Emily Carr

Patricia Morley is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University, an associate fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute, and author of Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

In the Emily Carr retrospective exhibition held in 1990 in the National
Gallery, the first work to strike the viewer’s eye was a self-portrait
(oil on paper, 1938–39) that caught what Shadbolt calls Carr’s
“willed Canadian-ness, her Pacific West Coast-ness, and her striking
individual otherness.” By being born a woman, and on Vancouver Island
instead of in Toronto or Montreal, Carr found herself assigned
willy-nilly to the role of Outsider. She proceeded to shape this fate
with stubborn courage.

Shadbolt’s Emily Carr served as the catalogue for that exhibition,
although it is more than simply a catalogue. The substantial text
sketches Carr’s life in Victoria, where “insistent and abundant
nature was an inescapable condition,” and where the first links with
the Native presence and heritage were forged.

The book includes a great many black-and-white photographs of Carr’s
magnificent paintings, and a few color reproductions. Some of the 125
plates have never before been reproduced.

Shadbolt, a distinguished curator and art historian, is Canada’s
leading authority on Carr’s work.