Emily Carr’s Stories

Young, spirited and rebellious, Emily Carr escaped a strict Victorian household to study art in the Paris of Picasso and Matisse. In middle age, she shook the dust of acceptable society from her shoes and began a passionate journey into the wilderness of British Columbia; the power of her genius made her one of the twentieth century's great painters. Fortunately, she also wrote. In her books, her warmth, her humanity, her sense of fun and the ridiculous combine to present a self-portrait of a remarkable woman and artist. -- Mary Pratt

Collected here for the first time in book form are the expurgated sections of artist, writer, and rebel Emily Carr's unpublished journals, her important Lecture on Totems about Native art and people, and letters to and from several key figures in her life. The unpublished journal entries include long passages about her first meeting with Sophie Frank, a Squamish basket maker who became a confidante; anguished meditations on her spiritual mission; musings about Native culture and the white community's reaction to it; and thoughts about her sisters and relatives. This collection also features commentary by the editor and noted literary historian Susan Crean that offers cultural and historical context.

Once available and appreciated only by researchers, these stories edited by Ann-Lee Switzer remained buried in the British Columbia Archives until 2007. Finally, readers are given a new glimpse into Emily Carr's life with this collection. Carr began to write these stories in the last two years of her life. She wrote of the project: ". . . they are too small each to be taken singly, but each, complete in itself, serves to ornament life which would be a drab affair without the little things we do not even notice or think of at the time but which old age memory magnifies." This collection illuminates her life and is available to all in This and That: The Lost Stories of Emily Carr. Enter Emily's world with stories like "Father's Temper," "The First Snow" and "Smoking with the Cow," stories in which she reveals details of her family life, school days, her fascination with nature, animals she loved and how she learned to smoke.

This delightful book combines 25 stories about dogs with 16 playful drawings by famous Canadian writer, artist, and animal lover Emily Carr. She tells of her joys and tribulations raising Old English sheepdogs, from her decision to start a kennel to the sad day when she had to close it. With each story Carr brings the affectionate and loyal nature of her canine companions to life, making this book an ideal choice for any dog lover, child, or adult.

Nearly seventy years after her death, Emily Carr's works continue to capture the grandeur of British Columbia's landscape and define our vision of the nation. The approximately one hundred works reproduced in this collection showcase the breadth of Carr's career, from early watercolours in Skidegate and Alert Bay on the northwest coast to charcoal sketches in mid-career to the stunning oils of trees, ravens, and mountains that characterized her later career. Beautifully designed, its small format and price ideal for giftbuyers and visitors to the province, this volume is a compendium of some of Carr's best and most memorable works.

Culled from the handwritten pages in old-fashioned scribblers and almost-forgotten typescripts amid drafts for her published stories, Unvarnished features among the last unpublished and highly personal writings of the iconic Canadian author and artist Emily Carr.

This highly readable manuscript edited by Royal BC Museum curator emerita Kathryn Bridge and illustrated with sketches and photographs from the BC Archives spans nearly four decades, from 1899 to 1944. In an almost stream-of-consciousness outpouring of stories, Carr chronicles her early years as an art student in England, her life-altering sojourn in France and subsequent travels to Indigenous villages along the coast, her encounters with the Group of Seven, conversations with artist Lawren Harris, and her sketching trips in the "Elephant" caravan in the company of a quirky menagerie. Also included are stories written in hospital recovering from a stroke, a particularly vulnerable time in her life.

Emily Carr's books have remained in nearly continuous print since the 1940s. Unvarnished is a fresh addition to her enduring oeuvre, to be enjoyed as a complement to her other writings or as a jewel in its own right.

Victoria, BC, July 11th 191. . . . With red eyes and a body guard of sniffing "faithfuls" attending us, we start on our long trip abroad. . . .So begins Emily Carr's memoir of her trip to England with her sister Alice. They travel across Canada by rail to board an ocean liner in Quebec City, meeting interesting characters and having many adventures along the way. They hike in "gloriously cool and beautiful" Glacier House, and encounter porcupines and wasps in otherwise "heavenly" Lake Louise.

They carry on to the "wonderful little town" of Medicine Hat, then Winnipeg, Montreal and "wonderful historic old" Quebec City, where they prepare for boarding the Empress of Ireland for Liverpool.

Sister and I presents Emily Carr's whimsical account of her trip across Canada, written and illustrated in her own hand, directly from Carr's original notebook. This one-of-a-kind book is introduced by Kathryn Bridge, who places it in context with Carr's life and works.

When Canadian artist Emily Carr (1871–1945) went to Alaska in 1907, she experienced a pivotal moment in her career. With a diary in her pocket, and her sister Alice in tow, Carr recorded the events that would later influence her artistic style. Today, fans of her work can explore the details of this most important and life-changing journey, 108 years later.

Carr’s diary — published in 2014 as Sister and I in Alaska — is a charming book that offers readers a glimpse into the humour and talent of a 36-year-old Carr. Believed to have been lost for more than 60 years, the diary was discovered by Canadian author David P. Silcox in 2011. Silcox was visiting Tom Daly, Jr. — grandson of Carr’s late friend Katherine Daly — when Tom brought out a diary he had inherited from his father. Realizing the significance of the diary, Silcox arranged to have it published.

Editor, David P. Silcox has received the Order of Canada and a Governor General's Award for his many contributions to all the disciplines of the arts in Canada. He has written several award-winning books: Painting Place: the Life and Work of David B. Milne, Tom Thomson: The Silence and The Storm (with Harold Town The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, and Christopher Pratt, as well as numerous articles, catalogues, and reviews on artists and the arts.

The official omnibus of Emily Carr's beloved writings, including Klee Wyck, The Book of Small, The House of All Sorts, Growing Pains, The Heart of a Peacock, Pause: A Sketch Books, and Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of an Artist. This text also includes an introductions by Doris Shadbolt, which looks at Emily Carr's double achievement as a painter and writer, drawing insightful connections between her personality and her work.

Distinguished art critic Doris Shadbolt has chosen 85 drawings from Carr's sketchbooks, those which particularly reveal the wellsprings of her inspiration. In an introductory essay and commentary for each of Carr's seven journeys along the British Columbia coast, Shadbolt's inspired text evokes the intimacy and immediacy of the drawings themselves, and takes us close to the heart of Emily Carr.

Among the collections of Emily Carr material at the British Columbia Archives is a special cache of thirteen small drawing books. The sketches in these volumes were done quickly to catch the features of a passing scene, to note the form and rhythms of a tree, as preliminary experiments in handling complex visual material. As indicators of a part of Carr's process of making art, and as notes of several significant trips made during a turning point in her life as an artist, they are fascinating and illuminating.

In that critical period, between 1927 and 1930, Carr made seven journeys -- several to isolated Native villages in coastal British Columbia, two to eastern Canada to meet fellow artists in the Group of Seven, and one metaphorical journey that was an intrinsic part of all the others -- to nature itself. On these travels and sketching trips, she used her drawings as part of the process of working out ideas, techniques and themes to develop the mature painting style that was uniquely hers.

Wild Flowers is a collection of Emily Carr's delightfully evocative impressions of native flowers and shrubs. She wrote these short pieces later in life and they rekindled in her strong childhood memories and associations. She delights in the brightness of buttercups that "let Spring's secret out," muses over the hardiness of stonecrop ("How any plant can grow on bare rock and be so fleshy leafed and fat is a marvel") and declares that "botanical science has un-skunked the skunk cabbage." Carr's playful words often bring a smile to readers. About catnip, she writes: "I did think it was kind of God to make a special flower for cats." In a brief foreword and afterword, archivist and historian Kathryn Bridge gives context to Wild Flowers within the body of Carr's previously published writings. Wild Flowers is illustrated with beautiful watercolours of wild plants by Emily Henrietta Woods, one of Carr's childhood drawing teachers in Victoria. The originals of Carr's manuscript and Woods' botanical illustrations reside in collections of the BC Archives; neither have been published until now.

See Emily Wood's illustrations

This classic of Canadian art biography, which won the Governor General's Award for Nonfiction, is a remarkable portrait of one of Canada's greatest artists. Emily Carr's life was filled with tension, between the conventions of society and her own originality, between her relationships with others and her often lonely struggle to overcome obstacles, between happiness and despair. Acclaimed writer and historian Maria Tippett has captured the essence of this complex life, weaving a narrative that is at once sympathetic and penetrating.

This book represents the culmination of Doris Shadbolt's long fascination with the work of Carr, a painter she views as one of the strongest and most individual of Canadian artists. It reflects more than a decade of meticulous research, and excerpts form Carr's own prolific writings have been skillfully woven into the narrative, combining with exquisite reproductions of over 200 paintings, charcoals and drawings, two thirds of them in colour, almost all of them specially photographed for this book. Never swallowed by the mainstream in art, Emily Carr remained extraordinarily loyal to her inner vision. The world she created lingers persuasively in the Canadian psyche.

Author Doris Shadbolt's observation that Emily Carr "forced her will on the patterns of her life" could apply as well to the patterns of our perception. Shadbolt offers an opportunity to submit to Carr's vision in The Art of Emily Carr the most complete and authoritative book available on this extraordinary Canadian woman artist. In it Shadbolt, a curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery for 25 years who also edited The Collected Writings of Emily Carr, interweaves a comprehensive collection of 177 sketches, watercolours, and works in oil along with a series of detailed biographical essays and occasional passages from Carr's own writing.

Defiant Victorian, drawn to the deep forest and the open sky. Early recorder of Northwest Coast monumental art. Painter. Writer. Humorist. Emily Carr is all of these, and she is unique in the Canadian cultural pantheon. We know much about Emily Carr, but what of the social and political contexts that surrounded her, that defined her image and her posterity? This groundbreaking book by three distinguished senior curators -- Charles C. Hill, Johanne Lamoureux, Ian M. Thom -- and seven equally distinguished Canadian essayists -- Jay Stewart & Peter Macnair, Shirley Bear & Susan Crean, Marcia Crosby, Andrew Hunter, and Gerta Moray -- sheds new light on Emily Carr and her world.

Ian M. Thom is a Senior Curator-Historical at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Involved in Canadian art museums for more than thirty years, he has also held senior curatorial positions at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. He has organized more than one hundred exhibitions and written numerous articles and authored or co-authored many books, including Robert Davidson: Eagle of the Dawn, Andy Warhol: Images, Art BC, E.J. Hughes, Takao Tanabe, B.C. Binning, Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon and Challenging Traditions: Contemporary First Nations Art of the Northwest Coast. He lives in Vancouver, BC.

In 1911, Emily Carr returned from a sixteen-month trip to France with a new understanding of French Modernism and a radically transformed painting style that broke free from the artistic shackles of her conservative training and embraced a new means of expression. Her studio experiences in Paris, her en plein-air painting in the French countryside, and her encounters with such artists as expatriate English painter William Henry Phelan Gibb, Scottish painter John Duncan Fergusson, and New Zealand watercolourist Frances Hodgkins had a profound impact on her work.

Emily Carr: Fresh Seeing focuses on the dramatic changes in her painting style, showcasing the paintings, drawings, and watercolours that she produced in France, as well as the works she created upon her return to the West Coast of Canada in 1912. The text of her 1930 speech "Fresh Seeing," in which Carr sought to explain Modern art to her baffled public, is included alongside an essay by writer and critic Robin Laurence. Also featured are essays by Carr scholar Kathryn Bridge, who examines the artist's travels and studies with post-Impressionist artists in Paris, Crécy-en-Brie, St. Efflam, and Concarneau and others. Audain Art Museum curator Kiriko Watanabe recounts Carr's return to the West Coast and the paintings that resulted from her ambitious sketching expeditions to the Upper Skeena River, Haida Gwaii, and Alert Bay in the summer of 1912.

Emily Carr captures the natural and cultural landscapes of British Columbia like no other artist before or after her. This major volume, designed to accompany an exhibition organized by the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, gathers work from all phases of this extraordinary artist's career — from her delicate early watercolours of the 1890s to her expressive hybrids of the 1930s and 1940s, which carry European and North American Modernist traditions with the formal stylizations of Indigenous design.

Carr's lifelong fascination with British Columbia's original inhabitants transformed her. Visiting First Nations villages up and down the coast, she absorbed the essence of the place she loved so well. Those experiences changed her life and charged her work, inspiring her imagination.

From the Forest to the Sea features written contributions by Toronto writer and art critic Sarah Milroy; Ian Dejardin, Director of Dulwich Picture Gallery (London) acclaimed contemporary artists Peter Doig and Jessica Stockholder; leading Carr scholars Ian Thom, Charles Hill, Kathryn Bridge, and Gerta Moray; Haida hereditary chief and master carver James Hart; Kwakwaka'wakw artists Corrine Hunt and Marianne Nicolson; and anthropologists Robert Storrie and Karen Duffek. Together, they illuminate Carr's immense legacy and the connections to First Nations culture that inspired her work.

After the success of her award-winning novels Girl in Hyacinth Blueand The Passion of Artemisia, best-selling author Susan Vreeland shifts her focus to the 20th century to tell the story of an adventurer and fiercely independent painter-Emily Carr. Before Georgia O'Keefe redefined the desert landscapes of New Mexico and Frida Kahlo revolutionized the art of self-portraiture, Emily Carr blazed a trail onto the early 20th century art scene with her boldly modern and inventive renditions of the British Columbian landscape.

With her uncompromising brushstrokes and against all odds, she was able to capture not only the fading wilderness slowly marred by encroaching industrialization and assimilation, but also the indigenous villages, the tribal peoples, and their dying customs and art forms.

With great detail, Vreeland conveys how Carr overcame self-doubt and grew to believe in her own passion and ability and chose, at no small cost, to live a life less ordinary. From illegal potlatches in tribal communities in the interior and a tryst with a French fur trader to Paris in 1911, where she was part of the birth of modernism and cubism, Carr's story is as arresting and vibrant as her many canvases. Above all, it is the story of a woman who faced hypocrisy and injustice, and was always true to herself and to her art.

Much has been written about Emily Carr, seminal Canadian artist; eccentric and cantankerous woman; and "appropriator" of native culture, but few have explored how and why Carr has become a national touchstone, an icon who has helped us define who we are as Canadians. Writer, art historian and cultural critic Susan Crean does just that in The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr, a fresh and unique investigation of Emily Carr and her influence.

Crean uses a multi-layered structure that combines historical research, including never-before-published material; fictionalized accounts of key events in Carr's life; and the author's own forays into Carr territory, reflecting on the startling connections between Carr's nineteenth-century sensibility and our present concerns with the environment; assimilation and destruction of native culture; spirituality; and identity.

Crean probes our fascination with Carr: Why was it that a 1913 showing of Carr's work went virtually ignored, while in 1927 - with a minimal change in style - her work was the star of a National Gallery exhibition, eclipsing even the Group of Seven? What was the meaning of the traumatic break with her father and her rejection of marriage? Why and how did a fledgling Canadian identity embrace her vibrant, often forbidding, landscapes?

Much more than a biography, The Laughing Onewill be an important new contribution to the world of Canadian art and cultural history and a thoroughly entertaining and insightful read.

Unsettling Encounters radically re-examines Emily Carr’s achievement in representing Native life on the Northwest Coast in her painting and writing. By reconstructing a neglected body of Carr’s work that was central in shaping her vision and career, it makes possible a new assessment of her significance as a leading figure in early-twentieth-century North American modernism.

Gerta Moray vividly recreates the rapidly changing historical and social circumstances in which the artist painted and wrote. Carr lived and worked in British Columbia at a time when the growing settler population was rapidly taking over and developing the land and its resources.

Moray argues that Carr’s work takes on its full significance only when it is seen as a conscious intervention in Native-settler relations. She examines the work in the context of images of Native peoples then being constructed by missionaries and anthropologists and exploited by promoters of world’s fairs and museums.

Although Emily Carr is now considered a Canadian legend, the most enduring image is that of her pushing a beat-up old pram into downtown Victoria, loaded with dogs, cats, birds—and a monkey. Woo, a Javanese macaque whom Carr adopted in 1923, has become inextricably linked with Carr in the popular imagination. But more than that, in her short lifetime Woo became equally connected to Carr’s life and art. Across the world in an Indonesian jungle lagoon, Woo (like Carr) was parted from her mother at a young age. The tiny ape with a “greeny-brown” pelt and penetrating golden eyes was then shipped across the world. When Carr spotted Woo in a pet store, she recognized a kindred spirit and took her home. Welcoming the mischievous Woo into her life, Carr also welcomed a freedom that allowed a full blooming of artistic expression and gave Canada and the world great art unlike any other before or since. However, despite Carr’s clear love for Woo, her chaotic life did not always allow Carr to properly care for her. Tragically, after Carr was hospitalized due to heart failure, she arranged for Woo to be sent to the Stanley Park Zoo. Bereft of Carr, Woo died alone in her cage only a year later.

In 1916, Emily Carr wasn’t famous. She was poor, and she taught art classes to children to make a living. One of her students was seven-year-old Carol Pearson. Pearson spent hours every day with Carr: they painted together at the water’s edge, and she helped care for the dogs, birds, monkey and other animals that Carr kept as pets. Carr nicknamed Pearson “Baboo,” and Carol called her “Mom.” The two were as close as mother and daughter for twenty-five years, up until Carr passed away. This touching tribute to Carr illustrates a gentleness and sensitivity not seen in other biographies. Originally published in 1954 and long out of print, this very unique biography reveals Carr's personality more fully than any other. With a new foreword by Robert Amos, Canadian art historian.

Out of print for more than 40 years, this is an intimate and heartwarming biography that throws a whole new light on one of Canada's most beloved and iconic artists.

In This Woman in Particular, Stephanie Kirkwood Walker explores versions of Emily Carr’s life that have appeared over the last half-century. She contends that the biographical image of Emily Carr that emerges from an accumulation of biographies, films, plays and poetry as well as her own autobiographical writing establishes an elaborated cultural artefact — an “image” that is bound by its very nature to remain forever incomplete and always elusive. She demonstrates how changes in Carr’s biographical image parallel the maturing of Canadian biographical writing, reflecting attitudes toward women artists and the shifting balance between religion, secular attitudes and contemporary spirituality. And she concludes that biography plays a crucial role in all our lives in initiating and sustaining debate on vital personal and collective concerns.

``[This Women in Particular]...is a superlative and painstaking contribution to the literary and biographical canon regarding the work and life of Emily Carr. It is also a unique and valuable addition to any serious discussion of the nature of biography, biographical research, and biographical literature.'' ― The Midwest Book Review

A book for young adult readers and older; this is a magical story about Canadian artist Emily Carr, and is based both on fantasy and fact. It starts with her beloved trees. The trees call her “the little rebel” and predict that her desire to live in the human realm will make her life difficult. As an innate tree soul, she will not understand human society but neither will she remember her true origins. Her dearest wish is to become a painter. Emily’s life is a fable of courage and tenacity. As an art teacher, one of her favourite sayings was “SCRAPE !” Whenever her pupils heard her say this, they knew that she meant them to begin all over again. Emily was not afraid to do this herself. The story explores the many different beginnings that she made on her life’s journey, eventually to find her own unique style of painting, and to re-discover her tree soul. The text is richly informed by Emily’s own writings and further fleshed out with stories from the First Nations of Canada’s West Coast. The character of Raven is drawn from these stories. He is the one who reaches out to Emily when she is at her lowest ebb. He takes her to the place where only dreamers can go. Her spirit is revived and her paintings are filled with a new energy. Her last paintings of the forest in British Columbia are a luminous dance of brush strokes that weave together a panoply of trunk, foliage and Light.

Emily Carr was an epic traveller. She covered more than 20,000 kilometres in British Columbia during a time when women rarely set off on their own—certainly not with the intention of visiting remote aboriginal villages. While this wanderlust and fearless sense of adventure fuelled her reputation as an eccentric, it also propelled her to become the artist and author we revere today. Laurie Carter set out to rediscover Vancouver Island by following Carr’s path, delving into the home life, landscapes and First Nations traditions that shaped the woman and her work. Emily Carr’s B.C.: Vancouver Island is a personal journey to a new perspective, an exploration of Vancouver Island’s best-loved destinations and all-but-unknown outposts, and a fresh take on evolving life in this province.

Journalist Laurie Carter knew she had a tiger by the tail when she set out to retrace the epic travels of Emily Carr, delving into the life, landscapes, and First Nations traditions that shaped an icon. She too has trekked more than 20,000 kilometres, though in greater comfort and probably raising fewer eyebrows than the lone artist and her dog. In this journey, Carter seeks to provide modern context while revealing the artist/author through Carr’s own words. Following up her Vancouver Island adventures, book two of Emily Carr’s B.C. explores Carr’s seminal expeditions to the Skeena and Naas Rivers of Northern B.C. and the islands of Haida Gwaii.

The final volume of Laurie Carter’s groundbreaking trilogy, Emily Carr’s B.C., presents the culmination of a journey far beyond anything Carter ever imagined when she set out to explore the landscapes, historical environment, and First Nations traditions that shaped an icon. Author and artist Emily Carr led a merry chase to some of the best-loved destinations and remotest outposts of the province, revealing her character and motivation every step of the way. Wherever this epic traveller (and her trusty canine companions) ventured, Carter was determined to follow. Book three traces the Vancouver years; forays to the Cariboo, Sunshine Coast, Fraser Canyon and Okanagan Valley; concluding with what we know today as the Sea-to-Sky corridor, Carr’s last great expedition.

In 1899, at age 27, Emily Carr travelled to London to attend art school. She spent almost five years in England, and in this time her life completely changed. She returned to Canada in 1904 a mature woman, eyes widened from living abroad, chastened because of ill health and technically proficient as an artist.

Historian Kathryn Bridge takes a fresh look at Emily Carr's time in England. She reveals new evidence that fills in many of the gaps in our knowledge of this important phase of Carr's life, and she documents important connections with people that the artist maintained throughout her life. She illustrates her findings with historical photographs and Carr's own sketches, paintings and "funny books," some never published before. Altogether, this book gives readers an entertaining second look into a pivotal time in the life of one of Canada's most famous artists.

Three of Emily Carr's funny books are included in this volume: A London Student Sojourn, in which Carr makes fun of life in Mrs Dodd's Guest House, where she stayed while attending the Westminster School of Art; Kendal & I, recalling the day she and her friend Hannah Kendall attempted in vain to watch the funeral procession of Queen Victoria andThe Olsson Student, a comical look at a painting excursion into the woods during her art-school days in St Ives, Cornwall.