Marilyn Jones | Emily Carr Chronicler

Emily Carr & Something Plus in a Work of Art

Published: 28 August, 2025
Written by Marilyn Jones

On October 1935, Emily Carr stood before the students and faculty at Victoria’s Normal School, delivering her speech “Something Plus in a Work of Art.” She confessed in her journal that she had spent a week preparing and, despite feeling steady rather than nervous, she felt the audience of “young things” received her warmly—far more enthusiastically than the trio of “set‑stiff” professors. Read more: Emily Carr & Something Plus…

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Emily Carr at Home: The Story Behind Carr House

Published: 28 August, 2025
Written by Marilyn Jones

Carr House, at 207 Government Street was built in 1863–64 for Richard and Emily Saunders Carr in James Bay. Designed in an Italianate Picturesque‑villa style by Wright & Sanders, it sat on four 1/2 acres in James Bay, then a fashionable neighbourhood in Victoria. The original address of the house was 44 Carr Street when Richard donated land to widen the road in front of his estate allowing two carriages to pass side-by-side…

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The Artist and the Suitor: Emily Carr’s First “Heartbreak”

Published: 28 August, 2025
Written by Marilyn Jones

In the summer of 1898, a young Emily Carr boarded the steamship Willapa to return to Victoria with a portfolio of drawings and watercolours of the Indigenous communities of Ucluelet. She was just 27 and already deeply committed to becoming a serious artist, even though that path for women was anything but straightforward. The steamship Willipa was a slow-moving vessel, typically transporting and dropping off mixed cargo, livestock, and passengers along the coast.

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