Senior Specialist Anna Holmes discusses Wind and Grey Trees by Emily Carr

We are delighted to be offering two Emily Carr paintings this spring auction season in Select Masterworks of Canadian and International Art. Each painting has been entrusted to Cowley Abbott from different private collections, both rich in Canadian art historical works that have been acquired over decades. We are privileged to have achieved excellent results with artworks by Emily Carr, witnessing fantastic success at auction.

Emily Carr Grey Trees

Grey Trees is a striking monochromatic work by Emily Carr. This artwork exemplifies the artist’s ability to distill the British Columbia forest into an orchestration of form, rhythm, and tone.

In the early 1930s, Carr made a significant change in her sketching method by adopting the new medium of oil on paper. She sought to combine the spontaneity of watercolour sketching with the intensity of oil pigments, and she found this to be possible by diluting oil paint with generous amounts of turpentine and applying the mixture to Manila paper.

She was able to attain the structure of oil paint with this medium as well as the delicacy of watercolour. It also dried immediately, was easy to layer pigments, and retained its colour intensity – all providing additional convenience.

Works such as this reflect Carr’s interest in Japanese woodblock prints and Chinese ink paintings. She admired the precision of line, the emphasis on brushwork, and the use of negative space in these works, all qualities central to her later ink and wash drawings.

Rendered in a restrained palette of greys, blacks, and whites, the composition of Grey Trees is enlivened by areas of exposed Manila paper, which function as a luminous fourth tone within the surface. The result is an atmospheric interpretation of the forest—less a specific place than an evocation of its enduring presence and inner life.

Emily Carr Wind, 1936

In June and September of 1935 Emily Carr painted at Albert Head, about eighteen miles west of Victoria. Ensconced in her van, the sketching was very productive. Movement was becoming a prime concern for Carr.

“Sketching in the big woods is wonderful,” she wrote. “You go, find a space wide enough to sit in and clear enough so that the undergrowth is not drowning you…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. …  Air moves between each leaf. Sunlight plays and dances. Nothing is still now. Life is sweeping through the spaces. Everything is alive.” 

If Carr increasingly saw her oil on paper sketches as paintings in themselves, they were also the kernels for reinterpretation in future canvases. During the winter, Carr worked at her sketches, and some were shown at the Women’s Art Association in Toronto.

It was from this exhibition that the Toronto collector Charles Band purchased Carr’s British Columbia Landscape, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Band requested that Carr send some paintings east for his consideration, so Carr sent a selection. However, on January 10^th of 1937, Carr suffered a heart attack.

The British art critic Eric Newton was in Vancouver lecturing for the National Gallery and the Gallery’s Director, Eric Brown, knowing that Carr was financially strapped, asked Newton to visit the artist to select paintings for possible purchase.

Among the works Newton selected was this painting, which Carr subsequently titled Wind. She signed it in the hospital before it was shipped to Ottawa.

Wind was not bought by the National Gallery, but it was sent with the other unpurchased paintings to Toronto at the request of Charles Band. These and the other paintings Carr had previously sent to Toronto were included in a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1937. The exhibition resulted in a flurry of purchases by Band, J.S. McLean, Eleanor Lyle and the Toronto gallery.

Carr was frequently frustrated by the failure to keep her informed about the whereabouts of paintings she had sent east. The unsold paintings shipped to the Women’s Art Association, to Charles Band and to the National Gallery for exhibitions and purchase consideration, were now handed over to the Picture Loan Society, an artist’s cooperative managed by Douglas Duncan.

An exhibition of Carr’s paintings was held at the Picture Loan Society and among the works shown was Wind, which was kept by the Society for rental or possible sale by instalment. Wind was then returned to Carr after some antagonistic correspondence back and forth.

Wind remained unsold when Carr died in March 1945. In June 1945, Carr’s co-executors, Lawren Harris and Ira Dilworth, agreed to consign all remaining paintings to the Dominion Gallery in Montreal. No. 90 in the list of consigned paintings was Wind, which was sold to Richard Van Valkenburg of the Fine Arts Gallery at the College Street store of the T. Eaton Company in Toronto. Wind was exhibited there in November. The painting then returned to the Dominion Gallery and was purchased by a private collector who built an impressive collection of Canadian art. Having remained in private hands until now, Cowley Abbott is pleased to present this masterwork in Toronto on May 27^th.