Emily Carr (1871–1945) is one of those people who sounds half like a major cultural figure and half like someone a novelist would invent after too much strong tea and rainwater. She became one of Canada’s most important painters — especially known for dramatic forests, Indigenous village scenes, and wild West Coast landscapes — but during much of her life she was considered odd, difficult, and commercially hopeless.
She was born in Victoria to an English family that expected proper behavior, and Emily responded by doing almost none of that. She never married, preferred animals to most people, wore practical clothes long before that was acceptable for women, and wandered around remote coastal settlements sketching totem poles while respectable society wondered what on earth she was doing.
Her early work was fairly traditional, but after studying in Europe — including exposure to Post-Impressionism and modernism — she came back to Canada painting forests as if they were alive and slightly haunted.
She painted:
- towering cedar forests
- stormy skies
- Indigenous villages and poles of the Pacific Northwest
- landscapes that seem to twist and breathe
Her style eventually connected with the famous Canadian art movement Group of Seven, particularly Lawren Harris, who encouraged her when she was nearly broke and discouraged.
Before that encouragement, she had largely quit painting and was running a boarding house called “The House of All Sorts.” Which sounds either charming or like the opening chapter of a murder mystery.
Emily Carr’s household was legendary chaos:
- dogs everywhere
- parrots
- monkeys
- raccoons
- assorted creatures drifting in and out like a furry vaudeville troupe
The monkey attached to the statue was real. His name was Woo. Woo reportedly rode on her shoulder and caused general mayhem. One story claims he bit people he disliked, which frankly sounds like excellent artistic judgment.
The little dog often shown with her references one of her beloved companions — she was devoted to animals and wrote about them constantly.
Victorian society in British Columbia found her deeply unconventional. She:
- smoked
- swore occasionally
- traveled alone
- went camping by herself
- spoke bluntly
- ignored many social expectations for women of her class
In the early 1900s, a woman disappearing into coastal wilderness to paint giant trees was considered suspiciously unladylike. Emily appears to have treated this criticism as background noise.
The difficult modern discussion
Some of her most famous work depicts Indigenous villages and ceremonial poles of First Nations communities of the Pacific Northwest. Today, scholars discuss this with nuance because:
- she helped document places and carvings that were disappearing under colonial pressures
- but she also viewed Indigenous culture partly through a romantic outsider lens common to her era
So modern discussions of Carr balance admiration for her artistic achievement with awareness of the colonial context surrounding the work.
The writing career
Late in life she became a successful writer almost accidentally after health problems limited painting. Her books — especially Klee Wyck — are vivid, funny, sharp-eyed, and often delightfully self-mocking. She wrote exactly the way one suspects she spoke: observant, cranky, affectionate, and occasionally ready to bite society back.
During periods when people ignored her paintings, she kept going anyway. She painted because she had to. The forests were there. The sky was there. Society could either come along eventually or stay home polishing its silverware.
Luckily for Canada, the forests won.
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