62 Facts About Emily Carr

Emily Carr was a Canadian artist who was inspired by the monumental art and villages of the First Nations and the landscapes of British Columbia.

Emily Carr was a vivid writer and chronicler of life in her surroundings, praised for her "complete candour" and "strong prose".

Emily Carr has been designated a National Historic Person and had a Minor planet 5688 Kleewyck named after her anglicized native name.

Emily Carr lived most of her life in the city in which she was born and died, Victoria, British Columbia.

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 California School of Design in San Francisco for three years before returning to Victoria.

In 1899, in some ways overcoming her family background, Emily Carr visited Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

That same year, Emily Carr traveled to London, where she decided to transform herself into a professional artist and to make it her life's calling.

Emily Carr began her studies at the Westminster School of Art.

Emily Carr then took art classes from John William Whiteley in Bushey, Hertfordshire and afterwards traveled to an art colony in St Ives, Cornwall, studying with Julius Olsson and Algernon Talmage.

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 was given the Indigenous name of Klee Wyck and she chose it as the title of her first book.

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

In 1907, Emily Carr made a sightseeing trip to Alaska with her sister Alice and decided on her artistic mission of documenting all she could of what she and many others perceived as the "vanishing totems" and way of life of the First Nations.

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

Emily Carr enrolled at the Academie Colarossi in Paris, then transferred to private lessons with John Duncan Fergusson and followed him to the Atelier Blanche.

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

Emily Carr organized an exhibition of seventy watercolours and oils representative of her time in France, using her radical new style, bold colour palette and lack of detail.

Emily Carr was the first artist to introduce Post-Impressionism to Vancouver.

Later in 1912, Emily Carr took a sketching trip to First Nations' villages in Haida Gwaii, the Upper Skeena River, and Alert Bay where she documented the art of the Haida, Gitxsan and Tsimshian.

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 a large exhibition of some of this work.

Emily Carr gave a detailed public talk titled "Lecture on Totem Poles" 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 Harold Mortimer-Lamb and Marius Barbeau, a prominent ethnologist at the National Museum in Ottawa.

Emily Carr sent 65 oil paintings east, along with samples of her pottery and rugs with Indigenous designs.

Jackson as well as Emily Carr, traveled to Toronto and Montreal.

Emily Carr made the trip east for the exhibition on West Coast art: Native and modern at the National Gallery of Canada in 1927.

Emily Carr met Frederick Varley in Vancouver and other members of the Group of Seven, at that time Canada's most recognized modern painters at the show's Toronto venue.

Emily Carr was deeply interested and struggled to reconcile this with her own conception of God.

Emily Carr thought a great deal about Theosophic thought, like many artists of the time, but in the end, remained unconvinced.

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

Emily Carr invited fellow exhibitor Mark Tobey to visit her in Victoria in the autumn of 1928 to teach a master class in her studio.

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

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

Emily Carr went to Yuquot and the northeast coast of Vancouver Island in 1930, and then to Lillooet in 1933.

In 1930, for instance, Emily Carr travelled to New York and met Georgia O'Keeffe.

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

In 1940 Emily Carr suffered serious trouble with her heart, and in 1942 she had another heart attack.

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

Emily Carr had the only successful commercial show of her career at the Dominion Gallery in Montreal in 1944.

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 artists who attempted 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 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 cubist and post-cubist influences of Lawren Harris and American artist and friend, Mark Tobey.

Emily Carr used charcoal and watercolour for her sketches, and beginning in 1932, house paint thinned with gasoline on manila paper.

Emily Carr's work is still of relevance today to contemporary artists.

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

Emily Carr is the subject of books and articles by authors such as Greta Moray and many others.

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.

Heffel has sold the top three most valuable works by Emily Carr ever offered at auction, including "Cordova Drift" for $3,361,250 on Wednesday, December 1,2021 and "Tossed by the Wind" for $3,121,250 on Wednesday, June 23,2021.