At the lowest point of The Great Depression this artist didn’t have to share the stage with anyone else
For the first time in her career no one would outshine her or steal the spotlight she worked so hard for
It had taken 60 years, but she was getting the acknowledgement she deserved. In that time, she had studied in London, France and San Francisco and traveled to the most remote First Nation villages on the Pacific Coast of Canada.
Her contemporaries called her a genius.
First Nations called her Klee Wyck, the Laughing One.
Today, we call her a national treasure.
But that wasn’t always the case.
I’m Craig Baird, this is Canadian History Ehx and today we are turning brush strokes into happy little clouds as I share the story of the one and only…Emily Carr.
Emily Carr grew up in a light yellow two-storey Italianate Villa.
The gabled roof, front full verandah and balustraded balcony gave her ample space to contemplate her surroundings.
The arched front windows gave her unparalleled view of the Pacific Ocean.
Constructed out of Californian redwood, the garden was large and well-tended and adjacent to Beacon Hill Park
Everything about the home made it one of the most affluent homes in Victoria, was decidedly English.
This is where she was born on Dec. 13, 1871.
The second youngest of nine children, the house was a lively and busy place. Located on 207 Government Street The Carr family occupied it for over 70 years.
It was originally known as Carr St, after Richard Carr, Emily’s father donated land to widen the road.
Richard was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England and moved to San Francisco before 1849, to become a commission agent where he met his future wife, Emily Saunders.
They married in 1855 and returned to California and eventually moved to Victoria in 1863 to enjoy the spacious freedom of the West Coast. Emily said of her childhood home,
“Our street was called Carr Street after my Father. We had a very nice house and a lovely garden. Carr Street was a very fine street. The dirt road waved up and down and in and out. the horses made it that way, zigzagging the carts and carriages through it.”
Her father, while loving, was strict in his adherence to British norms.
Sundays were for morning prayers and every evening was spent conducting Bible readings.
One child per week would be called to recite the sermon, something Emily always struggled with.
Despite his strict nature, Emily’s father did encourage her artistic side but saw it more as a hobby than a future career.
She wrote in the book Growing Pains,
“I was allowed to take drawing lessons at the little private school which I attended. Miss Emily Woods came every Monday with a portfolio of copies under her arm. I got the prize for copying a boy with a rabbit. Bessie Nuthall nearly won because her drawing was neat and clean, but my rabbit and boy were better drawn.”
With a house full of children and two loving parents, she was happy.
Although Emily felt different from her siblings.
She was a free spirit, more at home in nature with animals than dolls.
She had no interest in becoming a wife and mother, which went against her father’s beliefs.
She felt a different calling…
Emily was still in the process of figuring it all out when the happy family dynamic was disrupted.
Her mother died in 1886 when Emily was only 15.
Soon after, life seemed to fade from her father as well and only two years later, he passed away.
In her book, This and That, Carr wrote,
“Father told us that God had appointed man three score and ten to live on this earth, and he himself died punctually at seventy. I think he would have considered it like given God backchat to over overstepped his time limit. Mother predeceased Father by two years. He did his best to keep her longer, but she died at the age of fifty. Twenty years was between their ages at his death.”
Her older sister Edith, whom she referred to as Elder in her writings, stepped as head of the family.
Emily and Edith did not see eye-to-eye, and she wrote “The Elder, my oldest sister, immediately stepped into Father’s shoes. Father had been forced to be tender with his feet because of his gout The Elder’s step was hard firm. The Elder’s rule was more acute even than Father’s. She was always at home and now there was no intervening Mother to appeal to. My sister strove with us because she loved to dominate.”
Emily delighted in playing pranks on her sister.
Once, she told Edith that a Presbyterian minister wanted to meet her.
She told the minister the same.
The two arrived at the meeting and sat there staring at each other wondering why the meeting had been requested.
Neither knew why they were there and after a few awkward minutes they realized they had been had.
Emily’s rambunctious spirit and affinity for mischief triggered Edith’s darker side.
Emily said Edith would beat her with a riding whip and had no patience for things Emily loved.
She was incredibly stern with her younger siblings and her hard heartedness was in full display when Emily was 18 years old.
That’s when she got a dog that Edith hated.
One day, Emily went away on a day trip but was delayed in her return.
The dog spent the day barking awaiting her return.
Concerned neighbours called police and when they arrived to investigate the noise complaint, Edith had them put the dog down.
Emily returned to the horrible news and was distraught.
She swore she would never speak to Edith again, and for years she didn’t… until the 1910s when things began to thaw between the two.
Edith lent Emily money to build an art studio and by 1919, as Edith lay on her deathbed, the two had officially reconciled for good.
Through the difficult relationship with Edith, Emily kept her free spirit.
Nothing could extinguish her lust for life.
At the time, women were expected to be quiet and obedient wives and mothers.
She had no interest in any of that.
Her passion for art was more than a hobby.
It was a part of her very soul. Every fiber of her being told her that her purpose was to create beauty.
In 1890, Emily left home, with her beloved canary in a cage, to attend the California School of Design.
Founded in 1871 as the San Francisco Art Institute, it was one of the most prestigious art schools in Western North America.
There, she began sketching outdoors, something that would come to define her career.
She wrote in Growing Pains,
“Outdoor sketching was as much longing as labour. Atmosphere, space cannot be touched, bullied like the vegetables of still life or like the plaster casts. These space things asked to be felt not with fingertips but with one’s whole self.”
Emily attended the school for three years until she was forced to return home after several financial failures in the family estate prevented her from paying tuition.
For the next few years, she taught art to children in Victoria at the request of mothers she knew/
No one else was teaching kids to draw, and at first, Emily wasn’t interested.
She was afraid of having pupils, of being confined and taking on traditional roles.
In the end, she grew fond of the children and their work.
One of her students was Elsie MacGill who became the first Canadian woman to earn an electrical engineering degree, and the first woman in the world to be awarded an aeronautical engineering master’s degree.
Elsie became known as the Queen of the Hurricanes when she oversaw construction of 1,451 Hawker Hurricanes during the Second World War.
Emily Carr would go on to influence countless more women in the future.
As the 20th century dawned, Emily wanted to venture away from home and capture other parts of her province on the canvas.
To that end, Emily traveled to the Ucluelet Peninsula on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
Today, it is a tourist hotspot for surfing, paddleboarding, fishing and kayaking.
But back then it was one of the few untouched spots on the island.
When she arrived, she found First Nations still living a somewhat traditional lifestyle.
It was rapidly changing, as settlers flooded in as news of gold in Florencia Bay spread and a road to Port Alberni was being planned.
For her it was a simple sketching trip but today it is seen as the last window into a vanishing world.
Although the language is dated her sentiment was pure when she wrote in her book, Klee Wyck, quote,
“It amused the Indians to see me unfold my camp stool, and my sketch sack made them curious. When boats, trees, houses, appeared on the paper, jabbering interest closed me about. I could not understand their talk. One day, by grin and gesture, I got permission to sketch an old mat-maker.”
Emily was loved and welcomed and was given the name Klee Wyck, meaning “Laughing One”.
Her time in Ucluelet made a lasting impression on her.
And it should be noted that today, Emily is criticized by some for-painting villages and totem poles and appropriating Indigenous culture in the process.
In preparing this episode I’ve read her books, and it seems clear to me that r she had a deep respect for the First Nations.
She only wanted to capture on canvas what she saw in front of her and in the process preserved some of the culture the rest of Canada seemed to be doing everything they could to erase. Emily said,
“Whenever I could afford it, I went up North, among the Indians and the woods, and forgot all about everything in the joy of those lonely, wonderful places. I decided to try and make as good a representative collection of those old villages and wonderful totem poles as I could, for the love of the people and the love of the places and the love of the art, whether anybody liked them or not…. I painted them to please myself in my own way.”
She was ahead of her time in many ways.
First in her views of the roles of women.
Then in views of Canada’s treatment of First Nations.
In her book Klee Wyck, she shared the story of a missionary who told her to convince her Indigenous friend Louisa and her husband to put their children in the local Residential School.
Emily refused and when the missionary demanded to know why, she replied.
“In Louisa’s house now, there is an adopted boy, the product of an Indian Industrial School ashamed of his Indian heritage. All Louisa’s large family of children are now dead, all but these two boys and they are not robust. Louisa knows how to look after them. There is a school in the village. She can send them there and own and mother them during their short lives. Why should she give up her boys?”
The missionary pressed her and begged her to see the advantages, but Emily recognized there would be many more disadvantages to the children if they were sent away.
After her time in Ucluelet, she travelled to London hoping to continue her studies.
England inspired her to become a professional artist and pursue her true calling.
She studied at the Westminster School of Art, under acclaimed artists Julius Olsson and Algernon Talmage in Cornwall.
England energized her and forced her to reflect.
Even if unwanted.
For 18 months she was forced to rest in a tuberculosis sanitorium until she recovered and returned to Canada.
By then she was ready to capture the West Coast on canvas.
Little did she know how long it would take for her to get the acclaim and recognition she deserved.
Emily returned to teaching children’s art classes in Vancouver.
To make extra money, she drew political cartoons for the Week, a newspaper in Victoria.
A year after her return Emily took a position at the Vancouver Studio Club and School of Art in 1906.
While she enjoyed it, and was a popular teacher, she didn’t feel it was the right place for her.
The next year, she made a sightseeing trip up to Alaska with her sister Alice.
It had a major impact on Emily and her work.
She realized that her artistic mission in life was to document what she saw, specifically First Nations’ vanishing way of life.
To do that she knew she needed more education.
Her immense talent would only take her so far.
So, she traveled t the one place she felt could take her work to the next level.
France.
In 1910, Emily enrolled at Academie Colarossi in Paris where she worked with painters John Duncan Fergusson and Harry Gibb.
While working with Gibb, she vacationed with him and his wife.
They traveled through France, and he told her.
“You will be one of the great painters, woman painters, of your day.”
Under his watchful eye, Emily began to experiment with scale, colour and perspective.
She expanded her artistic comfort zone and went beyond the literal representations of natural forms.
She began to use broad brushstrokes and bold colours, further creating a style that would become her signature. She wrote of her experiences.
“Harry Gibb was dour, his wife pretty. They lived in a studio overlooking a beautiful garden, cultivated by nuns. I stood by the side of Harry Gibb, staring in amazement up at his walls. Some of his pictures rejoiced, some shocked me. There was rich, delicious juiciness in his colour, interplay between warm and cool tones.”
Today, we call this style Post-Impressionism because it focuses on abstract qualities and symbolic content.
It rejects the limitations of Impressionism by distorting forms for expressive effect.
Like her time in London, Emily was forced to spend what she called three hellish months in a Paris hospital.
She resolved to live in a large city again, believing them to be the source of her illnesses.
Victoria had a population of 25,000, while Paris and London both pushed one million people each.
For Emily, the small capital of British Columbia was the perfect size.
She returned to Canada in early 1912 and opened a studio in Vancouver, and if you remember from earlier, she was able to do thanks to money her Elder sister Edith loaned her.
She adapted the European styles she learned to capture Canada on the canvas.
She said,
“I drew away from the old school methods of teaching, realizing the cramped style of London and Paris could not adequately describe Canada.”
In late-1912, Carr took a trip to Haida Gwaii, Alert Bay and the Upper Skeena River to paint the totem poles in Indigenous villages.
These poles were more than decorative.
They told a story and had great spiritual power for First Nations of the Pacific Northwest.
And they were quickly disappearing.
As smallpox and settler encroachment eroded Indigenous lands and decimated populations, the totems began to fall into disrepair and succumbed to nature’s rot.
The totems that survived were often cut down by white settlers and sold to museums around the world with little care.
Emily wanted to paint them before they were gone.
In her book, Klee Wyck, she wrote of a visit to Kitwankul, a village in north-central British Columbia.
She was asked by an Elder why she wanted to paint their totem poles.
She responded,
“Because they are beautiful. They are getting old now and your people make very few new ones. The young people do not value the poles as the old ones did. By and by there will be no more poles. I want to make pictures of them, so that your young people as well as the white people will see how fine your totem poles used to be.”
During her time in Haida Gwaii, she painted a carved raven.
Upon her return to Vancouver, she organized an exhibition at the Dominion Hall of 70 watercolours and oils from her time in France.
That exhibition would nearly end her artistic career, through no fault of her own.
However, she later took that painting of the carved raven and turned it into one of her masterworks, Big Raven in 1931.
It hangs at the Vancouver Art Gallery today and depicts the carving of the lone raven among solid waves of vegetation, set against an illuminated sky.
The painting has become an iconic piece of Canadian art and was immortalized on a postage stamp in 1971.
When she first painted it in 1931, she recognized the importance of Indigenous culture and wrote.
“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.”
In the 2007 animated film Ratatouille, food critic Anton Ego writes of critics,
“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.”
Emily Carr’s critics in 1912 panned her work, and considered the influence of Europe on her to have been negative.
They risked little in their critiques and their words cut her deep.
She wrote.
“My pictures were hung either on the ceiling or on the floor and were jeered at, insulted; members of the ‘Fine Arts’ joked at my work, laughing with reporters. Press notices were humiliating. Nevertheless, I was glad I had been to France. More than ever was I convinced that the old way of seeing was inadequate to express this big country of ours, her depth, her height, her unbounded wideness, silences too strong to be broken, nor could ten million cameras, through their mechanical boxes, ever show real Canada. It had to be sensed, passed through live minds, sensed and loved.”
She had spent years working and studying to perfect her style.
She now sought recognition and acceptance.
She had risked everything, but none of that mattered to the critics.
Emily wrote that people looked at her paintings and laughed.
That they were the work of a child.
Emily wrote in Growing Pains,
“Perplexed, angry, they turned away, missing the old detail by which they had been able to find their way in painting. They couldn’t see the forest for looking at the trees.”
Not all reviews were bad.
The Vancouver Daily World wrote she had great artistic talent.
But the truth is the majority were negative.
And we always remember the criticism more than the praise.
So, Emily was devastated when the exhibition failed.
She offered to give the new provincial museum all her paintings, but they refused.
The Vancouver schools where she had taught refused to employ her and she was only able to keep a few pupils.
In 1913, with money running out, she returned to Victoria to live near her sisters.
She wrote in Growing Pains,
“Nobody bought my pictures. I had no pupils; therefore, I could not afford to keep on the studio. I decided to give it up and to go back to Victoria. My sisters disliked my new work intensely. One was noisy in her condemnation, one sulkily silent, one indifferent to every kind of Art.”
For the next 15 years, Emily did little, she believed her artistic career was a failure.
So, she turned her attention to other things.
She ran a boarding house called House of All Sorts because the mix of humans and animals that seemed to pass through the doors.
She spent her time caring for stray animals and making pottery and rugs.
She wrote in The House of All Sorts,
“One old sheepdog was always in the house with me, always at my heels. He was never permitted to go into any flat but mine. There was, too, my great silver Persian cat, Adolphus. He also was very exclusive. People admired him enormously, but the cat ignored them all.”
In 1923 she picked up Woo the Monkey who became a constant companion and muse.
She wrote in her book The Heart of a Peacock,
“Woo was teachable. Before I had owned her a week she got away from her chain in the garden. I was sad. I thought, of course, she would make for the woods in the Park nearby. No, Woo dashed up my stair, sat waiting on the mat to be let in. She had accepted the studio as her home. That quick response of love and trust entirely won me.”
As her pet menagerie increased, she was forced close to home with no great travels into Indigenous lands.
When she painted, it was of local scenes.
It seemed that her artistic career was behind her and forgotten.
Until…
An art movement Emily was already a part of caught on.
People took notice.
And it turned out Emily Carr’s artistic career wasn’t so dead after all.
Sophie Pemberton was born and raised in Victoria.
She was the first woman to be a professional artist in British Columbia and the first to receive international acclaim.
In 1897, when Emily Carr was taking her first steps into art, Pemberton’s work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London.
She had further exhibitions in the United Kingdom, Montreal, at the Royal Canadian Academy and even the St. Louis World’s Fair.
Pemberton spent her life pushing the limits in art for women.
In the early-1920s, she started to become aware of another woman….
Emily Carr.
Pemberton spread the message of this not-so-new artist and her amazing work.
She approached artists Harold Mortimer-Lamb and Marius Barbeau.
Lamb was one of Canada’s most celebrated artists, and Barbeau was an ethnologist with the National Museum in Ottawa.
Barbeau loved what he saw in Emily’s work.
He suggested his friend Eric Brown, the director of the National Gallery of Canada, visit Emily and in 1927, Brown met her for the first time.
It was a revelation.
He immediately asked her to exhibit her work at the National Gallery of Canada.
In November of that year, Emily and 61 of her paintings traveled across the country to Ottawa for an exhibition on West Coast Art with Indigenous themes.
It was the first time her art was exhibited in eastern Canada and gave her a massive confidence boost.
Having an exhibition, even a shared one, at the most important art gallery in Canada could help anyone’s career.
And something happened during the exhibition that changed everything.
A man with wild and greying hair, wearing an immaculate suit, walked into the National Gallery.
If you didn’t know who he was, it would be easy to assume he was just a visitor.
But to the Canadian art world he was a giant.
His name was Lawren Harris, and he was about to change Emily’s life forever.
Lawren Harris’ impact on Canadian art history runs deep.
Born to Thomas and Annabelle Harris, his father was secretary to the firm A. Harris Sons & Company Ltd.
It merged with Massey to form the Massey-Harris Company.
Harris grew up wealthy and it allowed him to forge his own path away from business.
As a young man, he studied art in Berlin.
When he returned to Toronto, he spent much of the 1910s painting urban landscapes.
During this time, he met J.E.H. MacDonald and the two often took sketching trips together.
Over the decade, he became inspired by the Scandinavian art style and decided he wanted to capture the landscape of Canada on the canvas.
He also began to use his family’s wealth to help other Canadian artists follow their dreams.
He bought a painting from artist A.Y. Jackson to help fund his work.
In 1915, he opened The Studio in Toronto and invited other artists to work there.
Harris also became close friends with Tom Thomson, one of Canada’s greatest artists.
He fixed up a shack behind The Studio for Thomson to use and was deeply inspired by Thomson’s work.
Harris was deeply impacted by Thomson’s sudden and mysterious death in Algonquin Park in 1917.
Three years later, Harris formed the highly influential art collective, The Group of Seven.
It transformed the Canadian art world, and helped bring many more artists to prominence.
Lawren Harris was the man behind all that and he’s the one walking into the National Gallery to see the work of Emily Carr.
Harris was so taken by it that he convinced her to come out of artistic retirement.
He said.
“You are one of us.”
Those five words supercharged Emily who went on to have the most prolific period of her career.
Harris heavily influenced Emily ’s artistic style from then on As her mentor, he encouraged her to study Northern European symbolism, and to find symbolism in her paintings of the west coast.
She wrote in her book Growing Pains,
“My first impression of Lawren Harris, his work, his studio have never changed, never faltered. His work and example did more to influence my outlook upon Art than any school or any master. They had given me mechanical foundation. Lawren Harris looked higher, dug deeper. He did not seek to persuade others to climb his ladder. He steadied their own, while they got foothold.”
She took new trips to Indigenous villages.
In 1929 she painted Church at Yuquot Village, one of her most acclaimed works.
The painting showed her growth in symbolism.
Nature in the painting is depicted in curving shapes that give a feeling of transformation and movement.
Human buildings are depicted as insignificant and fragile.
Harris often loved the painting and bought it.
He sent it to exhibitions and told her how well it was received. At one point he wrote to her,
“I went to the U.S. Show. Your Church was the best thing there, a swell canvas. I do not think you will do anything better.”
When she read the letter, she said she flew into a rage. quote
“Mr. Harris thought I had reached the limit of my capabilities, did he! Well, my limit was not going to congeal round that Indian Church! I sent other work east. He compared it unfavourably with the Indian Church. I had thought this work just as good, perhaps better. Mr. Harris did not. He still praised the Indian Church. You limit me! I am sick of that old Church. I do not want to hear any more about it! I wrote angrily.”
Harris responded,
“Good! Still, that Indian Church is a grand thing, whatever and despite what you think of it.”
She wrote in her book,
“He went on writing helpful, encouraging letters. A lesser man might have huffed at my petulance, even stopped writing. If he had I would have broken.”
Now that she had Harris’ backing Emily’s talent was finally recognized,
She exhibited in Ottawa, Victoria and Seattle in 1930.
The Group of Seven officially ended in 1933 once the group achieve widespread recognition and influence, and a year later they formed a new collective called the “Canadian Group of Painters.”
Emily became a founding member.
In 1935, decades after she first put paintbrush to canvas, Emily was finally given a solo show.
Her art was exhibited at the Women’s Art Association of Canada Gallery in Toronto.
Other than the solo show she put on for herself, which as you recall failed, Emily had to always share the spotlight with someone else.
Three years later, she had her first annual solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Despite the growing recognition, there were few purchases made by anyone other than her friends in the art world.
Painting was not a financially viable career.
During these years of artistic brilliance, her work reflected the disappearing wilderness of the places she loved.
Odds and Ends from 1939 shows the cleared land after loggers had come through, leaving only stumps behind.
Sadly, just as her work was gaining recognition Emily’s health deteriorated.
In 1937, she suffered her first heart attack.
While recovering in the hospital, English art critic Eric Newton visited her.
Wanting to help, he selected 15 of her paintings to be sent to the east to prospective buyers.
He later wrote,
“Emily Carr is not merely a good woman painter; she is the greatest woman painter who has yet lived.”
The heart attack forced Emily to slow down.
She also had to give her beloved Woo, to the Monkey House in Stanley Park since she could no longer care for her muse.
Two years later in 1939, Emily suffered a second heart attack, followed by a stroke.
By the early 1940s, she was unable to travel.
She could no longer paint as she once did, so she turned to a new artistic endeavour.
Writing.
In 1941, she published her first book, Klee Wyck.
It explored her experiences with the First Nations of British Columbia’s west coast. The book was critically acclaimed and won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction.
It has since been printed in 20 languages.
The University Women’s Club of Victoria gave a large reception on Dec. 12, 1941, to celebrate her success.
It was the first time Emily Carr was celebrated in her hometown.
She said,
“I would rather have the good will, and kind wishes of my hometown, the people I have lived among all my life, than the praise of the whole world.”
She wrote four more books, two of which were published after her death.
The irony is that today Emily Carr is known for her painting far more than her writing but in the 1940s, her writing gave her the public acclaim she sought.
But by then the clock was running out.
Knowing that her health was worsening and after she had yet another serious heart attack, Emily donated 170 paintings to the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1942.She then donated another 500 paintings to be sold to benefit a new scholarship to help young artists in British Columbia.
Through it all the paintbrush beckoned her.
In late-1942, she went to Mount Douglas Park and painted 15 oil sketches on a large canvas in eight days.
One of those paintings became Cedar, one of her most acclaimed pieces.
But the work was simply too much for her.
After her trip, she suffered a near fatal heart attack and spent a considerable time in the hospital.
At this moment, she finally saw the financial security she longed for.
Her books and paintings were sold across North America.
In one single week in Montreal, she sold 56 paintings.
She was even offered an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of British Columbia.
Emily never received it.
On March 2, 1945, her heart finally gave out and she died at the age of 73 in Victoria.
Women’s rights activist Emily Murphy said of her death,
“Emily Carr was essentially a trailbreaker. She was not afraid to make a new pattern with her pen or paintbrush. She was a shining link with the past…She wrote as she pleased and painted the world as she saw it.”
But you might be wondering…how has her influence and acclaim grown since then?
In Season 5 of the TV show Doctor Who, there is an episode called Vincent and The Doctor.
In it, The Doctor, played by Matt Smith, meets Vincent Van Gogh, played by Tony Curran when the great artist was near the end of his life, and felt as though he had failed.
The Doctor takes Van Gogh in The Tardis to the present day so that he can see the impact his art has had on future generations.
It is a beautiful ending.
I wish Emily Carr had that same opportunity.
In 1978, 33 years after her death, Emily was awarded the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal.
In 2013, her painting The Crazy Stair sold for $3.39 million, a record for a Canadian woman. Nine years later, in another auction, her painting The Totem of the Bear and the Moon sold for $3.1 million.
In 2016, Historica Canada released a Heritage Minute about her.
Five schools in British Columbia and Ontario are named after her.
The former Carr family home in Victoria is now a National Historic Site and a branch of the Victoria Public Library system also carries her name.
Perhaps the greatest honour came in 1978 when the oldest public post-secondary institution in British Columbia, the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts, changed its name to become the Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
Now, thousands of students each year attend the school named after her, as they begin their own careers on a path she helped pave.
A fitting tribute for the greatest artist Canada has ever produced.
