She snapped at him, “You are not a gentleman anyway! You are a sponger and a bully!” This was a great insult from a child to an adult, and Edith thrashed her for it until she fainted. But Emily refused to apologize.
It was a turning point. Emily told her sister, “I am almost sixteen now and the next time you thrash me I shall strike back.” That was her last whipping.
After this, the whip was used only after school and on Saturdays when Emily took it down from its peg to go riding on the family horse, old Johnny. On those days, after Johnny had galloped past all the houses of Victoria he would slow down, stopping occasionally to sniff the bushes as if he was looking for something. Suddenly he would push through the undergrowth, as he found a hidden path that carried both of them away from the prying eyes of people into the woods. Here in some quiet clearing, hidden among the trees where no one could tell her how to be or what to do, Emily found peace.
Later she said, “Maybe after all I owe a ‘thank you’ to the remittance ones and to the riding whip for driving me out into the woods. Certainly I do to old Johnny for finding the deep lovely places that were the very foundation on which my work as a painter was to be built.”
The more isolated Emily felt from her family, the more she clung to the idea of painting. No doubt her sisters saw it as a mere hobby, a pastime. But Emily’s dream of becoming an artist was nurtured by the French painter C.A. de L’Aubinière and his English artist-wife, Georgina, who probably taught her briefly in 1886.
She was in awe of them because they were the first “real” artists she had met – but she was oddly disappointed when she saw their pictures. Their landscapes did not seem at all Canadian to her, though Canada was so young that no one yet knew exactly what a “Canadian” painting should look like. In the European tradition, landscapes were panoramas of peaceful meadows with the odd tree, a cow perhaps, beside a quiet stream. They didn’t look at all like the British Columbia Emily knew, where, just outside the city, endless acres of trees towered above an almost impenetrable undergrowth, and the cow was in her back yard.
Nonetheless, the two Europeans sowed a seed that made Emily sling an old pair of shoes across her rafters. Now, every time she had a little money she pushed it into the shoes. She had a plan.
One day when she decided she had had enough of her family, she marched downtown to the offices of her guardian, Mr. Lawson. He had many children as wards, and it was obvious to Emily, as he stared at her over the tops of his glasses, that none of them had ever come to see him before.
“What can I do for you, Emily?” he asked.
“Please, I want to go away from home. There is an art school in San Francisco – may I go there?”
Mr. Lawson frowned and said, “San Francisco is a big and wicked city for a little girl to be alone in.”
“I am sixteen, almost.” (In fact, she was eighteen. Emily always underestimated her age.)
“You do not look it.”
“Nobody is allowed to grow up in our house.”
Mr. Lawson replied, “Your sister is an excellent woman and has been a mother to you younger children. Is this art idea just naughtiness, a passing whim?”
“No,” she assured him. “It has been growing for a long time.”
He looked at her for a long minute. “It can be arranged,” he said. And smiled.
2 . In 1871, the year of Emily Carr’s birth, B.C. became the seventh province to join Confederation.
3
Seeking Art
Artists from the Old World said our west was crude, unpaintable. Its bigness angered, its vastness and wild spaces terrified them.
–Emily Carr, Growing Pains
When Edith heard what Emily had done, she blackened, then suddenly smiled. Emily’s leaving would finally give Edith some peace and quiet as much as it would give Emily an education. But as the responsible one, she couldn’t let her sister simply disappear into the big city of San Francisco without a guiding eye.
Emily, “green as a cabbage” as an art student in San Francisco, about age 21.
“So you want to run away from authority? All right, I shall place you under the supervision of the Piddingtons!”
This was the same hated Piddington, the remittance man, who had made her seasick. Emily had forgotten that he and his wife were now living in San Francisco. When they left Victoria a few years before, she had been so glad to see them go, she hadn’t cared where they went. But even the fact that she must live with them didn’t dampen her joy at getting away from the ties of home and getting serious about her art, finally learning how to put together her love of art and her love of beautiful places.
Her ship sailed through the Golden Gate in the late summer of 1890, and San Francisco didn’t look at all wicked as it rose out of the fog. When Mrs. Piddington led her away from the wharf, Emily carried only her old straw suitcase and a birdcage holding her pet canary, Dick, in full molt. The Piddingtons gave her a small room at the top of the private hotel where they lived.
The art school, called the California School of Design, was over the old Pine Street Public Market in a poor part of the city. From the street, Emily walked up a dirty stair to a dark, airless office. Beyond that was the school itself, a huge room lit by a skylight with large windows on the north side. Under them, grey screens divided the hall into alcoves. In one corner was a closed door with a sign: Life Class, Keep Out.
Some students sat in long rows with lap boards. These drawing boards had fronts that rested on students’ laps and wide-spread hind legs that rested on the floor. Other students stood drawing at easels. They drew vegetable and animal still lifes so old they’d begun to rot, or they copied plaster images that stood on pedestals in the middle of the room.
The room was filthy. Blackened crusts of bread that students used for charcoal erasers dotted the floor. The air smelled of rats, and dead fish and birds, and rotting vegetables. Men and women wore smocks or painting pinafores smeared in layers of charcoal and paint. Emily bought charcoal and paper from the office and took her place in the long row of students under the windows. It wasn’t quite what she had expected, but her education in art had finally begun.
The art taught at the California School of Design was old-fashioned. Though the director had recently studied in Paris, neither his teaching nor his own painting reflected the more modern art going on in France. Years later, Emily recognized that the art she brought home was “humdrum and unemotional,” but she was beginning to learn her craft.
Emily’s nickname in San Francisco was “Dummy.” Perhaps it was because emotionally she was still young and very, very shy. She couldn’t bear – even for art’s sake – to take Life Classes that would mean having to draw a nude model, but she loved the Wednesday morning outdoor sketching sessions when the students set their easels up in cow pastures or on vacant lots. Outdoors, Emily found texture, shape, and space. As she sketched, half awake, half dreaming, she felt completely engaged with the landscape – body and soul.
Back in her boarding house, Mrs. Piddington watched Emily closely and called her “my dear”