The childhood home of Emily Carr, British Columbia's most important painter, sits in the quiet James Bay neighbourhood south of the Inner Harbour. The Victorian house, built in 1864, has been restored to its late 19th-century appearance and tells the story of Carr's life and her obsessive painting of the First Nations villages and old-growth forests of the BC coast.
Carr's paintings — dense, swirling canvases of forest and totem poles — are now held at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and major Canadian galleries. The house gives the domestic context for a life that was otherwise constantly difficult: she lived here with her domineering father, then struggled financially for decades before recognition came. A short walk from the Inner Harbour.