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settlement in Ucluelet twice already, but this was the first time she had seen anything like the carved poles and the painted house fronts. The watercolours she made on this trip, and subsequently on two more trips up the coast from Victoria, show flashes of unexpected colour and vitality, as if she had at last found a subject that she was inspired to paint.
    In her autobiography, Growing Pains, she said of her exposure to the totem poles:
    Indian Art broadened my seeing, loosened the formal tightness I had learned in England’s school. Its bigness and stark reality baffled my white man’s understanding. I was as Canadian-born as the Indian, but behind me were Old World heredity and ancestry as well as Canadian environment.
    It was during these trips that Emily began to formulate an ambitious project. Most people believed that totempoles would soon disappear as Native peoples adapted to the pressure to assimilate. The tradition of totem-carving seemed to be vanishing, and the remaining poles were either being abandoned to the elements or removed by collectors. Emily decided to make a visual record of the poles and carved figures in their original settings. The project did not come to fruition for some time, though. Just when she had found a subject for her painting, Emily, incredibly, decided to go back to being a student.
    Perhaps she found her technique and abilities inadequate for representing the totem poles. No doubt she also had heard from artists with wider contacts in the world at large about a new kind of painting coming out of France—a new art that offered a new way of seeing. “I learned a lot from the Indians,” she wrote later in her autobiography, “but who except Canada herself could help me comprehend her great woods and spaces? San Francisco had not, London had not. What about this New Art Paris talked of? It claimed bigger, broader seeing.”
    In the summer of 1910, accompanied by her sister Alice, Emily sailed for Paris.

CHAPTER SEVEN
In the French Style
    When Emily Carr arrived in Paris, a revolution had taken place. Not in the streets, but in the studios of the artists.
    Paris was the capital of the art world, and every ambitious painter set off to follow the same route to success. The path to accomplishment had been laid out for a long time: first study at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, then exhibit at the Salon (the annual exhibition organized by the Académie des Beaux-Arts), receive prestigious commissions from the state or the Church, and finally, become a member of the academy and enjoy the fruits of success.
    The kinds of subject matter suitable for painting had also been codified and followed a strict hierarchy: religious, historical, or classical subjects first; then portraiture and figure paintings; lastly, genres such as still life or domestic interiors. Paintings were expected to be as realistic as possible and done with a flawless finish. Landscape as a subject in itself was considered inconsequential, unless it included a significant monument or referred to the above-mentioned subjects.
    Artists had always made outdoor sketches, but these were considered mere practice or studies, not finished paintings. The revolution in painting took place when artists rejected the authority of both the Salon and the Academy, as well as the hierarchy of subjects. In the early and mid-nineteenth century, painters increasingly began to turn away from the accepted subjects and to paint the world around them, including the countryside outside Paris. Two factors, among many others, contributed to this change: the newly developed railways that made travel to the outlying regions easily possible, and a change in the technology of artists’ materials.
    A painter usually had to mix dry pigment with oil to obtain a workable paint. The process could be undertaken properly only in the studio and was messy and time-consuming. When ready-to-use paints in portable