Emily Carr (3 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.