PHOTO ESSAY

Regarding Emily

Taking a fresh look at Emily Carr

By Rachel Giese
June 6, 2006

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Courtesy National Gallery of Canada.

Self-portrait (1938-1939)
oil on wove paper, mounted on plywood, 85.5 x 57.7 cm

1944 exhibit of Carr’s work at Montreal’s Dominion Gallery sold several dozen of her paintings, netting Carr $1,260 — more money than she had ever earned in one show. But Carr had little time to enjoy her new wealth; she died a few months later, on March 2, 1945. However, Carr wasn’t one to measure herself in conventional terms. “Real success must be this,” she wrote, “to feel down in your own soul that the thing you have striven for has been accomplished. To this must be added the appreciation of the thing done by those you love and whose appreciation you value.”