CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: Emily Carr: Recognition Late in Life

Paragraph A

Emily Carr, now regarded as one of Canada’s most important painters, was born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1871, when the city was still a small colonial outpost. Orphaned as a teenager, she persuaded her guardian to let her study art in San Francisco, and later training took her to England, where she spent several years, and then to France. Her early work, mostly careful watercolours, gave little hint of what was to come. In France, she absorbed the bright colours and bold forms of modern European painting. The new style set her apart when she returned home, where it earned her more puzzlement than praise.

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Carr’s chief subject emerged on her visits to Indigenous villages along the coast. In 1912, she made an extensive journey north to Haida Gwaii and the Skeena River, sketching totem poles and village sites that she believed were disappearing, a view that historians have since questioned. The following year, she showed the work in Vancouver and offered the collection to the provincial government, which declined to buy it. Unable to live by her art, she built a small apartment house in Victoria and for many years earned her income as a landlady, making pottery and raising sheepdogs on the side. She painted very little during this period.

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The turning point came in 1927, when Carr was in her mid-fifties and the National Gallery of Canada invited her to take part in an exhibition of West Coast art. Travelling east for the show, she met members of the Group of Seven, among them Lawren Harris, whose encouragement restored her confidence. She returned home determined to paint again, turning increasingly from villages to the forests and skies of British Columbia. She developed a method of thinning oil paint with gasoline and working on paper, which was cheap and allowed her to record the movement of trees quickly in the open air. In the 1930s, she even bought an old caravan, which she called the Elephant, so that she could live and work in the woods for weeks at a time. Solo exhibitions followed during that decade.

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In her final years, a series of heart attacks limited her ability to go out and paint, so she turned to writing, with the help of a friend and editor, Ira Dilworth. Her first book, Klee Wyck, a collection of stories drawn from her time in the coastal villages, won the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction in 1941. Other books followed before her death in Victoria in 1945, including an account of her years as a landlady, The House of All Sorts. Today, a Vancouver art university bears her name, and her paintings have sold for millions of dollars at auction, although her portrayals of Indigenous subjects are now viewed more critically than they once were.