Provenance
Estate of Emily Carr
Dominion Gallery, Montreal (acquired from the above, per executor Lawren Harris, 1945)
Private Collection, Ottawa (acquired from Dominion Gallery in May, 1954)
Sotheby’s Canada, auction, Toronto, November 26, 1984, lot 53
The Collection of TC Energy, Calgary
Literature
Sotheby’s, “Important Canadian Art and Fine Jewellery”, auction catalogue, Toronto, November 26, 1984, reproduced lot 53 (unpaginated) and on the front cover
Emily Carr, “The Complete Writings of Emily Carr”, Toronto/Vancouver, 1993, pages 793-94
Maria Tippet, “Emily Carr: A Biography”, Toronto, 1994, page 238
“Once I went to some very beautiful children’s exercises in a great open space. There was no grandstand. The ground was very level and it was most difficult to see. I took a camp stool and when my feet gave out I sat down. It was very queer down among the legs of the dense crowd – trouser legs, silk stockings, knicker-bockers, bare legs, fat legs, lean ones – a forest of legs with no tops, restless feet, tired feet, small, big, lovely and ugly. It was more fun imaging the people that owned the legs than watching the shows. Occasionally a child’s face came level with yours down among the milling legs. Well, that is the way it feels looking though bracken stalks and sallal bushes. Their tops have rushed up agog to see the sun and the patient roots only get what they can suck down through those tough stems. Seems as if there is something most wonderful of all about a forest, especially one with deep, lush undergrowth.”
The foregoing quote, taken from Emily Carr’s journal entry in “A Tabernacle in the Wood” on September 29th, 1935, beautifully illustrates Carr’s approach to the subject. She was deeply in tune with the forest, and as a result, she saw beauty everywhere. “There are themes everywhere, something sublime, something ridiculous, or joyous, or calm, or mysterious. Tender youthfulness laughs at gnarled oldness. Moss and ferns, and leaves and twigs, light and air, depth and colour chattering, dancing a mad joy-dance, but only apparently tied up in stillness and silence. You must be still in order to hear and see.” In the undergrowth, in the forest floor, the red, fecund earth of the woods, Carr found her beauty.
“Forest Glade” comes from the period in Carr’s life when she was working in thinned oil paint on paper. She used oil-based commercial house paint rather than artist’s oils, which she further thinned to the consistency of cream. This allowed her to orchestrate the movement of the paint very quickly, allowing her deep sensitivity to the life-essence forest itself, to its subtle – and not so subtle – quivers and shudders and connectedness to the wind, sunlight, and air, to be instantly captured. It was a mad joy-dance indeed, between a sensitive soul and her fleeting subject, made possible by her adjustments to her media. Her written descriptions of the forest drip with emotive response, and her painted reactions are equally empathic. “How solemn the pines look,” she writes, “more grey than green, a quiet spiritual grey, blatant gaudiness of colours swallowed, only the beautiful carrying power of grey, lifting into mystery. Colour holds, binds, ‘enearths’ you. When light shimmers on colours, folds them round and round, colour is swallowed by glory and becomes unspeakable.” Works from these years – 1937-1942 – are often compared to those of Vincent Van Gogh, “both [are] expressionists, and work, as far as one can judge, under the influence of deep and intense feelings.” Carr’s mastery of atmosphere, colour, and mood were praised, and in these years, she was offered more exhibition opportunities than she could generate work to meet. With failing health and a resulting decreased mobility, she begrudgingly adjusted her methods and focused on working from a central base, with short excursions or a convenient porch as a painting place.
Camping in her beloved van dubbed ‘the elephant,’ or (after 1938) staying in a rented cottage, she would complete her camp chores and then find a place not too far afield, a place just open enough for her to sit and spread out her gear. Then she would wait and let the forest speak to her. She describes her practice in the same journal, from earlier that same September: “Wait. Out comes a cigarette. The mosquitoes back away from the smoke. Everything is green. Everything is waiting and still. Slowly things begin to move, to slip into their places. Groups and masses and lines tie themselves together. Colours you had not noticed come out, timidly or boldly. In and out, in and out your eye passes. Nothing is crowded; there is living space for all... The green is full of colour. Light and dark chase each other. Here is a picture, a complete thought, and there and another and there...”
The charm and intimacy of works from this period are as singular and unique as each small glade she worked within. They are completely honest and uncontrived. In “Forest Glade”, Carr’s broad brushstrokes radiate from the pines themselves, forming a burst of energy that fills the page, radiating outwards past the confines of the work’s dimensions. Here she has captured the very life force of the forest, the essence of its verdant growth and persistent, unrestrainable life. Her compositional energy radiates outwards and upwards from the low centre of the work, where a sunburst of brilliance forms and swoops towards us along the forest floor. This spark lights the most central pine first, then captures the others in its vibrating, radiating outward moving hum.
“Forest Glade” was acquired by Montreal’s Dominion Gallery from the estate of Emily Carr in 1945, as per Carr’s executor, Lawren Harris. The painting was sold by Dominion to an Ottawa collector in May of 1954, eventually arriving in the collection of Calgary’s TC Energy. Uniquely framed in fragrant Canadian cedar, touched with 24 karat gold, “Forest Glade” speaks eloquently to Carr’s deeply-felt connection to the forest of British Columbia and its wild, untamed beauty.
We extend our thanks to Lisa Christensen, Canadian art academic and the author of three award-winning books on Canadian art, for contributing the preceding essay.
We extend our thanks to Charles Hill, Canadian art historian, former Curator of Canadian Art with the National Gallery of Canada and author of “The Group of Seven - Art for a Nation”, for his assistance in researching the provenance of this artwork.
