Emily Carr

by Lewis Desoto

  Instruction at the Westminster School was conservative and dull, a repetition of what Emily had studied in San Francisco, but this time she conquered her reservations about sketching from the nude model and enrolled in the life-drawing class. She visited the National Gallery and the British Museum, but the masterpieces she saw apparently made little impression on her. Her heart was still in the wilds of British Columbia. There were various other, more personal pressures upon Emily as well. News arrived that her brother, Dick, had died in California. Then a man she had established a friendship with in Victoria, and with whom she had maintained a correspondence, arrived in London and proposed marriage. Other suitors also offered her their hand. Even the doctor she had met on the ship from Canada courted her with a visit. But she declined them all. Lonely, out of place, oppressed by the city, she fell into a depression. Her health suffered and, finally, she became seriously ill.

  Respite came when she quit both her classes and London, and left for the countryside. There she recovered her health and her spirits, even though she found the English countryside merely pretty and tame compared with the wild grandeur of British Columbia. In St. Ives, Cornwall, a coastal town popular with artists, she enrolled in outdoor painting classes. It was not to the picturesque fishing boats and beaches that she was drawn, however, but to the woods outside town. There, a sympathetic teacher encouraged her to look more deeply than she was accustomed to doing, and she at last began to learn something that she considered useful. Her teacher favoured the pastoral English landscape tradition, but showed her how to note the play of light and dark in the woods, to look for colour in the shadows, and to see not only the trees but the spaces between the trunks and foliage as well. These were lessons that Emily would long remember, and apply.

  All was not work, however. There were trips around England, and she made many friends, often staying with them at their houses, once in a mansion in fashionable Belgravia.

  Emily finally had to return to London. Once again she was lonely, feeling out of place and condescended to, both as a woman and as someone from the colonies. At the same time, her relatives were still pressuring her to marry and settle down. She had not made the breakthrough or achieved the success she had staked so much on. The city became unbearable. Emily suffered a complete physical and psychological collapse. Her sister Lizzie arrived and spent some time caring for her, but eventually a specialist was consulted. He diagnosed Emily’s condition as a nervous breakdown.

  She spent a year and a half recuperating at a sanatorium in the countryside. When Emily was finally well again, she packed her bags and departed for Canada. She had been five years in England, and was returning with neither reputation nor success to show for her efforts. Later in her life, when she came to write about this period in her autobiography, she would call it “A Pause.” But at that moment, in her own eyes, and no doubt in the eyes of those who awaited her in Victoria, she was a failure.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Vancouver

  Emily did not meet with the expected derision when she arrived home in Victoria. In fact, there was even a welcoming article on the front page of a local newspaper, lauding her return from studying under the “English Masters.” Nevertheless, she was expected now to start a career and earn her own living.

  Victoria was growing into a small city. Automobiles were appearing among the horse-drawn carriages. The Songhees reserve had been relocated away from the town to the Esquimault area. James Bay, where the Carr house was situated, had developed into a residential neighbourhood. The bridge across which her father had walked to his warehouse was replaced by a causeway when part of the bay was filled in. The Empress Hotel was being built in its place of dominance over the Inner Harbour.

  For eight months in 1905, Emily put her talents to use drawing political cartoons for the Victoria publication The Week. Her humour, and her evident graphic skills, show that she could easily have pursued a career as an illustrator. But, determined as ever to follow her own path, she relocated to Vancouver, and once more set up as a teacher of art.

  Her first job was at the Vancouver Studio Club, but she found the society ladies she was teaching to be mere hobbyists and amateurs, more interested in socializing than learning. The classes she held for children in her studio were much more satisfying. They were popular, too, and soon she had as many as seventy-five paying students. On the weekends Emily returned to the family home in Victoria, but now with an increasing reputation as a teacher, and her own income.

  In Vancouver, Stanley Park occupies a peninsula that juts out from the western edge of the city, encompassing an area of some four hundred hectares. In Emily’s day it was mostly an undeveloped wilderness of forest and beaches, with a few winding paths and tracks among the giant trees. It was there that Emily began to paint her first forest interiors.

  The watercolour paintings she made in the park in 1909 and 1910 retain the naturalistic style she had learned in England. To the modern eye, they appear all drab browns and washed-out greens. The colour is descriptive rather than expressive, and the composition is uninspired. But there is something there, a spark and glimmer in the silence and the shadows, the genesis of what would one day flower.

  During the summer of 1907, at the age of thirty-six, Emily took a cruise to Alaska with her sister Alice. In the town of Sitka and in a nearby Tlingit village, she saw for the first time the totem poles that would come to be her overriding subject. She had been to the Native settlement in Ucluelet twice already, but this was the first time she had seen anything like the carved poles and the painted house fronts. The watercolours she made on this trip, and subsequently on two more trips up the coast from Victoria, show flashes of unexpected colour and vitality, as if she had at last found a subject that she was inspired to paint.

  In her autobiography, Growing Pains, she said of her exposure to the totem poles:

  Indian Art broadened my seeing, loosened the formal tightness I had learned in England’s school. Its bigness and stark reality baffled my white man’s understanding. I was as Canadian-born as the Indian, but behind me were Old World heredity and ancestry as well as Canadian environment.

  It was during these trips that Emily began to formulate an ambitious project. Most people believed that totem poles would soon disappear as Native peoples adapted to the pressure to assimilate. The tradition of totem-carving seemed to be vanishing, and the remaining poles were either being abandoned to the elements or removed by collectors. Emily decided to make a visual record of the poles and carved figures in their original settings. The project did not come to fruition for some time, though. Just when she had found a subject for her painting, Emily, incredibly, decided to go back to being a student.

  Perhaps she found her technique and abilities inadequate for representing the totem poles. No doubt she also had heard from artists with wider contacts in the world at large about a new kind of painting coming out of France—a new art that offered a new way of seeing. “I learned a lot from the Indians,” she wrote later in her autobiography, “but who except Canada herself could help me comprehend her great woods and spaces? San Francisco had not, London had not. What about this New Art Paris talked of? It claimed bigger, broader seeing.”

  In the summer of 1910, accompanied by her sister Alice, Emily sailed for Paris.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In the French Style

  When Emily Carr arrived in Paris, a revolution had taken place. Not in the streets, but in the studios of the artists.

  Paris was the capital of the art world, and every ambitious painter set off to follow the same route to success. The path to accomplishment had been laid out for a long time: first study at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, then exhibit at the Salon (the annual exhibition organized by the Académie des Beaux-Arts), receive prestigious commissions from the state or the Church, and finally, become a member of the academy and enjoy the fruits of success.

  The kinds of subject matter suitable for painting had also been cod
ified and followed a strict hierarchy: religious, historical, or classical subjects first; then portraiture and figure paintings; lastly, genres such as still life or domestic interiors. Paintings were expected to be as realistic as possible and done with a flawless finish. Landscape as a subject in itself was considered inconsequential, unless it included a significant monument or referred to the above-mentioned subjects.

  Artists had always made outdoor sketches, but these were considered mere practice or studies, not finished paintings. The revolution in painting took place when artists rejected the authority of both the Salon and the Academy, as well as the hierarchy of subjects. In the early and mid-nineteenth century, painters increasingly began to turn away from the accepted subjects and to paint the world around them, including the countryside outside Paris. Two factors, among many others, contributed to this change: the newly developed railways that made travel to the outlying regions easily possible, and a change in the technology of artists’ materials.

  A painter usually had to mix dry pigment with oil to obtain a workable paint. The process could be undertaken properly only in the studio and was messy and time-consuming. When ready-to-use paints in portable tubes were introduced, all a painter had to do was pack them into a paintbox, take along a foldable easel and lunch, and he could spend a day painting in the countryside and still catch a train home in time for dinner.

  Using the new ready-mixed colours, painters worked rapidly out of doors. Instead of the smooth, blended surface that viewers were accustomed to seeing, painters began to use short brush strokes of pure colour placed next to each other, based on an optical theory that suggested the eye would do the mixing. So, for instance, an impression of green could be achieved by laying dabs and strokes of yellow and blue together. The same green could be obtained by actually mixing the two pigments into each other on the palette, but the new method gave new vibrancy and brightness to the painting.

  For artists, painting out of doors, creating a subjective impression of what they saw instead of a realistic copy of a scene, and considering these paintings not as sketches but as completed works of art, became valid and accepted practice.

  The artists who worked in this style were called the Impressionists, and today they are household names. The style eventually spread across Europe and to North America. Various stylistic developments took place, as Monet and Renoir were followed by Gauguin and Van Gogh, and then Matisse, Picasso, and others. Each new style built on the previous ones: Expressionism, Fauvism, Symbolism, and Cubism, eventually leading to the abstractions of modernism. This new way of seeing and painting can, for convenience, be called Post-Impressionism, and that was what Emily Carr had come to learn when she arrived in Paris in 1910.

  Emily had already glimpsed the new styles in the work that her friend, Theresa Wylde, had brought back from France. And in the painted totem poles of the Native peoples she had seen a use of colour and line that was radically different from what she had learned so far. There were other artists in Canada working in the Impressionist vein. In Ontario, young painters like Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris, and A.Y. Jackson would eventually think about how to apply this new style to Canadian subject matter.

  When Emily enrolled in one of the private Parisian academies, it seemed like a step backward, a return to the usual drawing from the model, studying composition and perspective, copying plaster casts. She had done all this already in San Francisco and London. At the age of forty, she no longer had time to repeat a basic art education. For a period, it seemed as if France would be a failure, just as London had been. The city oppressed her. She was dissatisfied with the instruction at the academy. She felt isolated and lonely. Illness, both emotional and physical, threatened to curtail her efforts.

  Relief came when she followed one of her teachers to study out of doors on the coast of Brittany. Emily’s work blossomed. The colours brightened; details were suppressed in favour of the overall effect; a freedom and confidence was evident in the way she used her brush. Gone were the muted landscapes of the English style. When Emily showed her teacher some of her sketches of Native subjects, they were praised, and she even repainted one or two of the sketches in the new style.

  A word or two should be said about how a single woman in Emily’s circumstances travelled and lived in the year 1911. She was not alone, but journeyed to Paris with her sister Alice, who had learned some French. While not rich, the sisters had ample funds for a comfortable journey, and were prepared with letters of introduction and a list of acquaintances and friends or relatives to call on.

  The rail trip across Canada from Vancouver took a leisurely three weeks, with visits to Banff and Calgary, a stay of a week in Edmonton, and twelve days in Quebec City. The sisters left from there on an eight-day sea voyage and disembarked in Liverpool. A short stay in London ensued before they crossed the English Channel to Le Havre and took the train to Paris.

  They rented an apartment on Boulevard Raspail in the Montparnasse neighbourhood. Nearby were the cafés where the young artists like Picasso and Modigliani were debating the latest theories about art. Gertrude Stein’s weekly salons, where the avant-garde of the literary and artistic worlds met, were a regular event not too far away.

  Emily, however, lived in a completely different milieu. Despite her ambitions as an artist, she was still a conventional middle-class lady from Victoria. Her teachers and the artists she visited were British. Her social life took place entirely within an English-speaking expatriate group. The only café she frequented was the tea room in the American Student Hostel Club on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. The club offered visits to museums and galleries, and no doubt Emily saw the sights on group tours, but whether or not she saw any of the avant-garde art being produced in the neighbourhood is impossible to know.

  She worked hard, enrolled in both day and night classes. The pressure took its toll. She began to suffer crippling headaches, as she had done before in London. The old family strife erupted between her and Alice. The city was noisy, cramped, and dirty. After three months Emily fell ill, and in what seems like a repetition of her London experience, spent six weeks at the American Student Hostel infirmary. After a brief period of convalescence in the apartment she had a relapse, and returned for another stay in the infirmary. When she recovered sufficiently the two sisters travelled to Gothenburg, Sweden, where Emily had a friend and where Alice, the teacher, could study the Swedish school system. Emily slowly regained her strength at a seaside spa.

  On their return to Paris, instead of resuming studio classes, Emily followed one of her teachers, William Phelan “Harry” Gibb, to a village two hours by rail from Paris, where he was giving outdoor classes in landscape painting. She took a room in the house of Gibb and his wife Bridget, while Alice remained at the apartment in Paris. When the Gibbs moved in the summer to Brittany, Emily did too, taking lodgings in a hotel nearby.

  Alice returned to Canada. Yet Emily was not lonely. She was happy in the little villages where she found that the peasants, and their quiet, dignified way of life, reminded her of the Natives she had met in Canada. Gibb taught her a great deal in the daily lessons that took place in the fields and hills. And he praised her work, going so far as to tell her that she would become one of the great painters of her time—women painters, he added.

  We should not imagine that Emily was isolated during her studies in Brittany. Ever since Gauguin and Van Gogh had made the area popular, artists’ colonies had become a fixture up and down the coast. Many of the artists gave classes, and the hotels were full of international visitors. Emily’s landscape paintings from this period, like Trees in France (1911), show not only how fluent she had become in the colourful new style—trees outlined in red, shadows of violet and blue, grass of pure orange—but also that even then her best work was being done when she used the woods as her subject matter.

  When the Gibbs returned to Paris Emily stayed on, moving along the coast to the town of Concarneau, where she studied for six weeks with Frances Hodgkins, a
New Zealand artist. Hodgkins was the only woman Emily ever had as a teacher. Her significant teachers and mentors would always be men.

  The meeting between the two women provides an interesting footnote in the life of Emily Carr. Hodgkins and Emily were of a similar age, both single women who had refused proposals of marriage, both transplanted from the outer reaches of the British Empire. Frances had supported herself in New Zealand through teaching and illustration, and had a local reputation based on her paintings of the Maori natives. She was an independent woman and ambitious to develop as a painter. Finding life in her town of Dunedin too confining, she had come to Europe, and like Emily, had been in London and Cornwall to study. Finding New Zealand still unsatisfactory when she returned, Hodgkins had come to France in 1906 to learn with the moderns. Also, like Emily, she found cities stifling and had settled in Brittany. In France, both women found that although they were considered foreigners, they were not looked down upon as colonials. Unlike Emily, who always felt that she belonged only in Victoria, Frances would remain in Europe, and later achieved a reputation in England.

  The culmination of Emily’s sojourn in France came on the day in 1911 when she walked down the Champs-Élysées to the annual Salon d’Automne at the Grand Palais. There, two of her works, which had been submitted by Harry Gibb, were accepted to hang among the most daring and innovative artists of her time.

  When she departed for Canada, it was not only as an accomplished painter, but also as a modern artist.