Emily Carr, one of Canada's greatest artists and most loved authors, was born in Victoria in 1871, a few months after British Columbia ended its term as a British colony and became a province of this new country of Canada. Emily Carr self-portrait

Over the next 70 years, she expressed her pride in her part of Canada and her passion for nature through brush and pen. At seventeen, she traveled to San Francisco and later in Paris and London to study painting. In 1913, she returned to Victoria from which she undertook a series of adventures into the remote wilderness and visited isolated native villages, bringing back hundreds of sketches and water-colours from these journeys. When her health began to fail, she took to writing, eventually producing seven books based on her life. In 1941 she published her novel Klee Wyck which won the Governor's General's Award. She wrote several other best sellers, including The Book of Small and The Heart of a Peacock. Emily Carr died on March 2 1945 and was buried on the Carr Family plot at the Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria.

Emily Carr House
Emily Carr House, with an architectural style described as both "San Francisco Victorian" and "English Gingerbread," was built in 1864. It is the house Emile grew up in, with the same Victorian ambiance the Carr family would have known in the 1870's with some their actual possessions, including some of Emily's pottery and sculpture.

As Emily Carr wrote in The Book of Small:

“Our street was called Carr Street after my Father. We had a very nice house and a lovely garden... Carr Street was a very fine street. The dirt road waved up and down and in and out. the horses made it that way, zigzagging the carts and carriages through it. The rest of the street was green grass and wild roses. There was a grand, wide open ditch with high grass by the sides. The cows licked in great mouthfuls to chew as they walked up and down to the pasture land at the end of Carr Street down by the beach. In front of our place Father had made a gravel walk but after our trees stopped there were just two planks to walk on."

Emily Carr House
207 Government St.
Victoria, B.C.
Canada V8V 2K3
Telephone: (250) 383-5843