When construction of Canada’s trans-national railway had been completed in the late fall of 1885, William Cornelius Van Horne, general manager and president of the Canadian Pacific Railway, set out to sell the West.
The railway had been completed at great expense, putting the CPR into equally great debt, and Van Horne, an American businessman of great vision and talent, recognized the mountains of the Canadian Rockies as a marketing tool.
Van Horne created a program in 1886 that offered painters and photographers free rail passes in exchange for artwork that could be used to advertise the railway in Europe and the U.S.
The pass program would also create one of the most significant collections of art in Canada and a tradition that continues today.
It is this tradition that the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies plans to celebrate with the Saturday (June 8) opening of Picturing the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Anne Ewen, interim curator of art and heritage at the Whyte Museum, said the exhibition is in a small way a ‘thank you’ to Van Horne for having the foresight to create the pass program and for allowing the CPR to create a substantial artistic legacy.
Ewen initially set out to tell the story of the CPR in this region, from Calgary to Craigellachie, B.C., where the railway’s last spike was driven on Nov. 7, 1885. She wanted to include a historical and contemporary component for each section or town, but couldn’t find enough pieces to tell that story.
“There were these amazing gaps,” she said. “And I realized it wasn’t going to work.”
Ewen instead changed the theme of the show to reflect on the CPR’s free pass program and what it accomplished and inspired.
Once she made that shift, Ewen’s story opened right up, allowing her to reach into numerous different aspects of art and history that all – in one form or another – connect to Van Horne’s pass program.
“Really it is about that whole linkage of that incredible marketing campaign of Van Horne’s free pass program. The guy was a genius. Absolute genius,” she said, adding he wasn’t just a businessman, but a painter as well, with an artist’s sensibility.
In fact, if he hadn’t been such a good businessman, he would have been an artist.
Artist John A. Fraser, one of the first artists to be invited to participate in the pass program, once told Van Horne in a letter that because he had not followed through with his artistic ability that the arts community had suffered.
“He was a painter and he understood that. One quote he said was ‘the best way to show our country is through our painters.’ He was very aware of the art movement in Europe or the U.S. and if he hadn’t been, if he had the same mentality as ‘I’m going to make the shareholders happy and that’s it,’ it would have been a whole different story.”
The artists he invited included Frederic Marlett Bell-Smith, George Horne Russell, William Brymner and Marmaduke Matthews and as he was providing the rail passes, he got to call the shots.
He demanded his artists portray the Rockies in a romantic light seen under ideal conditions, with no rain, no bugs and no adversity. The early paintings and photographs are beautiful and sublime, but not entirely honest.
“It’s beautiful, sublime, pristine, aren’t the natives happy, they don’t bite us, but it is all part of that, very romantic, but also part of Van Horne’s dictum to all his artists: ‘I want it to look pretty. I am trying to sell this area to tourists and settlers. Don’t make the natives scary. Make the natives look really pretty. Don’t make it look like it rains there. Make it really nice,’” Ewen said, channeling Van Horne.
Even though the CPR’s free pass program ended in 1914 with the start of the First World War, it created a remarkable foundation of artwork featuring the Canadian Rockies that also created tradition by drawing subsequent generations of artists west, including members of the Group of Seven and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
A show of this nature is diverse and by broadening her scope, Ewen has been able to reflect upon a considerable time frame. It has always allowed her to incorporate a variety of mediums and historical artifacts, such as maps, glass lantern slides, letters and a considerable body of contemporary work from artists.
Each piece, whether artwork – historical or contemporary – or artifact has to say something about the CPR, Van Horne and his pass program, despite the fact that artists of today are working different materials and sensibilities than their historical counterparts.
“Even from a material perspective, even the paints are different. The varnishes are all different. A lot of the paints have different compounds than they do now. Canvases are different. It is all very, very different,” she said.
“The only thing shared is the heritage and the shared desire to capture the beauty of this region and the challenge is the link between the past artists and the current ones. The challenge is still, however you do it, it’s a challenging landscape.
“Some of the artists, Bell-Smith, just as an example, found it really, really challenging at first to get the magnitude of it. You’re from the east, kind of flat, trees, pretty, idyllic and then you come out here and how do you get something that big onto this and get it into proportion. A lot of them really struggled artistically to get it into proportion and get it down.”
The work itself has come from over 19 galleries, institutions and collections throughout Canada. Along with the Whyte Museum’s considerable collection, Ewen has drawn images from the Glenbow Museum, the Canadian embassy in Washington, and possibly – if it came together – a painting by Charles Fraser Comfort that hangs office of Canada’s prime minister.
While Ewen is focusing on the free pass program and its result on the history of art and what it did for Canada’s sense of identity, she is also including the more political and difficult stories that look at the role of Chinese rail workers and displacement of aboriginal people.
Both stories, she said, allow the exhibition to talk about Canada’s national policies and the effect development had on minority groups in the West.
“In a way it is a story unto its own. This whole CPR story, there are so many stories within a story, within a story,” she said.
The opening reception for Picturing the Canadian Pacific Railway begins June 8 at 7 p.m.
