| Facts/Data
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Birth
1871 (Victoria, British Columbia, Canada)
Death
1945
Lived/Active
British Columbia / Canada
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Often Known For
rain forests, rain forest, Indian villages and totem pole painting
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  One of Canada's leading female artists, Emily Carr was a painter whose
work reflected her Canadian culture of a vanishing Indian civilization
and dramatic coastal landscape. She created dark, imposing
landscapes that reflect Fauvist colors and her own vitality.
However, she was most noted for her totem figures, paintings of totems
that she saw in museums and native villages. She was also a
writer and did a series of autobiographies that brought her attention.
She
was born and raised in Victoria, British Columbia on Vancouver Island
in a family where the mother died when Emily was fourteen and the
father, who died two years later, was highly eccentric. She lived
most of her life in the vicinity of her birth, after travels as a young
girl.
At age twenty, she went to San Francisco to study art for two years at
the Mark Hopkins School, and then earned enough money by teaching
children's art to finance a five-year trip to London, 1899-1904, where
she studied at the Westminster School of Art and also studied at
Cornwall. During this time, in 1902, she had a physical and
mental breakdown and spent time in an English sanatorium.
Feeling as though she was a failure, she returned to Vancouver where
she painted and taught art, becoming a modernist in style. In
1910, she traveled to France, wanting to learn about the 'new
art'. She again fell ill, but her career was permanently affected
by the new styles she learned; her palette became brighter and style
much looser. She found that many people were shocked by her work,
when she exhibited paintings in her "new style" of Aboriginal subjects
in Vancouver in 1912 and 1913.
She returned to Victoria and moved into Hill House, and had her studio
there. In 1927, Eric Brown, the Director of the National Gallery
of Canada, visited her and was stunned by the quality of her
artwork. He arranged for her work to be exhibited, and from that
time participated in national and international exhibitions and had
several solo exhibitions.
In 1936, she moved from Hill House to rental property in James Bay, and
the next year had the first of a series of heart attacks. With
diminished energy, she turned to writing. In 1940, she moved in,
unannounced, with her sister because her landlord had sold the place
she was renting, and the next year she won a Governor General's Award
for her published autobiographical piece, Klee Wyck.
Emily Carr died on March 2, 1945, at age 73.
Expressing her affinity for Canada and its people, she ultimately had
won much positive recognition with dramatic Canadian landscapes often
with striking figures.
Sources include:
"The Art of Emily Carr" by Doris Shadbolt
John Barton, "Emily Carr: New Perspectives", American Art Review, August 2006, pp. 146-147
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  The following was written and compiled by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California: Emily Carr was born in 1871 in Victoria, British Columbia. She first studied art in San Francisco, from 1889 to 1895. She was dreamy and snappish from the start; fleeing to London in 1899 to study art; she came back with an incomprehensible bad habit - smoking cigarettes. While there she was taken ill with pernicious anemia and spent eighteen months in a sanatorium. Back in Victoria, she worked as a newspaper cartoonist, then in 1905 settled in Vancouver. During the summers she visited Indian villages, painting water colors of the magnificent totem poles. She escaped again, this time to Paris, where she learned to paint "the despised, adorable, joyous, modern way." When her money ran out, she returned to teach art in Victoria. But no one wanted to learn from her, it was generally agreed that the home town girl's paintings were simply terrible. To support herself, she opened a boarding house, raised puppies, made pottery and hooked rugs for sale. She became a frumpy eccentric old maid, whom neighbors laughed and sneered at.
The Indians, in their fishing villages north of Victoria, knew an entirely different woman. Whenever she could get away from Victoria, she appeared among them to paint pictures of their harsh, hushed land and works. By fervently distilling such experiences in her paintings, Emily Carr made her outwardly shabby life an inner triumph.
In 1912 an exhibition of her Fauve-inspired French work in Vancouver attracted interest, but a show the following year of Indian scenes in the same style was not well received. In 1927 an exhibition of West Coast Art, both Indian and white, including twenty-seven of her paintings, was held at the National Gallery of Canada at Ottowa. Encouraged by the enthusiastic reception of her work, she returned to Victoria and began painting again.
By the time of her death in 1945 she ranked among the foremost painters in the Western Hemisphere. Her best work showed great strength and strangeness.
Sources include:
Time Magazine, November 22, 1954
Oxford Companion to 20th Century Art, edited by Harold Osborne
Article in LA Times Sunday, October 14, 2001
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