of her destiny in distant places across the world, until she finally reached the destination she had always sought, in the most unlikely of places—at home.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Student of Art
By the time she was eighteen, Emily knew she wanted to be an artist. She also knew that she had no real training or much exposure to art and artists. There were no museums or galleries in Victoria, and artists seldom visited. The few painters who had stopped in the city, the ones that Emily knew about, had given her a glimpse of a wider world. Just a glimpse, but enough for her to know there was more out there than she would find at home. She was not yet an artist, but she had desire, and desire is what counts.
She would have preferred to study in Europe—a couple of older acquaintances from her sketching group had already embarked for Paris and London—but in the family’s eyes she was an unsophisticated girl without parental supervision, and Europe was a long way from the watchful gaze of her sisters. Emily was anxious not only to study art, but also to escape from the stifling, pious, strife-filled presence of her sisters, and especially from Edith, who was the authority in the house now.
Emily appealed to the family guardian. A decision was made that she would go to the art school in San Francisco. The Carrs had a long connection with the city. There were relatives and acquaintances in San Francisco with whom Emily could board, and who would keep an eye on her in what was considered to be something of a wicked place.
Even with an education, the options for a young woman in Emily’s position were severely limited. Without the necessary schooling, she could not find employment in the usual occupations open to women—teaching, nursing, or secretarial work. But, with a course of study in art, she would at least be qualified to teach privately, if only to children or to other young ladies. This last fact might have prompted her guardian and her sisters to agree to the trip.
She arrived after a three-day voyage, a shy, inexperienced, naïve young woman, and before long settled down to a routine of study. Her drive, her dedication, and her capacity for hard work were soon evident. Like her desire, this dedication would never leave her.
In the classroom, she studied what every art student had always studied. Before brush could touch canvas, one first had to learn drawing. She was taught how to use a line and how to shade a mass. The models were still-life arrangements or plaster casts of the great sculptures from antiquity. As well, there were lessons in composition and perspective. Once a student had mastered the basics, she could progress to portraiture and drawing the figure. Emily’s innate modesty, coupled with the rather puritanical attitude to the body that she had grown up with, made her avoid the classes on drawing and painting the nude or semi-nude model. She much preferred the outdoor landscape painting sessions, when the students left the city and set up their easels in a field or on a riverbank. Emily would find herself in classrooms many more times in the coming years, and always she would forsake them for study out of doors. Even in her first real art school, just a beginner, she was already a landscape painter at heart.
There were other young people in the classes, and Emily soon made friends. She joined a music club and took up the guitar. There were also a few lessons she learned outside the classroom that had nothing to do with art. She had been warned by Mrs. Piddington, who ran the residence where Emily lived, about opium dens in Chinatown, kidnappings, and white slavery. Once, with a friend, Emily wandered into a red-light district by accident and had the briefest of glimpses of the underside of San Francisco. Another friend seemed to lead a mysterious, sinful existence outside the classroom, and Emily was warned against associating with her. Some time after Emily returned to Victoria, she received news that this friend had died in compromising circumstances, possibly from the consequences of a mishandled abortion.
After she had been in San Francisco for a year, Emily’s sisters arrived, and she went to live with them. Her brother, Dick, had left school in Ontario and was now in a sanatorium in Santa Barbara, ill with tuberculosis.
All the old tensions between Emily and Edith surfaced again. Emily was frustrated by the restrictions Edith imposed on her and realized how much she had enjoyed her independence. In 1893 an economic downturn hit the West Coast, and the combined expense of keeping Dick in the sanatorium and supporting Emily in San Francisco forced the family to call her back to Victoria.
Emily returned to Victoria not quite an artist, but no longer a student. There were practical lessons she had learned about techniques and methods during her studies, but she had also discovered that she could be independent, that she had talent, and that with hard work she might succeed in becoming an artist.
Once at home again, Emily did exactly what was expected of her: she set up a studio in the barn and advertised for pupils. Soon she had a barn full of children, and by all accounts she was a popular and successful teacher. Her playful side came out in the company of children and the classes were unconventional, especially since Emily always had a menagerie of small animals and birds in the barn. Nobody, especially her sisters, thought of her as a real artist. To them she was still little Milly. And if she thought of herself as an artist, she was one without a style or a subject. The works she made at this time were mostly in pencil and watercolour, in a realistic style that could best be described as conventional and picturesque.
During this period Emily made a visit to
the Native village of Ucluelet, midway up the coast of Vancouver Island. The experience was a significant one, in ways that would affect her destiny, but this would become apparent only much later. In the meantime, Emily decided to become a student once again.
CHAPTER FIVE
A Canadian Abroad
In Victoria everyone who was anyone, or wanted to be someone, had either been born in England or had lived there, or traced their origins to Britain. England was where the news, fashions, ideas, culture, and sometimes even the food, originated. Important decisions were made there. It was the centre of the British Empire. In most people’s minds, Canada was just a colony, and Victoria a very remote part of that colony. England was the homeland.
Emily had been chastised by her family for not being serious, for playing at art. She realized that she had learned a little in San Francisco, but not much. If an artist wanted a real education and a reputation, she had to go to London and be accredited, approved, and celebrated there first before she would be accepted at home.
Armed with recommendations and letters of introduction, Emily set off alone for London at age twenty-seven. She was eager, ambitious, and determined to succeed. As she had done in San Francisco, Emily stayed with relatives, family acquaintances, or in boarding houses for ladies. She enrolled at the Westminster School of Art, which had been recommended as first-rate but had declined both in reputation and quality of instruction by the time Emily arrived. A photograph of Emily from the time shows a mature-looking, sturdy young woman, conservatively dressed in a woolen cape, with a tam-o’-shanter perched on her luxuriant head of dark hair.
She hated London. As someone who had grown up surrounded by gardens and woods, and with the ocean just nearby, she found the city cramped and airless—not to mention dirty, crowded, noisy, and squalid. The studios at the school seemed to encapsulate everything that was disagreeable about the city. One of the few places she found relief was in Kew Gardens, not only because it was a place to escape the grimy confines of the city, but also because the gardens contained pine and cedar trees from British Columbia.