54 Facts About Emily Carr

Emily Carr was a Canadian artist and writer who was inspired by the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast.

The Emily Carr home was on Birdcage Walk, in the James Bay district of Victoria, a short distance from the legislative buildings and the town itself.

Emily Carr's father believed it was sensible to live on Vancouver Island, a colony of Great Britain, where he could practice English customs and continue his British citizenship.

Emily Carr was taught in the Presbyterian tradition, with Sunday morning prayers and evening Bible readings.

Emily Carr's father called on one child per week to recite the sermon, and Emily consistently had trouble reciting it.

Emily Carr's mother died in 1886, and her father died in 1888.

Emily Carr's father encouraged her artistic inclinations, but it was only in 1890, after her parents' deaths, that Emily Carr pursued her art seriously.

Emily Carr studied at the San Francisco Art Institute for two years before returning to Victoria.

In 1899 Emily Carr traveled to London, where she studied at the Westminster School of Art.

Emily Carr visited the Nootka Indian mission at Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island in 1898.

Emily Carr traveled to a rural art colony in St Ives, Cornwall, returning to British Columbia in 1905.

In 1898, at age 27, Emily Carr made the first of several sketching and painting trips to Aboriginal villages.

Emily Carr stayed in a village near Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island, home to the Nuu-chah-nulth people, then commonly known to English-speaking people as 'Nootka'.

Emily Carr recalled that her time in Ucluelet made "a lasting impression on me".

In 1912, Emily Carr took a sketching trip to First Nations' villages in Haida Gwaii, the Upper Skeena River, and Alert Bay.

Emily Carr adopted the Indigenous name Klee Wyck and she chose it as the title of one of her works of writings.

In 1913, Emily Carr held a large exhibition of her work of First Nations villages and poles in their original setting.

In Montparnasse with her sister Alice, Emily Carr met modernist painter Harry Gibb with a letter of introduction.

Emily Carr was greatly influenced by the Post-Impressionists and the Fauvists she met and studied with in France.

Emily Carr was the first artist to introduce Fauvism to Vancouver.

In March 1912 Emily Carr opened a studio at 1465 West Broadway in Vancouver.

Emily Carr painted a carved raven, which she later developed as her iconic painting Big Raven.

On her return to the south, Emily Carr organized an exhibit of some of this work.

Emily Carr gave a detailed lecture about the Aboriginal villages that she had visited, which ended with her mission statement:.

Emily Carr recounted as much in her book Growing Pains.

Emily Carr was determined to give up teaching and working in Vancouver, and in 1913 she returned to Victoria, where several of her sisters still lived.

Emily Carr ran a boarding house known as the 'House of All Sorts'.

Over time Emily Carr's work came to the attention of several influential and supportive people, including Marius Barbeau, a prominent ethnologist at the National Museum in Ottawa.

Emily Carr sent 26 oil paintings east, along with samples of her pottery and rugs with Indigenous designs.

Emily Carr continued to travel throughout the late 1920s and 1930s away from Victoria.

Emily Carr travelled to Friendly Cove and the northeast coast of Vancouver Island, and then to Lillooet in 1933.

Emily Carr held her first solo show in eastern Canada in 1935 at the Women's Art Association of Canada gallery in Toronto.

Lawren Harris of the Group became a particularly important support: "You are one of us," he told Emily Carr, welcoming her into the ranks of Canada's leading modernists.

Emily Carr struggled to reconcile this with her own conception of God.

Emily Carr became influenced by Theosophic thought, like many artists of the time, and began to form a new vision of God as nature.

Emily Carr led a spiritual way of life, rejecting the Church and the religious institution.

Emily Carr painted raw landscapes found in the Canadian wilderness, mystically animated by a greater spirit.

In 1924 and 1925, Emily Carr exhibited at the Artists of the Pacific Northwest shows in Seattle, Washington.

Emily Carr jettisoned her painterly and practiced Post-Impressionist style in favour of creating highly stylized and abstracted geometric forms.

Emily Carr suffered a heart attack in 1937, and another in 1939, forcing her to move in with her sister Alice to recover.

In 1940 Emily Carr suffered a serious stroke, and in 1942 she had another heart attack.

Emily Carr was awarded the Governor-General's Award for non-fiction the same year for the work.

Emily Carr suffered her last heart attack and died on March 2,1945, at the James Bay Inn in her hometown of Victoria, British Columbia, shortly before she was to have been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of British Columbia.

Emily Carr was one of the first artists to attempt to capture the spirit of Canada in a modern style.

Emily Carr blended these two themes in ways uniquely her own.

At the California School of Design in San Francisco, Emily Carr participated in art classes which were focused on a variety of artistic styles.

Emily Carr is known for her paintings of First Nations villages and Pacific Northwest Indian totems, but Maria Tippett explains that Emily Carr's rare depictions of the forests of British Columbia from within make her work unique.

Emily Carr's painting can be divided into several distinct phases: her early work, before her studies in Paris; her early paintings under the Fauvist influence of her time in Paris; a post-impressionist middle period before her encounter with the Group of Seven; and her later, formal period, under the post-cubist influences of Lawren Harris and American artist and friend, Mark Tobey.

Emily Carr used charcoal and watercolour for her sketches, and later, house paint thinned with gasoline on manila paper.

Emily Carr's painting Old Time Coast Village is referenced in Korean Canadian artist Jin-me Yoon's A Group of Sixty-Seven.

Emily Carr is remembered for her writing, largely about her native friends.

Emily Carr was an artist who succeeded against the odds, living in an artistically unadventurous society, and working mostly in seclusion away from major art centres, thus making her "a darling of the women's movement".

Emily Carr brought the north to the south; the west to the east; glimpses of the ancient culture of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas to the most newly arrived Europeans on the continent.

Emily Carr has been designated as an Historic Person in the Directory of Federal Heritage Designations.