Emily Carr
Emily Carr was a Canadian artist and author who lived from 1871 to 1945. She is mostly known for her paintings of the indigenous peoples of Canada’s northwest coast. Carr was one of the first well-known modernist painters of Canada and was part of Canada’s art movement known as the Group of Seven.
Carr was born in Victoria, British Columbia in 1871 to a large and traditional English family. Her parents encouraged her artistic inclination. In 1890, she decided to finally pursue her art full time. Carr attended the San Francisco Art Institute for several years before moving to London where she enrolled at the Westminster School of Art. In 1905, she moved back home to Vancouver in Canada and got a teaching position at the ‘Ladies Art Club’. However, she smoked in class and swore at her students who eventually started to boycott her classes. She was fired within a month.
In 1907, on a trip to Alaska with her sister, Carr encountered some of the indigenous native peoples. The meeting greatly inspired her, and she dedicated herself to documenting the western Canadian indigenous people’s lifeways through painting and writing. She has said, “I glory in our wonderful west, and I hope to leave behind me some of the relics of its first primitive greatness. These things should be to us Canadians what the ancient Britons relics are to the English. Only a few more years and they will be gone forever into silent nothingness, and I would gather my collection together before they are forever past.”
Between 1910 and 1911, Carr spent some time in France studying art at the Academie Colarossi in Paris under Harry Phelan Gibb. Gibb was part of the burgeoning Fauvism art movement. In France, Carr was deeply influenced by the Post-Impressionists and Fauvist artists. She found their lack of inhibition exhilarating. In 1912, Carr returned home to Canada, moving to Vancouver. She started applying the new techniques that she learned in Paris to her art, including the use of brighter colors and bolder lines to accentuate form. The initial response to Carr’s paintings of indigenous subjects was not positive. It wasn’t until she started exhibiting with Group of Seven exhibitions that she became respected as a modern artist in her own right.
In 1927, Carr became recognized as an official member of the Group of Seven art coalition, and her painting momentum took off. The Group of Seven, also known as the Algonquin school, was founded just after Tom Thomson‘s death by artists who were inspired by Thomson and the landscape of Canada. This was the very first major art movement in Canada. Carr’s health deteriorated in the late 1930s, suffering heart attacks and a stroke. When she could no longer paint, Carr started writing novels. Between 1941 and her death in 1945, Carr published three books. She died from a heart attack at the age of 73.
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