Emily Carr 1871 - 1945

Mr. and Mrs. A.E. Jones, Victoria
Private Collection, Manitoba

Emily Carr Centennial Exhibition, Vancouver Art Gallery, May 18 - August 29, 1971, no. 25; Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, September 24 - November 14, 1971; Royal Ontario Museum, February 15 - March 15, 1972, no. 25
Emily Carr in France, Vancouver Art Gallery, June 22 - September 22, 1991, no. 15

Doris Shadbolt, Emily Carr Centennial Exhibition, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, 1971, p. 69, reproduced, no. 25, p. 69
Ian M. Thom, Emily Carr in France, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, 1991, p. 25, and p. 72, no. 15, listed.
Gerta Moray, Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr, Vancouver, 2006, p. 92, and p. 169, reproduced in colour.

Canal in Brittany is among the best-loved canvases from Emily Carr’s 1910 -1911 sojourn in France. Here, she creates a composition of extraordinary harmony by using a limited but brilliant palette where no one element of the picture is comprised of just one shade. As Gerta Moray notes, Carr “grasped the technique of colour gradation—large areas of colour are modulated with hues that are matched in tone, the cream-coloured walls, for example, inflected with pale blue, green, orange, and pink reflections.”

The work is a triumph of arrangement as well; Carr has carefully balanced the harder vertical and horizontal planes of the bridge and canal-houses with the feathery, leafy boughs of the trees, and graceful sloping of the canal walls.

Describing Crécy-en-Brie, the village where she created this picture, Carr wrote that “many fine houses backed on to the canal; they had great gardens going to the edge of the water and had little wash booths…the women did their laundry here and were very merry about it. Shrill voices, boisterous laughter, twisted in and out between the stone walls of the canal. Lovely trees drooped over the walls to dabble their branches.”

Though the vista recorded here is unpopulated by the town residents who the artist recalled with such affection, the canvas nonetheless pulsates with vitality; the wind, the lapping waters, the shimmering sunlight which brought Carr such serenity and joy serve to animate the painting.