The Skeena River area where Emily Carr prepared this painting is rich in the culture of the West Coast native peoples. It was first explored and painted by her in 1912 in a series of watercolours of considerable documentary value. But after that first trip, Carr did not return to the area for many years.

Kitseukla, or Kitsegukla, was a village on the upper Skeena in British Columbia. The river was called the “K-shian” (“water of the clouds”) by the Tsimshian (“people at the mouth of the K-shian”) and the Gitksan (“people who live up the K-shian”). The Western Gitksans lived in the three villages of Kitwanga, Kitwankool, and Kitsegukla.

In November 1927, Emily Carr travelled from Victoria, B.C., to Ottawa to attend an exhibition opening at the National Gallery of Canada. “Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern”, was an attempt by the Gallery and the National Museum to study the relationship of the older art to the more recent. Eleven of Emily Carr’s paintings and 27 watercolours were included in the exhibition, her work having been seen by National Gallery director Eric Brown at Carr’s Victoria home in September. Armed with a return C.N.R. pass provided by Brown, Carr was excited about the trip and also with the prospect of meeting some of the Ontario members of the Group of Seven.

What happened on that whirlwind trip is one of the heartening stories of Canadian art, and most of the story is true. Carr met painter Lawren Harris in Toronto and was indeed overcome with emotion upon seeing his paintings. The spiritual element in his art was in accord with her own searching. From Harris, Carr received important artistic stimulation and hope. With words of praise ringing in her ears, so the story goes, the 56-year-old artist returned to her Victoria studio to pick up her long-neglected brushes. Not quite.

The encouragement Carr received was certainly an important stimulus but Carr had not stopped painting. In fact, she had been making slow but steady progress since about 1919. In April 1924 her painting “McCaulay Point” [now in the Sobey collection] had won second honourable mention at the annual Pacific Northwest Exhibition in Seattle, an event which art historian and Carr biographer Maria Tippett says encouraged Carr to contribute work to the Island Arts and Craft Society in Vancouver and return to public life as an artist. [Tippett, 131] But there is no doubt that by meeting Harris, Carr’s creative energies were given essential renewal and opened the period of Carr’s life when she was the most creative in her painting and writing.

One important outcome of the eastern visit, according to Tippett, was a renewal of Carr’s affinity with the totem pole and a heightened perception of its spiritual qualities. But since her 1912 excursions many of the old poles had been lost through decay or removal. Marius Barbeau of the National Museum recommended to Carr the upper Skeena area where he, A. Y. Jackson and Edwin Holgate had engaged in an ethnographic and artistic field trip in 1926. In June 1928 it was Carr’s turn to set out for the Skeena River.

The weather and the mosquitos conspired to make the sketching conditions unpleasant. It is believed that Kitseukla was painted in 1928 as a result of this trip up the Skeena but hard documentary evidence for a precise date is lacking. Carr never did attach a date to this painting; placing dates on paintings was not her style. Certain other paintings of the upper Skeena, of Kispiox and Kitwankool villages, are indeed dated 1928 and it is probably that Kitseukla was painted at this time. But as the feisty Carr wrote in about 1942 to her friend Ira Dilworth,

I don’t know one date in my life. I had no periods that I know of nor any direct planning of how I was going to or did work. I just went on, the other stuff is all jargon - - - when art sinks to jargon it’s dead. Art should grow and become just as cabbage heads up… I only named pictures because it was necessary when they went out to exhibition for catalogues…. I’m not a museum and I won’t be a datery.”   

[Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr, 198]

References in Carr’s own published Journals and letters are also not very helpful, but even if a precise month and year cannot with confidence be determined, this does not detract from the pleasure and wonder which Emily Carr’s paintings can bring.

Sources and further reading

M. Emily Carr, Growing Pains; the autobiography of Emily Carr.
With a foreword by Ira Dilworth. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1946, 1966.

M. Emily Carr, Klee Wyck.
With a foreword by Ira Dilworth. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1945, 1965. There are many later (and earlier) editions of Carr’s writing.

Maria Tippett, Emily Carr, a biography.
Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1979. This book won a Governor-General’s Award.

Doris Shadbolt, Emily Carr.
Vancouver / Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1990.

Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr.
Toronto and Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin / Douglas & McIntyre, 1979.

My dear Annie,
Thank you for your letter and the nice things you said and for the cheque. I am delighted for you to have the picture which I shipped to you today (Saturday) via C.P.R. Express. Willie (Mr. Newcombe) offered t make my crate and I said no. I hate to impose, he is always doing chores for me & I said I could do it quite easily and was sorry when I got to it I had refused him, he makes them better and so easily…. I hope you get lots of pleasure out of the picture. It was taken out at McCaulay Point, you know on way to Esquimault. I am engaged with a cold in my head and it feels like a last years wasps nest. Why do we???

Here was a large number of paintings which corroborated our ideas. Here were paintings of northern lands created in the spirit of those lands and through the hearts and minds of those who knew and loved them. Here was an art bold, vigorous and uncompromising, embodying direct first-hand experience and the great North. As a result of that [Buffalo] experience our enthusiasm increased, and our convictions were reinforced.

"We found, for instance, that there was a wild richness and clarity of colour in the Algoma woods which made the colour of southern Ontario seem grey and subdued. We found there were cloud formations and rhythms peculiar to different parts of the country and to different seasons of the year. We found that, at times, there were skies over the great Lake Superior which, in their singing expansiveness and sublimity, existed nowhere else in Canada. We found that one lake would be friendly, another charming and fairy-like, the next one remote in spirit beyond anything we had known, and again the next one harsh and inimical…. And we found that all these differences in character, mood, and spirit were vital to a creative expression in paint which went beyond mere decoration and respectability in art." Lawren Harris, quoted in Adamson, 84

The 1922 boxcar trip to Algoma included Harris and A. Y. Jackson. In the autumn they went to the north shore of Lake Superior, camping at Coldwell for a week in early October. This painting may be based on field sketches from this time and then later completed in Toronto in Harris’ studio. The painting has been exhibited in many exhibitions including those at the Confederation Centre in Charlottetown, at Dalhousie University Art Gallery in Halifax, the Art Gallery at Acadia University in Wolfville, as well as at the National Gallery and the Vancouver Art Gallery for the 1963 Harris retrospective. The painting has been developed from an oil sketch by Harris which was auctioned at Heffel’s in Vancouver in November 2007 (lot 098) and titled “Pool, Algoma, Sand Lake (Algoma Sketches LXXIX).

Sources and further reading

Jeremy Adamson, Lawren S. Harris; Urban Scenes and Wilderness Landscapes: 1906-1930.
Toronto: The Art Gallery of Ontario, 1978.

Charles C. Hill, The Group of Seven: Art For A Nation.
Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada and McClelland and Stewart, 1995.

Ian McNairn, ed., Lawren Harris, Retrospective Exhibition, 1963.
Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada and Vancouver: The Vancouver Art Gallery, 1963.

His vision is as austere as his subject matter, which is precisely the hard puritanical land in which he has always lived: with no frills, with all the dismal solitary grandeur and bleak beauty, its bad side deliberately selected rather than its chilly relenting…

Northern Landscape, Great Bear Lake was first exhibited at the Canadian National Exhibition in 1940; Frank Sobey acquired it about 1970. It has been loaned on several occasions to various exhibitions in Halifax, Charlottetown, Ottawa, Toronto, and Vancouver. A smaller version of this painting is in a private family collection in Montreal.

Sources and further reading

A. Y. Jackson, A Painter’s Country, the autobiography of A. Y. Jackson.
Memorial edition with a foreword by Naomi Jackson Groves, Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company, 1976. This book was first published in 1958.

Charles C. Hill, The Group of Seven; Art For A Nation.
Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada and McClelland and Stewart, 1995.

Dennis Reid, Alberta Rhythm: the Later Work of A. Y. Jackson.
Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1982.

The first landscape by MacDonald to successfully capture the dramatic power of nature was The Lonely North…. The sky dominates the painting, with its heavy, dark clouds sweeping upwards across the canvas. Contrast is provided by the sunlight on the bluffs of the far shore and the flecks of colour on the water. In many ways the work harks back to Beatty’s Evening Cloud of the Northland, which MacDonald must have seen; but he far surpasses Beatty in force of expression. The Lonely North was a major step toward the monumental work of MacDonald’s Algoma period.