Emily Carr 1871 - 1945

Private Collection, Toronto

Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr, Toronto, 1979, no. 159, illustrated in colour, pp. 171, 144 and 170 quoting Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands, pp. 207 and 294 

This painting has been viewed under UV and it is in excellent condition. It has been laid down on an auxiliary canvas and the eges have been cropped. We would like to thank "In Restauro Conservart Inc." for examing this painting and their original notes are available upon request to Sotheby's.
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When she took up painting again in the 1930s, Emily Carr was in her sixties. She had been encouraged to resume her splintered career as a painter, and freshly inspired, through the confidence of Lawren Harris and others. They pushed her to another pivotal point in her life.

Carr had been on the cutting edge of art in France and immediately afterward in 1912 when she began her brilliant studies and canvases of the totems and villages of the Haida, Gitxsan, Salish, and Kwakwakawakw. Despite their brilliance and originality, or perhaps because of them, her paintings had been rebuffed and she was humiliated by rejection; she became acquainted with failure, poverty, and unhappiness. With all this behind her, she had little more to lose. When Harris gave her a reason to come back to life, as if she were Lazarus himself, she suddenly discovered a deep new spiritual power in the landscape.

The landscape had always been behind her earlier paintings but always as the setting for the subjects she painted rather than as the subject itself. Harris urged her to turn to landscape, since he, like Jackson and Marius Barbeau, believed that the Indian civilization, for all its many glories, was dying out. Further, Harris had always sensed that the 'soul' of the land was in landscape, but seen intensely and elevated to an abstract level. Carr took her cue and inspiration from Harris but she found her own source of subject matter in her own experience and on her own turf.

Instead of Harris's detachment and intellectual hauteur, Carr finds the essence of an emotional spirit in her familiar and much-loved rain forest of British Columbia. Her attachment to it at this stage in her life was so total and complete that she once wrote that if you ever sat down in that teeming jungle, where everything was vital, moving and growing ... the great, dry, green sea would sweep over and engulf you.

In order to render that emotional intensity and authenticity in painting, Carr at first relied on the faster medium of oil (thinned with kerosene) on paper, where thought and execution were almost instantaneous. Then she tried tackling canvases... with huge brush strokes, first going for the movement and direction such as I got in my sketches [oil on paper], and with great freedom. The danger in canvases is that of binding and crucifying the emotion, of pinning it there to die flattened on the surface. Instead, one must let it move over the surface as the spirit of God moved over the face of the waters.

In Sunlight in the Forest, Carr managed, at last, to bring her oils on canvas up to the same emotional pitch as the spontaneous works on paper. In her comprehensive study of Carr, Doris Shadbolt acknowledged this unequivocally:

The long sweeps of pigment, the gestural hatchings and ripples that relate to trees and growth, the tone reversals and sensitivity to positive and negative space which characterizes the handling of stump areas – the total energy of the paintings' surfaces – demand an abstract reading ... Her route by this time was becoming expressionist, immediate, based in the senses though informed by spirit.