Start of an art school

Emily Carr Centenary
by Daniel Francis

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2025 was the centenary of Emily Carr University. Founded one hundred years ago on the top floor of the Vancouver School Board headquarters in downtown Vancouver, ECU is now one of the foremost art schools in Canada.

This is the story of how it came to be created in the first place.

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In the early decades of the twentieth century, Vancouver was an artistic backwater. Residents were preoccupied with real estate flipping and resource extraction; the arts generated no interest whatsoever. “At that time,” the artist W.P. Weston wrote, “if a person painted, people openly believed something was wrong with them.”¹ For several years Emily Carr famously abandoned painting altogether because of what she felt was the public’s relentless indifference to her work. It was more or less impossible to earn a living as an artist of any kind in the city.

Following the First World War, however, the situation began to brighten. In 1920 leading members of the small cultural community came together to form the BC Art League to promote the arts. The League’s principal objective was to create a place where young, aspiring artists could train for a career. To this end, League members formed a committee to gather support for the creation of an art school. This committee included some of the leading figures in the city’s arts community, including painters Thomas Fripp and John Innes, sculptor Charles Marega, and journalist/architect John Radford.

The League found allies among industrial leaders as well as the artistic community. This was no ivory tower they had in mind. From the beginning the curriculum was expected to include instruction in commercial art and industrial design, subjects of interest to the province’s business community. But despite widespread support for its proposal, the League failed to attract the necessary funding from the provincial government so in 1925 members initiated Plan B: an alliance with the Vancouver School Board. The Board’s involvement meant that the school’s identity shifted even more toward the practical. “The utilitarian aspect of the training was stressed from the beginning,” explained Charles Scott, the school’s second director, “in the belief that many trades and industries in Vancouver and British Columbia stood in need of trained artist workers.”²

With the School Board now onside, the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts began classes in September 1925, squeezed into two rooms on the top floor of the Board office, a three-storey stone building at the corner of Dunsmuir and Hamilton streets. It operated as part of the city’s school system, though unlike regular public schools it charged an annual tuition of $50. The first director was G. Thornton Sharpe and the principal was Charles Scott. After the first year Sharpe withdrew and Scott became director, a position he held for the next 26 years.

Charles Scott was a giant figure in Vancouver’s cultural history. Born in Scotland in 1886, he studied at the Glasgow School of Art before immigrating to Canada at the age of 25. From the beginning he combined an involvement in public education with his own development as a painter of solid reputation. He settled first in Calgary where he joined the board of education as art supervisor, then moved across the mountains to Vancouver in 1912 to take up a similar position in the city’s schools. After serving with the Canadian army in Europe during the First World War, and being wounded in action, he returned to the coast and his job with the school board.

Immediately upon taking over the art school Scott bolstered the faculty with a slate of new instructors. First, he hired a 29-year-old Scotsman, J.W.G. (Jock) Macdonald, from the Lincoln School of Art in England. Macdonald would become one of Canada’s leading painters, one of its first abstractionists, but at the time of his hiring he was known chiefly as a fabric designer. Then Scott convinced his sister-in-law, Grace Melvin, an illustrator and calligrapher, to leave her position at the Glasgow School of Art to head up the design department at the VSDAA. For the rest of his faculty Scott drew from the local arts community, including the city’s best-known sculptor Charles Marega and Kate Smith Hoole, a former student at the Calderon School of Animal Painting in London, who taught painting and drawing.

But Scott’s real coup was convincing Fred Varley, one of the most famous artists in Canada at the time, to move west to teach at the school. Varley had emigrated to Canada from his hometown of Sheffield, England, in 1912. In England, he had experienced little success as an artist, living on the edge of poverty, but in Toronto he found employment almost immediately as a commercial artist at Grip Ltd., a commercial printing and design company where he fell in with a group of young painters who were experimenting with new ways of rendering the Canadian landscape. In 1920, these painters came together formally to create the Group of Seven, for the next decade the country’s foremost interpreters of the Canadian wilderness. With the addition of Varley to its faculty, the VSDAA became the centre of the artistic fluorescence that occurred in Vancouver during the inter-war period.

In the first year of Scott’s directorship forty students enrolled at the school. They began publishing a magazine, The Paint Box, filled with humorous stories, illustrations, poetry, class reports and school news. From its pages a portrait of the student body emerges. They were young, of course. Serious about their work, perhaps a bit swollen with self-importance, ambitious for themselves. Being young, they also liked to party. Every year they staged an elaborate costume gala, the Beaux Arts Ball, which became one of the signature events in the city’s social calendar. Proceeds went towards improvements to the school. Typical was the third ball which took place in February 1929 at the Vancouver Hotel (then at the corner of Granville and Georgia) where the spacious Oak Room was decorated to resemble a medieval baronial hall hung with tapestries and shields. Guests dressed as knights, jesters, monks, and heralds. Some came as characters from Shakespeare, others as members of the royal court.

Most of the students at the school in the early days were from well-to-do, west side families. Of the eleven members of the original graduating class in 1929, all but two were women. Jack Shadbolt, who arrived at the school from his home on Vancouver Island in 1932, described them dismissively as “daughters of the better-off merchant families,” which was true enough. But they were not dilettantes dabbling in the arts to keep themselves busy while waiting to meet a husband. Several were serious artists who made lifelong careers in the city. Beatrice Lennie, whose father was a prominent Shaughnessy lawyer, went to California after her graduation to continue her studies. She returned to the city determined to succeed as an artist, which she did, teaching, exhibiting her work nationally and obtaining commissions for several significant pieces of public sculpture. Lilias Farley was active for many years as a sculpture, textile artist, public muralist and painter, winning a Centennial Medal for Service to the Nation in the Arts in 1967. Irene Hoffar, whose father was the well-known boat builder Henry Hoffar, pursued post-graduate studies in London, England, and she regularly exhibited her work for the rest of her life. Margaret Williams was a founding member of the Federation of Canadian Artists; her work was routinely exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery. These women, and others, belonged to the PASOVAS Club (Pioneer Art Students of the Vancouver Art School), a group of thirty members of the school’s inaugural class which held its first group show in the fall of 1930. They shared studios, did post-graduate studies at the school and encouraged each other to produce and exhibit. They and some of their fellow students constituted a community of committed, trained, professional artists the likes of which the city had not seen before.

In its early days, Fred Varley was the charismatic centre of the school. “The art school was dull until Fred Varley arrived,” one of the students, Vito Cianci, told an interviewer.³ The students respected Director Scott, but they adored Varley. “Mr. Scott was very kind,” recalled Irene Hoffar, “and if you really got to know him he had a great sense of humour. He was, however, usually very formal and distant.”⁴ Varley, on the other hand, did not recognize the traditional barrier between teacher and student. He was approachable and full of enthusiasm. He was twice the age of most of the students but he loved to spend long hours in the bar drinking and smoking and talking with them like someone much younger. Varley lived with his family in a converted boathouse overlooking Jericho Beach next door to the tennis club and he welcomed students there to share meals, swim, play badminton, and talk about art and philosophy. His mind was open to all sorts of influences and he brought them into the classroom: Indigenous art, French impressionism, cubism, Asian culture, whatever caught his interest. “The whole atmosphere was charged,” said Hoffar; “it was tremendously exhilarating.”⁵ 

Unlike most other members of the school’s faculty, Varley already had a significant career behind him. He had studied in Europe and struggled as a starving artist in London. During the First World War he been at the front lines working as a commissioned war artist. Now he was a member of the country’s most progressive art movement, the Group of Seven. For the young students he represented what an artist should be: committed to his craft, indifferent to material success, bohemian in his lifestyle, a free spirit. (Jack Shadbolt called him “the last great bohemian.”⁶) He even dressed like an artist, favouring corduroy trousers, neckerchiefs and baggy jackets.

When he lived in Toronto, Varley had accompanied other members of the Group of Seven into the rugged Shield Country on some of their famous sketching expeditions. He drew on this experience to lead his art school students on similar excursions, first of all to the North Shore mountains and then in the summer of 1927 he and Jock Macdonald began leading more ambitious trips to Garibaldi Park north of Squamish. The province had set aside the area as a reserve just a few years earlier. Access required a steamer trip to the head of Howe Sound followed by an hour and a half train ride on the Pacific Great Eastern Railway. Disembarking at Daisy Lake station south of Alta Lake, hikers faced a ten-kilometre trek up onto the meadows near Garibaldi Lake carrying their painting supplies as well as camping gear and food enough to last for several days. Varley thrived on these expeditions: “get the sky – the sea, the countryside into you, & paint!”⁷ Later in the 1930s, the school hosted a regular summer school at a hotel on Savary Island north of Powell River.

The early growth of the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts was not without its setbacks. Just eight years into its operation, in the spring of 1933, with the Depression at its worst, the School Board served notice that it intended to close the school as a cost-saving measure. Director Scott succeeded in averting closure by agreeing to carry on with a dramatically reduced budget. He came up with a plan that included slashing staff salaries by sixty percent. This plan drew heavy criticism from Varley and Jock Macdonald who resented having their salaries squeezed when Scott himself was taking a smaller reduction. They countered with their own, more equitable, proposal but the Board backed Scott. This disagreement over money only exacerbated tensions that had been evident for some time between the director and the two artists. “Scott was an old-fashioned painter and teacher,” explained Vito Cianci. “He was a very bright guy […] but he just didn’t fit into the same milieu as Varley and Macdonald.”⁸ The two disaffected artists may also have believed that Grace Melvin, Scott’s sister-in-law, was receiving favoured treatment. Whatever the full story, Varley and Macdonald resigned in anger.

It was, remarked arts reporter Reta Myers, “the most drastic change in the Vancouver School of Art since its foundation some eight years ago.”⁹ And to make matters more dramatic, Myers reported, the dissidents had plans to open their own rival school that fall. It may have been the nadir of the Depression but Varley and Macdonald managed to raise the money they needed. On September 11, classes began at the British Columbia College of Art, located in a former car dealership at 1233 West Georgia Street, a block west of the new civic art gallery. Fees were set at $80 per year for full-time students with different fees for part-time and evening classes.

The new college was considered much more avant garde than the Art School. It was open to Eastern mysticism, theosophy and other exotic disciplines and more experimental forms of presentation. A young Jack Shadbolt attended many of the lectures and performances there and was skeptical of the new school where, he recalled, “high society, the neurotic and the hypersensitive commingled…in an emphatic rejection of the real.”¹⁰ But of course at this time Shadbolt was absorbed in socialist realism, in making art that might influence the class struggle. He naturally criticized the college crowd for being indifferent to what was going on in the world around them, accusing them of indulging in a “half-hearted romanticism.”¹¹

The new college opened what the sculptor Beatrice Lennie called “a great rift” in Vancouver’s small art world.¹² Because of the animosity between the college founders and Charles Scott, people felt they were taking sides when they engaged with one or the other schools. Irene Hoffar, for example, accepted a job with Scott at the Art School but regretted the effect that it had on her long friendship with Vera Weatherbie, another graduate of the School. Not only was Weatherbie romantically involved with Varley, she was assisting him at the College. “The art community and students […] were divided over which school to support,” Hoffar later explained. “The other school seemed to me to be more glamorous. … I would hear of many interesting things being done, and we [at the VSDAA] seemed to be behind the times. I went to see the College’s production of Volpone [a play with puppets], which was marvellous, and went to the college several other times, but always felt guilty…. It was a trying time.”¹³ In the end the College was an artistic success but a financial failure; it closed after three years and the founders went their separate ways. Jock Macdonald and his wife moved to Nootka Island to homestead; Varley returned to eastern Canada where he spent the rest of his life.

Unlike the College, the Art School managed to survive the schism, and the depression. Scott called the 1933 session “a second beginning” for the school. It simplified its name to the Vancouver School of Art and for the next few years managed to attract enough students to keep its doors open. Then, in 1936, outgrowing its initial cramped quarters, it took over the former Vancouver Central High School building at Cambie and Dunsmuir. With a new name (it would not adopt Emily Carr’s name until 1978) and a new, more spacious home, the school was set to realize the ambitions that the original founders had held out for it.

The VSDAA was one of several cultural institutions that appeared in the city in the interwar period. In 1926, the photographer John Vanderpant, with the help of local mining engineer turned artist Harold Mortimer Lamb, opened his Vanderpant Galleries on Robson Street. For several years Vanderpant hosted a kind of floating intellectual salon there, staging exhibitions, hosting lectures and musical evenings, and welcoming all friends of the avant garde. In 1930, the symphony orchestra began performing again after a brief hiatus. And then, in 1931, after a long fundraising campaign spearheaded by a group of business leaders, the Vancouver Art Gallery opened its doors on West Georgia. By the early 1930s, in other words, Vancouver had a cultural life more varied and sophisticated than ever before. And right at the centre of it all was the art school now known as Emily Carr University.

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Daniel Francis is the author of thirty books, principally about Canadian and BC history. Becoming Vancouver: A History (2021), was reviewed by Patricia Roy, and Where Mountains Meet The Sea: an Illustrated History of the District of North Vancouver (2016), was reviewed by Trevor Carolan. Daniel Francis previously taken a look at the work of Stephen Bown with his review of The Company: The Rise and Fall of the Hudson’s Bay Empire and has also reviewed books by Stephen R. Bown, Martha Black, Lorne Hammond, & Gavin Hanke, Peter Neary & Alan Collier, Ben Bradley, and Mark Leiren-Young. He lives in North Vancouver. Visit his website here.

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster

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Notes

1. Vancouver Province, Feb. 10, 1921. ↩︎
2. Charles Scott, “Vancouver Art School, First Fifty Years 1890-1940 Vancouver High Schools”, Vancouver School Board, 1940. ↩︎
3. Quoted in Sheryl Salloum, Underlying Vibrations: The Photography and Life of John Vanderpant (Victoria: Horsdal & Schubert, 1995): p.35. ↩︎
4. Ibid. ↩︎
5. Ibid. ↩︎
6. Quoted in Maria Tippett, Stormy Weather: F.H. Varley, a Biography (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1998), p.182. ↩︎
7. Ibid., p. 168. ↩︎
8. Quoted in Salloum, p.63. ↩︎
9. Vancouver Province, June 10, 1933. ↩︎
10. Scott Watson, Jack Shadbolt (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1990), p. 10. ↩︎
11. Jack Shadbolt, “A Personal Recollection”, in Vancouver Art and Artists 1931-1983 (Vancouver Art Gallery, 1983), p. 36. ↩︎
12. Quoted in Salloum, p.65. ↩︎
13. Ibid. ↩︎