flower-scented, outdoor space.
Shortly after, when Emily was fourteen, her mother died of tuberculosis. Two years later, her father also died.
Officially, the children – except for Clara, who was married – were now put under the guardianship of lawyer James Lawson, a family friend, but their daily care was left to the eldest sister, Edith.
Edith was thirty-two years old and had never married. Now she committed herself to raising the younger Carrs, and she no doubt did so the only way she knew how: sternly, following strict Victorian rules of proper behaviour. The other children were mostly obedient: Lizzie was very religious and wanted to be a missionary; Alice was patient and took the path of least resistance; Dick was still only eleven. But Emily was a passionate, strong-willed young woman who reacted to Ediths stern “care” with anger and a growing rebelliousness. Emily and Dick often got the riding whip on their legs – mostly for “insubordination” – not being polite enough to their elders.
Emily grew increasingly angry at what she saw as the hypocrisy of her family. On the outside, the Carrs appeared all kissing and sweetness. On the inside, she felt bitterness and resentment – certainly her own. Perhaps her view was influenced by the fact that she had always been the pampered youngest girl, their father’s favourite. Now, their father had left everything to Edith, and Emily thought it wasn’t fair. The house was meant to be a home for all of them, but Emily felt she had no rights and did not exist.
One day she went with several others for a boat ride with one of Edith’s friends, a remittance man named Piddington, who was living with the Carrs for six months. In England at that time, if a family had a son who caused them difficulty, they sometimes got rid of him by giving him a one-way ticket to Canada, together with a small allowance to keep him there. Like many Canadians, Emily thought these remittance men were parasites and intruders. She hated Piddington in particular because he teased her unmercifully. One day he humiliated her by rocking the little boat they rowed in until she was seasick in front of her friends. Emily was furious. That he called her “kid” made it even worse.
She snapped at him, “You are not a gentleman anyway! You are a sponger and a bully!” This was a great insult from a child to an adult, and Edith thrashed her for it until she fainted. But Emily refused to apologize.
It was a turning point. Emily told her sister, “I am almost sixteen now and the next time you thrash me I shall strike back.” That was her last whipping.
After this, the whip was used only after school and on Saturdays when Emily took it down from its peg to go riding on the family horse, old Johnny. On those days, after Johnny had galloped past all the houses of Victoria he would slow down, stopping occasionally to sniff the bushes as if he was looking for something. Suddenly he would push through the undergrowth, as he found a hidden path that carried both of them away from the prying eyes of people into the woods. Here in some quiet clearing, hidden among the trees where no one could tell her how to be or what to do, Emily found peace.
Later she said, “Maybe after all I owe a ‘thank you’ to the remittance ones and to the riding whip for driving me out into the woods. Certainly I do to old Johnny for finding the deep lovely places that were the very foundation on which my work as a painter was to be built.”
The more isolated Emily felt from her family, the more she clung to the idea of painting. No doubt her sisters saw it as a mere hobby, a pastime. But Emily’s dream of becoming an artist was nurtured by the French painter C.A. de L’Aubinière and his English artist-wife, Georgina, who probably taught her briefly in 1886.
She was in awe of them because they were the first “real” artists she had met – but she was oddly disappointed when she saw their pictures. Their landscapes did not seem at all Canadian to her, though Canada was so young that no one yet knew exactly what a “Canadian” painting should look like. In the European tradition, landscapes were panoramas of peaceful meadows with the odd tree, a cow perhaps, beside a quiet stream. They didn’t look at all like the British Columbia Emily knew, where, just outside the city, endless acres of trees towered above an almost impenetrable undergrowth, and the cow was in her back yard.
Nonetheless, the two Europeans sowed a seed that made Emily sling an old pair of shoes across her rafters. Now, every time she had a little money she pushed it into the shoes. She had a plan.
One day when she decided she had had enough of her family, she marched downtown to the offices of her guardian, Mr. Lawson. He had many children as wards, and it was obvious to Emily, as he stared at her over the tops of his glasses, that none of them had ever come to see him before.
“What can I do for you, Emily?” he asked.
“Please, I want to go away from home. There is an art school in San Francisco – may I go there?”
Mr. Lawson frowned and said, “San Francisco is a big and wicked city for a little girl to be alone in.”
“I am sixteen, almost.” (In fact, she was eighteen. Emily always underestimated her age.)
“You do not look it.”
“Nobody is allowed to grow up in our house.”
Mr. Lawson replied, “Your sister is an excellent woman and has been a mother to you younger children. Is this art idea just naughtiness, a passing whim?”
“No,” she assured him. “It has been growing for a long time.”
He looked at her for a long minute. “It can be arranged,” he said. And smiled.
2 . In 1871, the year of Emily Carr’s birth, B.C. became the seventh province to join Confederation.
3
Seeking Art
Artists from the Old World said our west was crude, unpaintable. Its bigness angered, its vastness and wild spaces terrified them.
–Emily Carr, Growing Pains
When Edith heard what Emily had done, she blackened, then suddenly smiled. Emily’s leaving would finally give Edith some peace and quiet as much as it would give Emily an education. But as the responsible one, she couldn’t let her sister simply disappear into the big city of San Francisco without a guiding eye.
Emily, “green as a cabbage” as an art student in San Francisco, about age 21.
“So you want to run away from authority? All right, I shall place you under the supervision of the Piddingtons!”
This was the same hated Piddington, the remittance man, who had made her seasick. Emily had forgotten that he and his wife were now living in San Francisco. When they left Victoria a few years before, she had been so glad to see them go, she hadn’t cared where they went. But even the fact that she must live with them didn’t dampen her joy at getting away from the ties
