B.C. Artist Emily Carr—Aunt Milly—Had a Temper

(Conclusion)

Emily Carr, British C.olumbia’s most famous artist, was no “sweet, simple old lady… The sweet, angelic old lady that loved everybody…just didn’t exist.”

So her favourite—and only—nephew, the late Richard V. Nicholles of Port Alberni, told me, 40 years ago.

Weary of widely circulated stories about Emily Carr’s character, personality and eccentricities, most of which he thought were exaggerated and inaccurate, he approached me for an interview.

“I am so tired of hearing about ‘poor Miss Carr’ and welcome the chance to tell you about the real Emily Carr,” he said. “I admired her and I loved her. Had she been the woman I have read so much about I would never have felt toward her as I did.”

He recalled the day he, his wife and infant daughter visited his aunts in the old Carr home. “We were sitting around in the kitchen as they were getting lunch ready. There was an old coal stove and, next to it, a highly-polished woodbox. Back of that was a nail upon which Aunt Dede used to hang a special frying pan.

“When cooking, she’d remove the stovelid and put the frying pan right down on the red-hot coals to fry steaks in. Then she’d scour the inside and hang it up on that nail, leaving the outside as it was—-part of the household routine.

“Well, my wife was sitting on the edge of the woodbox, when Aunt Milly (Emily) came and sat beside her and leaned back, when my wife said, ‘Oh, careful, Aunt Milly, you’ll get soot on your dress.’

“’Oh, Lor’!’ swore Aunt Milly—her favourite expression—as she looked over her shoulder, then jumped up and said, ‘Dede, you’re a filthy old bitch and I’ll never come in your goodamn house again!’

“And, with that, she took off out the back door. In a few minutes, Aunt Betty says, ‘Well, I wouldn’t wait for her; lunch is just ready, and it’s not nice to be kept waiting.’”

To his obviously confused wife, Betty said, “Don’t you pay any attention to that, she’ll be here.”

Five minutes later, Mr. Nicholles continued with a chuckle, “down she came—she reminded of of a dreadnaught the way she steamed into the kitchen!—and she says, ‘Oh, Dede, I see you have a lot of those bronze nuns [flowers] along the driveway there and I wonder if I might have some for my garden?’”

Dede’s reply that she could have all she wanted had left Nicholles shaking his head: “You’d have never thought that there had been an argument!”

Aunt Milly did have a temper. “I think in her book, The House of Allsorts, she writes about wrapping a basket of dirty clothes or something around [a tenant’s] neck. She gave him a bad time, anyway.

“The sweet, angelic old lady that loved everybody…just didn’t exist. She was independent; she didn’t love anybody but herself. And she didn’t love herself very much. She was an eccentric, she was hard to get along with.

“Even Ira Dilworth who helped her so many years ago with her books, told me at her funeral that she was a very hard worman to work with. Billy Newcome was very interested in her painting and in the Indians [sic], having inherited his father’s famous collection and ability. He was quite a chap himself and very good to her—and quite an eccentric also.

“Aunt Milly was a woman all to herself. I’ve never met anybody, or heard of anybody, who really liked her. She could be so very nice…and yet the least little thing and she’d fly off. I just thought of a [show] which I saw on television last night, where the son-in-law said, ‘Well, thank God I’m an atheist.’ Well, that’s her type!”

About 1911, Emily built a house with a studio and apartment upstairs, and two self-contained apartments on the ground floor.. But she had to give them up after her first heart attack and later moved into a separate apartment in sister Alice’s house.

So that the old girls could be in the same house,” Mr. Nicholles recalled, there were “connecting doors between, but [they] still [weren’t] living together. Because they couldn’t get along.”

None of the Carr sisters ever made much money—not even Emily during her lifetime—and they were fortunate to have inherited their parents’ James Bay property. Nicholles was sure that Emily “spent quite a lot of money to travel in her younger days [but], in later years, I think she was pretty well strappped.

“If she’d got a little more money for her pictures… I know my older sister sent the two old girls (Aunts Milly and Alice) each a small allowance every month and that Aunt Milly, for some reason or other, took offence at something, and refused to accept anything. So [his sister] sent double the amount to Aunt Alice who gave [half] to Emily and it was all right!”

Upon her death, aged 74, Emily Carr “left many paintings. I don’t know how many, but dozens and dozens of them. I could have bought any one of them for $25-$30. But she left them all to a trust fund. She figured that her relatives didn’t apreciate her art so she left them all, I believe, to help deserving young artists.

“A lot of them found their way into the basement of the [Victoria] Parliament Buildings. And they say that when they were going through the old Newcombe house [on Dallas Road, just blocks from both the Carr house and the Legislature] after Billy died, they found any number of her paintings down in the basement, which she had given to him.”

Asked what he thought of her distinctive—even iconic—paintings, Mr. Nicholles replied, “I liked her later pictures, when there wasn’t a straight line when there could be a curved line…and I appreciate her admiration for the Indian art and I like her pictures on that account.”

He particularly liked her paintings of totem poles.

Mr. Nicholles “loved and admired” Aunt Milly—the real woman, as he termed her. But he was sure that “Emily Carr, had she been raised in a different atmosphere, would have been a different—much diferent—woman.”