Emily Carr 1871 - 1945

Collection of Ira Dilworth, Vancouver

Laing Galleries, Toronto, May, 1977

Private Collection, Ontario

Montreal, Galerie Walter Klinkhoff, Emily Carr (1871-1945) Retrospective Exhibition,  2002, no. 29

Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr, Vancouver, 1979, p. 138

Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands, The Journals of Emily Carr, Toronto, 1966, p. 260

This painting is in remarkable condition. Under UV, the central small tree gives off darker fluorescence incongruous with a similar tree to the right. We would like to thank "In Restauro Conservart Inc." for examing this painting and their original notes are available upon request to Sotheby's.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Carr's love affair with the forests of British Columbia was an all-encompassing passion in her life. She wrote about the evergreens - the firs, the spruces, the pines - with almost as much fervor as she painted them.

The pines are wonderful, a regular straight-from-the-shoulder tree.  From root to sky no twist, no deviation. They know no crookedness, from trunk to branch-top hurled straight out, with needles straight as sewing needles. Other trees ramble and twist, changing colour, clothed or naked, smooth or knobbly, but the pine tree is perpetually decent.  In spring she dances a bit more. How her lines do twirl and whirl in tender green tips! She loves you to touch her, answering in intoxicating perfume stronger than any words. I'd rather live in a pine land than anywhere else. There is a delicious, honourable straightness to them.

This exceptionally fine and strong painting demonstrates all of Carr's energy and devotion for her subject. When she turned to painting in oil on paper in the mid-1930s, she found that the technique, because of its complete flexibility, allowed her to express her emotional response rapidly and directly. Doris Shadbolt noted this:

The fluidity of the oil-on-paper technique permitted Carr to give form to an idea almost at the speed of thought, so that inspiration, always elusive, had less inclination to falter in an encounter with resistant, heavy pigment.

By 1940, after she had used this painting method for several years, Carr was able to tackle and to control more complex compositions, as she has done here. This work has not only the guardian evergreens, and the tawny foreground of the forest floor; it also has the vertiginous pitch down through a tangle of undergrowth to the shoreline and the sea. The result is a sense of vast scale and great detail, with every brushstroke doing its work, and not one out of place.

The famed English art critic Eric Newton was conscious of this when he wrote, in 1938 in Canadian Forum that Carr

...is at her best when she is working on a big scale. And her best is magnificent. If the word 'genius' (a word to be jealously guarded by the critic and used only on very special occasions) can be applied to any Canadian artist it can be applied to her. She belongs to no school. Her inspiration is derived from within herself. Living among the moist mountains and giant pines of British Columbia, a country climatically different from the rest of Canada, she has had to invent a new set of conventions, a personal style of her own. Where the Eastern Canadians have been content to stylize the outward pageantry of the landscape, she has symbolized its inner meaning, and in doing so has, as it were, humanized it. Her trees are more than trees: they are green giants, and slightly malevolent giants at that. The totem poles she often paints are haunted by the Indian deities they represent. Her art is not easy to describe... I saw over a hundred of her paintings when I was in Victoria. To see them was rather like reading an epic.