PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
West End Gallery, Montreal
Galerie Walter Klinkhoff Inc., Montreal
Private Collection, Ontario
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 25, 2016, lot 121
Private Collection, British Columbia

LITERATURE
Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr, 1979, a similar 1936 oil titled Shoreline, in the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, reproduced page 123
Emily Carr, The Complete Writings of Emily Carr, 1993, pages 735 and 736

Emily Carr holds an extraordinary place in the art history of both British Columbia and Canada. Born in Victoria in 1871, she was the first artist of major importance born in British Columbia and the first woman born in Canada to have a major career as an artist. Her depictions of the landscape of her native province and the totemic monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Northwest Coast make her work of singular importance to the history of Canadian art. Although many other artists have depicted the BC landscape, Carr’s approach to her subject was without parallel and remains, eighty years after her death in 1945, central to our visual understanding of BC’s rich forests and coastline.

Shoreline, which relates to the canvas of the same title in the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, was likely painted in the mid-1930s, on the southern coastline of Vancouver Island. While we cannot precisely place the location of this image, like all of Carr’s oil on canvas landscapes, it would have been painted in her studio, working from an oil on paper study painted on location. What is remarkable about this image is the fact that, despite being executed in her studio rather than directly from the subject, Shoreline has a vitality and élan that vividly suggests Carr’s close involvement with her subject. Carr has effectively conveyed the immediacy and energy of the natural world in her canvas.

Carr was a child of the natural world, and this canvas builds on her long familiarity with the southern coast of Vancouver Island and her understanding that this landscape is always changing, never at rest. The painting is animated by Carr’s vivid depiction of the surface of the ocean, the twisted logs on the shoreline and the active cloudscape of the sky. This is a landscape brought to life by the strength of Carr’s brush-strokes and her quest to convey the spirit she sensed in nature.

We are almost immediately drawn into this vista, the shoreline at the lower left providing the briefest of introductions to the scene. The writhing forms of the logs on the beach and the swells of the sea provide a striking contrast. Their curving hills and Carr’s shifting use of colour enliven the islands beyond. Atop the whole composition is an active sky, the cloud forms enhanced by the red, yellow and pink pigments. For Carr this is both a moving and a living landscape, and her use of brush-stroke and pigment strengthens our understanding of that immediacy. Shoreline is a painting that clearly demonstrates Carr’s love for and understanding of the coastal landscape that she knew from the earliest days of her childhood. As with all great landscape paintings, Emily Carr and her vision are one.

We thank Ian M. Thom, Senior Curator—Historical at the Vancouver Art Gallery from 1988 to 2018, for contributing the above essay. Thom contributed to the major exhibition catalogue From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia and is the author of Emily Carr Collected.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars