Emily Carr

Emily Carr was born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1871. In 1890, after the death of her parents, she went to San Francisco to study art at the California School of Design, and in 1898, she made her first visit to the Nuu’chah’nulth (Nootka) village of Hitats’uu near Ucluelet on Vancouver Island, where she sketched Native subject matter. Carr’s desire to deepen her studies took her to England in 1899 and to France in 1910 when the Paris art world was bursting into modernism. She began to paint the totem poles of the Tlingit in Alaska in 1907, the Kwakiutl along the British Columbia Coast in 1908, and the Coast Tsimshian, the Gitksan villages of the Upper Skeena River, and the Haida villages of the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1912. She was invited to submit her works for the landmark 1927 exhibition “Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern” at the National Gallery in Ottawa, which included paintings by the Group of Seven. This marked the beginning of her long and valuable association with the Group. An accomplished writer, Carr wrote a number of books, including The House of All Sorts, Growing Pains, and The Heart of a Peacock, but is best known for Klee Wyck, which won the Governor General’s Award in 1941. Carr died in 1945 in Victoria, British Columbia.