ship sailed through the Golden Gate in the late summer of 1890, and San Francisco didn’t look at all wicked as it rose out of the fog. When Mrs. Piddington led her away from the wharf, Emily carried only her old straw suitcase and a birdcage holding her pet canary, Dick, in full molt. The Piddingtons gave her a small room at the top of the private hotel where they lived.
The art school, called the California School of Design, was over the old Pine Street Public Market in a poor part of the city. From the street, Emily walked up a dirty stair to a dark, airless office. Beyond that was the school itself, a huge room lit by a skylight with large windows on the north side. Under them, grey screens divided the hall into alcoves. In one corner was a closed door with a sign: Life Class, Keep Out.
Some students sat in long rows with lap boards. These drawing boards had fronts that rested on students’ laps and wide-spread hind legs that rested on the floor. Other students stood drawing at easels. They drew vegetable and animal still lifes so old they’d begun to rot, or they copied plaster images that stood on pedestals in the middle of the room.
The room was filthy. Blackened crusts of bread that students used for charcoal erasers dotted the floor. The air smelled of rats, and dead fish and birds, and rotting vegetables. Men and women wore smocks or painting pinafores smeared in layers of charcoal and paint. Emily bought charcoal and paper from the office and took her place in the long row of students under the windows. It wasn’t quite what she had expected, but her education in art had finally begun.
The art taught at the California School of Design was old-fashioned. Though the director had recently studied in Paris, neither his teaching nor his own painting reflected the more modern art going on in France. Years later, Emily recognized that the art she brought home was “humdrum and unemotional,” but she was beginning to learn her craft.
Emily’s nickname in San Francisco was “Dummy.” Perhaps it was because emotionally she was still young and very, very shy. She couldn’t bear – even for art’s sake – to take Life Classes that would mean having to draw a nude model, but she loved the Wednesday morning outdoor sketching sessions when the students set their easels up in cow pastures or on vacant lots. Outdoors, Emily found texture, shape, and space. As she sketched, half awake, half dreaming, she felt completely engaged with the landscape – body and soul.
Back in her boarding house, Mrs. Piddington watched Emily closely and called her “my dear” in the English way Emily hated because she was sure Mrs. Piddington didn’t mean it. One day Mrs. Piddington wondered aloud how Emily could have managed to get through a huge crowd outside so quickly because when Mrs. Piddington left the house right after Emily, she couldn’t move for all the people coming out of the cathedral.
Emily replied she’d found a nice, quiet side street: “The house doors opened so quaintly right onto the pavement,” she explained. “All the windows had close green shutters; nearly every shutter had a lady peeping through. There was a red lantern hanging over each door. It was all romantic, like old songs and old books!”
“Stop it! Little donkey!” shouted Mrs. Piddington, and told Emily she’d just walked through San Francisco’s notorious red light district.
“What is a red light district?”
“A place of prostitutes.”
“What are prostitutes?”
That evening after supper, Mrs. Piddington pulled her chair so close to Emily’s, their knees touched.
“Sit there, little fool,” she ordered. “Your sister has no right to send you out into the world as green as a cabbage. Listen!”
Half an hour later, Emily crept up the stairs to her room, afraid of every shadow, every door. Mrs.
Piddington had told her that evil lurked everywhere in San Francisco. There were opium dens, she said, and drug addicts, kidnappings, prostitution, murders. The very sidewalks could open up and swallow a young woman and she would be taken into something called “white slavery” and never heard from again. Even the art school district, Mrs. Piddington warned, was very, very dangerous.
Emily locked the door tight behind her and crept to the window. As she stared outside at the “evil” city, she touched the canary’s cage and felt his familiar nibble on her finger. After a while, she said out loud, “Dick, I don’t believe it, not at all. If it was as wicked as she said the black would come up the chimneys and smudge the sky; wicked ones can shut their doors and windows but not their chimneys. There is direct communication always between the inside of the houses and the sky…. San Francisco’s sky is clear and high and blue.” Mrs. Piddington had warned her never, ever to go off the main streets, never to speak to anyone and never to answer if anyone spoke to her. “I’ll do that,” Emily solemnly told her small, yellow bird. “But all the rest I am going to forget!”
No doubt Mrs. Piddington sent a letter back to Edith in Victoria, telling her that although Emily was working hard at school, she was taking liberties. She had not only discovered Grant Street but she was taking guitar lessons (had even joined a club) and only went to church where and when she felt like it. Perhaps the Carr sisters found themselves free to leave Victoria for a year, or they were curious and wanted to share her adventure, or simply to be closer to Dick, who now had tuberculosis like his mother and was in a sanatorium in southern California. Perhaps they didn’t trust Emily, alone in the big city with her silly plan to become an artist. Whatever the reason, in Emily’s second year in San Francisco, Edith, Lizzie, and Alice all came to stay with her for one year. While they were there, they insisted she come with them on visits and family outings, and Emily worried that she wasn’t working hard enough at her art.
At school, she moved from the drawing of plaster casts to painting still lifes under a professor with “ogle-eyes” who she was afraid of.
His main suggestions to her were, “Scrape, repaint.” Over and over. “Scrape, repaint.” Sometimes he just roared, “Scrape!” One day when he had done that four times in a row, Emily shouted back, “I have, and I have, and I have!”
“Then scrape again!”
In a fury she scraped the paint off her canvas and wiped the oily mess on a rag. Then she threw new paint onto the canvas, grabbed her paint box, and ran out of the studio in order to hide her tears.
When she had gone, one of the students told the teacher he was hard on the little Canadian.
“Too bad, too bad!” he said. “But look there!” and pointed to the painting. “Capital! Spirit! Colour! It has to be tormented out of the girl, though. Make her mad, and she can paint.”
Before Emily could finish her course, she was called home by her guardian because, he said, she had “played at art” long enough. Probably there was not enough money left to support her. After three years in San Francisco, Emily returned to Victoria.
Emily’s sisters, although they loved her, continued to be both over-protective and critical of her, the baby of the family, and Emily was often cross with them. Her sisters were among the founders of the Young Women’s Christian Association, the YWCA,
