About this work
*Wind in the Tree Tops* is a Post-Impressionist oil on canvas completed by Emily Carr between 1936 and 1939.
It depicts a moody and precarious grove of evergreens — tilting trees that were among Carr's most compelling recurring subjects. The canvas is dominated by deep, saturated greens, and Carr saw a vibrant life force in the giant trees of British Columbia's coastal rainforest, depicting them with wave-like movements in the swirls of branches and the lines of their trunks. The painting's composition pulls the eye upward along bending, straining forms that seem genuinely caught in a gust — not static botanicals but living things in motion, their canopies churning against a charged sky. Carr's loose brushstrokes and simplified forms give the scene an almost choral energy, where individual trees dissolve into a single rhythmic force.
By the late 1930s, Carr was painting at the peak of her expressive powers while contending with serious physical decline. She suffered her first heart attack in 1937 and another in 1939, forcing her to move in with her sister Alice to recover. That *Wind in the Tree Tops* was completed during this period makes it all the more remarkable — a painting of elemental vitality made under the shadow of failing health. Her late paintings reflect an invented visual language designed to capture the spiritual and elemental force she perceived in the B.C. landscape.
The work has since been dubbed "one of the rarest treasures" in Canadian art — a judgment confirmed when it sold for more than $2.16 million at Heffel's spring auction in Vancouver in 2009.
Carr's canvas paintings are rare commodities, more commonly held by museums, large galleries, and private collectors — making the image itself a significant document of her mature vision.
This is a painting that rewards a wall with room to breathe. Its vertical energy and surging greens make it a natural fit for spaces with strong natural light — a reading room, a stairwell landing, a study where the outside world is meant to press in. While others thought of the forests as impenetrable and unappealing, Carr saw the vitality of the natural world — and her forest paintings profoundly shaped not only her own work but the way viewers perceive the natural world. It speaks to anyone drawn to wildness rendered with intelligence: not a pastoral comfort, but something closer to awe.
