This Canadian Painter Found Her Muse in the Verdant Trees of British Columbia

Emily Carr took her brushes out of the gardens and into the rainforest to seize her native panorama in methods “beloved and likewise fraught”

Amy Crawford

– Contributing Author

January/February 2026

Born in 1871, painter Emily Carr resisted her prim upbringing in British Columbia. As an alternative of flowers and gardens—deemed correct topics for a girl artist—Carr felt drawn to the area’s lush, temperate rainforests, “the deep, sacred fantastic thing about Canada’s nonetheless woods,” as she wrote in her autobiography. After a long time working in obscurity, she received the respect of fellow artists in her later years, then renown throughout Canada after her 1945 demise.

“It’s work that’s beloved and likewise fraught,” says Richard Hill, curator of a significant exhibition of Carr’s nature work, opening in January on the Vancouver Art Gallery. Her depictions of First Nations cultures have just lately been criticized as patronizing, he notes, however whereas Carr’s perspective might now appear dated, her inventive affect stays highly effective, particularly in her personal province. Carr immersed herself within the forests, Hill says, and her imaginative and prescient “left its mark on how we see this panorama.”