Oil on canvas: 74.5 x 92.0 cm
Collection: The Woodstock Art Gallery

In Against All Odds, Joan Murray comments: "By contrast, in what may have been intended as a companion portrait [to those of Thomas Carlyle], Carlyle's mother, Emily Youmans, the former principal of a college in North Carolina and a descendent of United Empire Loyalists, exudes a rational and cheerful dignity: the viewer senses her inquiring mind. We can be in no doubt of the values by which she lived - Christian (she was a Congregationalist in her religion, one of the Protestant denominations) and teetotal (the household was sternly anti-smoking and anti-alcohol, so much so that she once knocked a cigar from a man's mouth). These individuals taught Carlyle, as much by exmple as precept, to respect her mind and use it; she set her aims high."