VICTORIA, B.C.- Reactions to the discovery of a possible Emily Carr portrait painted on the reverse side of another Emily Carr canvas went through the Canadian art world this week. At the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, in the city where Emily Carr lived much of her life as an artist, there was a great interest in the Heffel Auctioneers findings which resulted in discoveries of their own.

Gallery Educator Diana Brooks has researched the renowned BC artist, both in relation to the Art Gallery’s permanent exhibition of Carr’s paintings and writings as well as for her own personal interest. Heffel Auctioneer’s claims of this painting being a self portrait didn’t ring true to Diana.

“Emily was not one to conform to standard religious dogma, despite an incredible sense of spirituality”, comments Brooks as she points to one of Carr’s writings; ‘God got so stuffy squeezed into a church. Only out in the open was there room for him.’ “I thought it was unlikely she would have chosen to represent herself in this pious manner, in addition to the technical difficulty of painting a self-portrait in this pose,” she continued. Her writings indicate a frustration with her home life with her sisters, and that this is one of the reasons she wanted to leave Victoria for schooling in San Francisco in 1890. Heffel Auctioneers presume the portrait was painted during the time Carr was at the California School of Design in San Francisco from 1890-3.

It was Emily Carr’s sisters, and especially Elizabeth (who Emily called Lizzie), who were known to be very religious. In Heart of a Peacock (pg. 580), Emily writes that Lizzie’s room “was smothered with neatly framed good behaviour recipes and with photographs of …missionaries dashing up raging rivers in war canoes to dispense Epsom salts and hymn books to Indians.” It came as an interesting discovery when Brooks research showed Lizzie visiting San Francisco for 5 months with eldest sister Edith and other sister Alice in 1892. “ Lizzie was also just a young woman and only 4 years older than Emily. It was she who wanted to be a missionary, so is it possible that the portrait is of Lizzie?” Brooks ponders.

Other speculations consider the transport of the canvas and apparent 20-30 year gap between the portrait and on “Arbutus Trees” painted on the reverse 1913-20. Research shows that the Carr sisters lived in Carr house on Government Street (currently the Emily Carr House museum) until Edith’s death in 1919. Perhaps it was only then that Emily rediscovered the canvas, and given her frugal nature and strained finances, put the reverse to use? Whether a self-portrait or family portrait, it is clear that the mysterious painting represents a period of Emily Carr’s work that is better represented for its discovery.