Sold for: $339,300

PROVENANCE
Acquired directly from the Artist by Agnes Macpherson Russell, wife of Finley McDonald Russell, co-founder of Russell & Dumoulin, the prominent Vancouver law firm
By descent to a Private Collection, Edmonton
Sold sale of Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, November 9, 2000, lot 230
Private Collection, USA

LITERATURE
Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr, 1979, the 1912 canvas entitled War Canoes, Alert Bay reproduced page 41
Emily Carr, Growing Pains, 2005, page 257
Gerta Moray, Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr, 2006, page 146, reproduced page 88, figure 5.23

In 1913 Emily Carr held a solo exhibition in Drummond Hall, Vancouver, of almost 200 paintings. The works were the result of her travels in the summer of 1912 to northern British Columbia, where she visited First Nations villages on both Haida Gwaii and the mainland. The exhibition also included many of the earlier First Nations studies produced in the years 1908 to 1910. Carr’s sense of mission in choosing to portray First Nations villages such as Alert Bay was forged in the summer of 1907 when she and her sister Alice took a pivotal boat trip to Alaska. As she writes in Growing Pains, “We passed many villages on our way down the coast. The Indian people and the Art touched me deeply.....By the time I reached home my mind was made up. I was going to picture totem poles in their own village settings, as complete a collection of them as I could.”

One of the villages that Carr and her sister visited was ’Yalis or Alert Bay, the Kwakwaka’wakw village on Cormorant Island, off the northern coast of Vancouver Island. It was a striking site, with ten large community houses facing the beach, five major carved totem poles and a pair of eagle houseposts. Carr determined to revisit the community in 1908, and Alert Bay became a key subject for her. This important watercolour, War Canoes, Alert Bay, is related to two other watercolours, one of the same title sold at Heffel’s May 2012 auction and another, War Canoe, Alert Bay, sold at Heffel’s November 2011 auction. This is a striking composition that gives prominence to the group of canoes in the foreground, with the village in the distance. Gerta Moray comments that these canoes were important possessions of the village, displayed as “emblems of wealth that had passed from one owner to another as potlatch gifts.”

Carr was clearly struck by the splendid forms of the canoes and their vividly painted raven and eagle motifs. The foreground tree is sensitively rendered, and the colours are remarkably fresh and bright, particularly the reds and blues. Carr used soft wash effects in the background and created a sense of light through the delineation of shadows cast by the boats. The winding path leads the eye to the native village, which presents a low and harmonious profile in the landscape.

The broadening of her vision and loosening of the “formal tightness” of her work that “Indian Art”, as she described it, had inspired made Carr feel that she needed further training, and in July of 1910 she left for a period of intensive study in France. There she was introduced to the brilliant non-naturalistic use of colour of the Fauves, such as Henri Matisse and André Derain. Her brushwork opened up and the work she produced there displayed a new energy. With these new tools, she returned to Canada and First Nations subjects.

This new approach allowed her to reconsider her earlier Alert Bay subjects, and the 1908 watercolours became the basis for 1912 canvases. Carr was known to have reworked some watercolours in light of her artistic discoveries in France, and due to the bright, fresh palette of this watercolour, it is possible that is one of these works. Carr was so inspired by the canoes she had seen in Alert Bay that, as well as three watercolours, she produced three important canvases of this subject. One, Indian War Canoe (Alert Bay), is in the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The second, War Canoes, Alert Bay, 1912 (sold by Heffel in May 2000), is based on the two watercolours of this subject, and the third oil is in a private collection.

Works such as War Canoes, Alert Bay, both the masterpiece oil and this magnificent watercolour, provide a vital record of the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples and mark Carr’s emergence as a major and distinct voice in Canadian painting. Together, all the war canoe works tell a powerful story about the importance of First Nations subject matter to Carr and the pivotal effect on her career of the time she spent in France during 1911.



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