Emily Carr’s biographer Doris Shadbolt observes that “the sketches of the years 1933 to 1936 when she had the van are her most direct and free,” adding that the period she spent living and working from it “were surely the most blissful of her adult years.” By the mid-1930s, Carr had reached a level of spiritual and artistic ease she had never known before. That inner calm seeped into her writing and her paintings, as seen in Strait of Juan de Fuca.

This period, despite the economic hardships of the Depression, provided a window of liberation for Carr. She roamed Vancouver Island in her beloved canvas-topped trailer, christened The Elephant, a makeshift camper she shared with her assortment of pets. At places like Cordova Bay, she settled in for long stretches, sketching from countless vantage points overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca. While Carr never embraced abstraction in the manner of Mark Tobey—a Seattle painter who, along with Lawren Harris, was influential in encouraging her to develop her style in the late 1920s—her work of the 1930s shares with him a broader modernist concern for spiritual and expressive content beyond literal representation. The paintings associated with this period pulse with a sense of joy; the sky vaults upward, the sea surges towards the cliffs, and every line seems to vibrate with movement. These scenes feel charged, swirling and exuberantly alive.

Since 1932, Carr had been experimenting with an unconventional medium: oil on paper, thinned with gasoline and mixed with white house paint. The choice was partly financial—she simply could not afford traditional supplies—but it also unlocked a new freedom. The mixture allowed her to paint with the fluidity and immediacy of watercolour while retaining the tonal depth of oil. As she explained in a letter to the director of the National Gallery, “It is a kind of sketchy medium I have used for the last three or four years.… It is inexpensive, light to carry and allows great freedom of thought and action.”

The forests and coastlines of Vancouver Island were well suited to this approach, and Carr felt newly satisfied with what she was creating. Her journals record the delight she took in her oil sketches during this phase: “I do feel I put more of myself into them.… I am painting my own vision now, thinking of no one else’s approach, trying to express my own reactions.” She worked confidently, sometimes painting three or four large sketches in a single day, and those around her were also moved by the maturity of these works. As Carr began to pay attention to how others received her art, something she had long resisted, she found herself unexpectedly touched by the admiration of her friends, family members and critics.

Carr was endlessly drawn to the meeting place of sea, sky and land. She believed, as she wrote, that “the air and the earth and the sea seemed to be holding some splendid wonderful secret … saying to you, ‘Peep and guess. If you guess right you can have it.’ ” That sense of mystery and invitation permeates her work from this era, and characterizes the modern art icon Carr would soon become.

This painting has sterling provenance. It was once held in the private collection of Dr. and Mrs. Max Stern of Montreal’s Dominion Gallery. Stern, who competed with dealer G. Blair Laing for access to Carr’s work, had met her in 1943 at precisely the right moment. Laing later remarked that Stern “had already gained an insurmountable advantage.… He had read her potentials accurately and pressed his advantage, doing an excellent job of imparting his dealing philosophy … to retain exclusive and complete control over the sale of her work.” Stern ultimately handled Carr’s estate and selected the finest pieces for his own collection. Strait of Juan de Fuca is one of those exceptional works, a luminous oil on paper that captures Carr’s clear, iconic and uniquely personal vision and contribution to modern art.

We thank Dr. Michael Polay, contributing author to Emily Carr: Fresh Seeing—French Modernism and the West Coast, for his assistance in researching this lot.