Emily Carr - Return To Canada

Return To Canada

In the summer of 1912, Carr again traveled north, to the Queen Charlotte Islands and the Skeena River, where she documented the art of the Haida, Gitxsan and Tsimshian. At Cumshewa, a Haida village on Moresby Island, Carr painted a carved raven that she later turned into her iconic painting Big Raven. Tanoo, another painting inspired by work gathered on this trip, depicts three totems before house fronts at the village of the same name. On her return to the south, Carr organized an exhibit of some of this work, and delivered a detailed lecture about the aboriginal villages that she had visited which ended with her mission statement:

I glory in our wonderful west and I hope to leave behind me some of the relics of its first primitive greatness. These things should be to us Canadians what the ancient Briton's relics are to the English. Only a few more years and they will be gone forever into silent nothingness and I would gather my collection together before they are forever past.

While there was some positive reaction to her work, even in the new 'French' style, Carr perceived Vancouver's reaction to her work and new style was not positive enough to support her career, and she recounted as much in her book Growing Pains. Carr determined to give up teaching and work in Vancouver, and in 1913 she returned to Victoria where several of her sisters still lived.

During the next 15 years, Carr did little painting but ran a boarding house known as the 'House of All Sorts', which provided the namesake and source material for her later book. Her circumstances straitened and her life in Victoria circumscribed, Carr's few paintings of this period drew their inspiration from local scenes: the cliffs at Dallas Road, the trees in Beacon Hill Park. Her own assessment of the period was that she had ceased to paint, which was not strictly true, although "rt had ceased to be the primary drive of her life."