Beloved British Columbian Artist Cast a Cold Eye on Conventions of Her Era

She wore old smocks and hairnets, smoked cigarettes, sauntered through the buttoned-up British Columbia town of Victoria with Woo, her pet monkey, and once said she was “contrary from the start.”

Canadians probably would recognize this woman with no further description. Americans may not know Emily Carr, an artist and writer who was born in Victoria in 1871 and died there in 1945. Her struggles to be accepted as a painter in a conservative place and time partly parallel those of Georgia O’Keeffe, 16 years her junior. Carr’s work, like that of O’Keeffe, was modernist, borrowing from such early 20th century movements as Expressionism, Fauvism and Cubism. But Carr wasn’t as lucky as O’Keeffe, whose work was promoted in the New York art world by her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Carr never married (though she had suitors as a young woman) because she thought homemaking incompatible with serious art.

Both painters put their work above all else, grew cantankerous in old age and were eventually embraced not only for their art but for their courageous approach to life as women painters. “Carr was not typical of her time,” says Kathryn Bridge, the curator of “Emily Carr: Eccentric Artist, Author, Genius,” a special exhibition at Victoria’s Royal B.C. Museum. “She made decisions and stuck to them despite adversity. That resonates with a lot of women.”

This year it’s easy to get to know the artist and her work in Canada and the U.S. Carr, O’Keeffe and Mexican painter Frida Kahlo are the subjects of an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, N.M., through Jan. 6.

The Royal B.C. Museum exhibition, on display through April 7, has 80 paintings by Carr. Many explore the Native American themes that captivated her, like a large oil on canvas from 1913 of Tanu, a Haida Indian village in the Queen Charlotte Islands, with decorated house posts and totem poles. There are pieces of pottery she made between 1913 and 1927, when, defeated as an artist, she all but stopped painting to support herself as the landlady at the House of All Sorts, a Victoria apartment house she made famous in a 1944 book of the same name. And there’s a Carr diary, open to the page where she recorded her joyous response to a 1927 visit with like-minded members of the modernist Group of Seven in Toronto: “What have I seen! What have I experienced!”

Carr’s life is also on display in the Beacon Hill Park area of Victoria, a ferry ride across the Strait of Georgia from Vancouver. Known for its English air, turreted Parliament buildings and redoubtable Empress Hotel, the town is as prim and perfect as when Carr turned heads with Woo on the waterfront.

The house on Government Street where the artist was born is a B.C. Heritage Site occupied by curator Jan Ross and her family. (Carr was eighth in a family of nine children, of whom one son and five daughters survived.) The Italianate villa has the bed where Carr was born and a garden with quotes from her books on plaques.

From the start, she didn’t fit in Victorian society. She was a tomboy with perpetually muddied skirts who tagged along after her father and should have been a boy, he once said. “She was such a strong individual, with tremendous focus when it came to doing what she wanted, a Canadian icon and inspiration for women,” Ross says.

In 1890, after the deaths of her mother and father, Carr attended the California School of Design in San Francisco. Nine years later she studied at the Westminster School of Art in London, returning to Victoria five years later, with all her rough edges intact. “I was more me than ever, just pure me,” she wrote in “Growing Pains,” her autobiography. In 1910 she and her sister Alice went to Paris, where Emily absorbed the art of Postimpressionist painters like Van Gogh and Gauguin. But British Columbia wasn’t ready for her paintings in these outre styles when Carr brought them home in 1911.

The next year she moved to Vancouver, where she taught art and found inspiration. The Vancouver Art Gallery has more Carr works than any other museum, including “Big Raven” from 1931 and “Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky” from 1935. But after a year in Vancouver, she wrote, “Nobody bought my pictures; I had no pupils; therefore I could not afford to keep on the studio. I decided to give it up and to go back to Victoria.”

The House of All Sorts, where Emily hoped to support herself as a landlady, and where she painted totemic eagles on the attic ceiling, argued with tenants and raised bobtail sheepdogs, is near the Carr House, a private residence at 646 Simcoe St. Nearby, the home owned by her older sister Edith is now the Inn on St. Andrews, a B&B; for Carr devotees. The old folks’ home where Emily died is the James Bay Inn on Government Street.

The wilderness that formed her worldview is evident in adjacent Beacon Hill Park, where tour guide Danda Humphreys takes visitors to a narrow bridge dedicated to Carr. And more well-loved Carr paintings, like the radiant 1936 oil on canvas called “Blue Sky,” are exhibited at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria on Moss Street.

As she wrote in “Growing Pains,” after her work started being recognized in the late ‘20s, “Sketch-sack on shoulder, dog at heel, I went into the woods singing.... Household tasks shriveled as the importance of my painting swelled.”

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Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 1040 Moss St., Victoria; (250) 384-4101, https://www.aggv.bc.ca.

Danda Humphreys’ Emily Carr and other Victoria walking tours; (250) 382-8029, https://www.dandahumphreys.com.

Emily Carr House, 207 Government St., Victoria; (250) 383-5843, https://www.emilycarr.com.

Inn on St. Andrews, 231 St. Andrews St., Victoria; (800) 668-5993 or (250) 384-8613, fax (250) 384-6063, https://www.travelscout.com/victoria/bed/theinn/inn.htm.

James Bay Inn Hotel & Suites, 270 Government St., Victoria; (800) 836-2649 or (250) 384-7151, fax (250) 385-2311, https://www.jamesbayinn.bc.ca.

Museum of Fine Arts, 107 Palace St., Santa Fe, NM; (505) 476-5072, https://www.museumofnewmexico.org.

Royal B.C. Museum, 675 Belleville St., Victoria; (888) 447-7977 or (250) 356-7226, https://www.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca.

Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby St., Vancouver; (604) 662-4700.