PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Acquired from the above by a Private Collection, Winnipeg, 1948
By descent to a Private Collection, Ontario
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, November 24, 2005, lot 19
Private Collection, Vancouver
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 23, 2007, lot 76
The Art Emporium, Vancouver
Private Collection, Nova Scotia

LITERATURE
Emily Carr, Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr, 1946, page 222 in 1966 edition

When Emily Carr traveled to France in 1910, her main artistic contact there was Henry William Phelan Gibb, an English artist living and working in Paris. In the spring of 1911, after taking painting classes with Gibb in Crécy-en-Brie, she accompanied Gibb and his wife to Brittany. They stayed and sketched for several months in the little town of St. Efflam. Carr did not have a studio there and so painted directly from the subject. Her painting routine was to be in the fields or woods by eight in the morning, back to the hotel for a midday break, and then out again until dark.

Carr, although she could not speak French, admired the warmth and spirit of the villagers and found herself a part of their life. She was also quite interested in the architecture of the towns. It is possible that this scene is the one that she described in her book Growing Pains:

There was an aloof ridge of land behind the village of St. Efflamme [sic]. I climbed it often. On the top stood three cottages in a row and one stable. Two of the cottages were tight shut, their owners working in the fields. In the third cottage lived a bricklayer and his family. The woman was always at home with her four small children. They ran after her like a brood of chicks. The children sat around me as I worked; always little Annette, aged four, was closest, a winsome, pretty thing, very shy. I made the woman understand that I came from Canada and would soon be returning. She told the children. Annette came very close, took a corner of my skirt, tugged it and looked up beseeching.

The mother said, “Annette wants go you Canada.”
I put my arm round her. With wild crying the child suddenly broke away, clinging to her mother and to France.

During this time Carr developed a vocabulary of bright, Post-Impressionist colour and the approach to landscape that was to serve her well upon her return to Canada. Thanks to a freeing of her colour palette from naturalism, she was able to express herself more brilliantly. The handling of colour, light and the paint itself achieves a new freedom in these works and established Carr as an artist of consequence. Her work also developed a sense of movement not evident in her earlier oils. Cottage, St. Efflam is a magnificent large work for this period (the scale adding to its rarity); its vivid green foliage, soft pastel houses, and rich blue and purple tones make it a fine example of Carr’s fresh focus on light and colour. This work expresses Carr’s new-found confidence as a painter, which allowed her to return to Canada and produce her equally brilliant 1912 canvases of First Nations subjects.

A facsimile of the original invoice, dated December 2, 1948, from Dominion Gallery, 1448 Saint-Catherine Street West, Montreal, is included with this work.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars