Emily Carr Read Free Page B

boy. The house was willed to Edith and the finances of the family were entrusted to aguardian. Clara had left home and married six years earlier. (She would be the only one of the Carr sisters to do so, and would later divorce.) Lizzie was studying to be a missionary, and Alice to be a schoolteacher. Emily had finished elementary school, but had completed only one year of high school.
    A photograph of Emily in 1890, aged eighteen, shows a pretty young woman with long curly hair, intelligent eyes in a round face, arched eyebrows, and a shy smile. An interest in drawing had manifested itself in Emily over the years, and had been encouraged with lessons. Her declared aim in life was to be an artist. As her father had been something of a traveller before settling down, she may have inherited his wanderlust. In any event, she decided to escape what was now an oppressive and broken household and go to San Francisco to study art.
    It would be the first of numerous departures and returns. Victoria’s location, on the edge between the old British society and the new Canada, would have a profound effect on Emily Carr, remaining a source of pride and conflict, becoming both the cause of her failure and the reason for her success.
    More than the city, it was the landscape that would call to her—the forests, the mountains, and the sea. Always they would call to her, wherever she was. In their mystery andtheir wildness she would find herself, she would find her art, and she would find something of Canada itself. Later, she put it this way in her journal Hundreds and Thousands:
    I am always asking myself the question, What is it that you are struggling for? What is the vital thing the woods contain, possess, that you want? Why do you go back and back to the woods unsatisfied, longing to express something that is there and not able to find it? This I know, I shall not find it until it comes out of my inner self.
    In the years to come Emily would leave this landscape many more times, in search of her destiny in distant places across the world, until she finally reached the destination she had always sought, in the most unlikely of places—at home.

CHAPTER FOUR
A Student of Art
    By the time she was eighteen, Emily knew she wanted to be an artist. She also knew that she had no real training or much exposure to art and artists. There were no museums or galleries in Victoria, and artists seldom visited. The few painters who had stopped in the city, the ones that Emily knew about, had given her a glimpse of a wider world. Just a glimpse, but enough for her to know there was more out there than she would find at home. She was not yet an artist, but she had desire, and desire is what counts.
    She would have preferred to study in Europe—a couple of older acquaintances from her sketching group had already embarked for Paris and London—but in the family’s eyes she was an unsophisticated girl without parental supervision, and Europe was a long way from the watchful gaze of her sisters. Emily was anxious not only to study art, but also to escape from the stifling, pious, strife-filled presence of her sisters, and especially from Edith, who was the authority in the house now.
    Emily appealed to the family guardian. A decision was made that she would go to the art school in San Francisco. The Carrs had a long connection with the city. There were relatives and acquaintances in San Francisco with whom Emily could board, and who would keep an eye on her in what was considered to be something of a wicked place.
    Even with an education, the options for a young woman in Emily’s position were severely limited. Without the necessary schooling, she could not find employment in the usual occupations open to women—teaching, nursing, or secretarial work. But, with a course of study in art, she would at least be qualified to teach privately, if only to children or to other young ladies. This last fact might have prompted her