Provenance:

Private Collection, England

Literature:

Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr, Toronto and Vancouver, 1979, pages 34-36.
Ian M. Thom, Emily Carr in France, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, 1991, pages 29-30 and page 41, no.39, illustrated in colour (for a watercolour entitled The French Knitters, 1911).
(Various Authors), Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon, National Gallery of Canada/Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2006, page 43 and pages 54-55 for other watercolours executed in Brittany.

Note:

Painted circa 1911.

Carr sailed aboard the Empress of Ireland for Paris in August, 1910 and was to stay in France from late summer until fall of the following year. This period would mark her entry into the central stream of twentieth-century art.

Shadbolt writes that during Carr’s time spent in Brittany, the artist returned to painting in watercolour: ”There are a number of sparkling Brittany scenes...Figures are comprehended as compositional units to be marshalled according to pictorial needs...brought dramatically forward into the picture plane...Highlights and shadows become part of an overall tonal structure, not simply the means of representing the subject with convincing volume and depth.”

Thom, describing Carr’s paintings done in France in 1910 and 1911, concludes that the watercolours from the summer of 1911 “are perhaps the most important of the works which Carr executed in France. As a group they have an assurance and immediacy which is not always felt in the oils.” Shadbolt concurs with this assessment, writing that the paintings produced in France “represented a considerable achievement...She painted with a vigour and assurance, and with a sensuousness and formal awareness new to her, that from then on became part of her artist’s equipment.”