FEATURE
The First Gaze New Acquisitions for the Arts and History Collections By Dr. India Rael Young, Curator of Art and Images
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his fall, the Royal BC Museum and Archives acquired a selection of new artworks by two significant British Columbia artists, Emily Carr (1871–1945) and Sophia Theresa Pemberton (1869–1959), also known by her married names of Beanlands and Deane Drummond. Thanks to ongoing relationships with local and international arts communities, curator emerita Dr. Kathryn Bridge was able to ensure that these artworks will become a part of British Columbia’s enduring art history.
While Carr is better known today, Sophie Pemberton was considered Victoria’s “first artist” in her day. Their parallel trajectories as artists brought range and
depth to Victoria’s art scene in the first half of the twentieth century. Both women were born in Victoria to parents who emigrated from England and Ireland and who maintained strong ties to the mother country. In the 1890s, both embarked on arts training programs abroad. Pemberton went to London, then Paris, to study in the academic style; Carr travelled first to San Francisco, then London, then the arts colony at St. Ives, England. Pemberton exhibited extensively in London and Paris and became an associate member of the Royal Canadian Academy in 1906. Her academic portraiture and BC landscapes executed in a French Realist style appealed to the European sensibilities of Victoria’s
colonial gentry. Carr, who travelled to France a decade after Pemberton, became enamoured of the next generation of French painting, Post-Impressionism, which she too transcribed onto the landscapes of British Columbia. Both women returned to the province early in the new century to invigorate Victoria’s arts community. These artists’ interpretations of the “other”—a term used in cultural theory that describes how exclusion can enforce power structures— inform the museum’s newest acquisitions. Pemberton continued to travel extensively and rendered her observations of faraway lands in a popular decorative arts style. Meanwhile, Carr immersed herself in regional travel to present the peoples and places of British Columbia. Along with a selection of portraiture sketches, the new Pemberton acquisitions include some of her personal belongings that have remained within the Pemberton family until now. These personal objects illustrate colonial interests in a decorative arts style known as chinoiserie. As a general style, chinoiserie is characterized by European interpretations of Asian aesthetics. The style was particularly popular in European decorative arts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Pemberton created a variety of such
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What’s inSight
1. Victorian-style writing desk with hand-painted ornamentation by Sophie Pemberton, undated. Wood, lacquer, paints. 2. Sophie Pemberton in her Victoria studio, 1904.
