FEATURE The First Gaze

The First Gaze New Acquisitions for the Arts and History Collections

By Dr. India Rael Young, Curator of Art and Images

This 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

1 1. Victorian-style writing desk with hand-painted ornamentation by Sophie Pemberton, undated. Wood, lacquer, paints.

decorative works, including fans, trays and boxes commissioned by her Victoria and English clientele. The new acquisitions may represent work created for sale or for her own personal use.

These pieces from her personal collection epitomize the combination of artistic genres. A desk couples Victorian style— plain lines and slender legs—with the black lacquer, gold ornamentation and floral imagery that Europeans closely associated with Chinese design. The florals on this piece, and on the ink stand, maintain a Victorian sensibility, with soft, recognizably European flowers and regal gold filigree, while the tray and the desk shelf embrace the exoticism of the style. Pemberton travelled to India, Thailand and Sri Lanka in 1921, and these two objects merge signature exoticizing black lacquer and gold ornamentation with renditions of Indian birds and Thai figures.

Conversely, Carr’s watercolour, Chinese Boy, presents a sober and literal portrait unique to the artist’s oeuvre. The young boy, dressed in a collarless jacket with black piping at the neck and sleeves, wears his hair in a distinctive queue and looks upon the viewer as closely as Carr must have been observing him. Best known for her moody forestscapes and highly stylized interpretations of Indigenous village scenes, Carr rarely committed to the exactitude required for portraiture. On occasion she would create rough studies of First Nations subjects (BC Archives PDP00585; PDP00595), but her painterly interests seldom allowed for the precision Pemberton mastered.

Carr rendered this carefully observed portrait during her time in Vancouver, between 1906 and 1910. During this period she created her only other known representations of Chinese settler life, which are all housed in the Emily Carr Art Collection at the BC Archives. A sketch of a Chinese subject (BC Archives PDP05525) exhibits the same raw impressions of her other portraiture. Carr also satirized colonial life in her Aunt Fay cartoons, which included caricatures of Chinese life in Victoria (BC Archives PDP06168; PDP09020).

These additions to the art collection critically expand provincial art histories. Chinese Boy provides an intimate portrayal of the Chinese presence in Victoria and will expand the popular understanding of both Carr’s capacities as an artist and her interests in the subject matter. The sketches in this acquisition situate Sophie Pemberton’s foundational training as a Canadian studying in Europe. Her personal effects offer insight into the life of the artist and to the transnational aesthetic exchanges between Asia, Victoria and Europe.

Only three other public collections—the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Hamilton—hold the works of Carr’s contemporary, Sophie Pemberton. With the strength of the Pemberton Family fonds already residing in the archives, the museum hopes to build upon its current holdings of Pemberton works. Kathryn Bridge is currently researching Pemberton and her family. She and the museum welcome information from the larger community about Pemberton’s artworks, decorative pieces and archival records.