Emily Carr (1871–1945) is a painter and writer whose lifelong inspiration was the coastal environment of British Columbia, introduced in Season 17 of Murdoch Mysteries.
History
Emily Carr was one of the first artists of national significance to emerge from the West Coast. Along with the Group of Seven, she became a leading figure in Canadian modern art in the twentieth century. She spent the greater part of her life living and working in Victoria, where she struggled to receive critical acceptance.
Carr first studied at the California School of Design in San Francisco from 1890 to 1893 and sketched in the First Nations village of Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island in 1899. Carr travelled to England in 1899, studying in London and at St. Ives in Cornwall. She returned to Canada five years later, first to Victoria and then moved to Vancouver to teach. In 1907 she travelled by ship to Alaska and determined to depict the monumental arts of the First Nations of the West Coast.
In search of a bigger vision of art, in 1910, Carr once again travelled abroad for study, this time to Paris. She stayed for fifteen months, and the technical and stylistic training she experienced in France changed her work irrevocably. As in England she quickly tired of the large city. “I could not stand the airlessness of the life rooms for long,” she writes later, “the doctors stating, as they had done in London, that ‘there was something about these big cities that these Canadians from their big spaces couldn’t stand, it was like putting a pine tree in a pot.” She retreated to a spa in Sweden for several months, returning to study with Harry Phelan Gibb (1870–1948) in Crécy-en-Brie, east of Paris, and in Brittany. When Carr studied with Gibb, he was painting in the Fauvist style.[*]
In 1912, Carr made a six-week painting trip to fifteen First Nations villages along the British Columbia coast. After exhibiting the results in Vancouver, Carr settled in Victoria, where she lived by renting out rooms, growing fruit, breeding dogs, and, later, making pottery and rugs decorated with Indigenous designs to sell to tourists. [*]
Her later paintings of the vast Canadian West Coast sky and monumental trees, with their sweeping brushstrokes, demonstrate her continued desire to paint in a "big" way that she felt was in keeping with the expansiveness of her environment.