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William Cornelius Van Horne understood the power of mountains. In the late 19th century, the legendary president of the Canadian Pacific Railway oversaw the construction of Canada’s first transcontinental line and knew that Canada’s Rockies had the potential to become one of the world’s great tourist destinations. As he famously declared, “Since we can’t export the scenery, we will have to import the tourists.” But even so, Van Horne, a powerful man with the renegade vision and inexhaustible energy inherent amongst early nation builders, eventually did find a way to move mountains: through art.
He commissioned renowned landscape artists such as Frederic Marlett Bell-Smith and Marmaduke Matthews to paint the mountains; the resulting works travelled the globe in promotional exhibits touting the glories of the “Canadian Alps.” For Van Horne, these works not only revealed the majesty of nature but also his personal triumph. The CPR, with its tracks and timetables, had civilized an untamed wilderness, allowing upper-class tourists to drink in its vistas along with an aperitif.
From this pragmatic beginning was born a tradition of art-making in the Canadian Rockies that was to reveal itself over time as a reflection of visitors’ changing relationship with this environment. To take an art tour of the Bow Valley is to discover a wealth of stories about the people who visited the Rockies intending only to capture the mountains in paint, but who found themselves instead taken captive by a force more profound.
In search of Van Horne’s Banff, I find myself drawn up winding Mountain Avenue to the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel. Depending on your point of view, the colossal resort-castle is either a magnificent heritage monument or a misplaced monstrosity. Either way, it is the most visible legacy of the former CPR president’s influence on these mountains. The story has it that when Van Horne came to inspect the hotel during construction, he found, to his horror, that it was being built backwards: the staff, rather than the paying guests, were getting the million-dollar view. He ordered the hotel rebuilt the right way round, so that visitors would get what they paid for.
Van Horne was a painter in his own right and one of his landscapes still hangs in a grand hallway of the hotel. A closer look reveals Van Horne’s name signed backwards – a subtle reminder of his lingering irritation over the debacle.
If there is one place in these mountains that embodies the area’s early 20th-century golden age of art, it’s the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff. I’m here on a chilly, overcast day, when the mountains are barely visible outside, and paintings must tell the story in their place. This museum, with its gallery spaces for historic and contemporary art, is a treasure on the banks of the Bow River. Its origins date back to the late 1950s, when it was the vision of pioneering artists Peter and Catharine Whyte.
Peter Whyte was a local boy who went to art school in Boston and returned home with an unlikely bride: Catharine Robb, a young woman whose social status can be inferred from the fact that in order to marry Whyte, she turned down a member of the Rockefeller family. Her regal portrait, prominently displayed in the main hall of the museum, also speaks to her privileged origins and adds to the romance of her abandonment of that world to join Peter in this remote mountain town.
Their cosy log house next to the museum, and open to visitors on guided tours, displays some of their canvases as well as their painting paraphernalia. The Whytes’ landscapes have a warmth and intimacy that reveal their deep love for these mountains. Peter, in particular, took an interest in the Stoney and Blackfoot people, committing their images to canvas at a time when their traditional way of life was swiftly vanishing.
Curator Michale Lang takes me into the stacks in the basement of the museum to impress upon me the volume of artistic treasures held in this 1,200-square-foot vault. Approximately 49,000 artworks make up the collection, and are either in storage here or on display upstairs. In the stacks, I spot pieces by the CPR artists, some of which will be displayed next year in the museum’s Gateway to the Rockies exhibition. As well, there are portraits of early Banff settlers such as outfitter Jimmy Simpson rendered by expatriate Russian painter Nicolas de Grandmaison, yet another artist who came to visit and stayed. It was Simpson who invited the famed American wildlife artist Carl Rungius to Banff in 1910 and took him on pack trips around the Bow Valley and into Jasper. On those trips, Rungius produced sketches of what would later be some of his most iconic portrayals of mountain fauna. For the next 20 summers, after 1922, Rungius split his time between New York and a small studio in Banff, which he called the Paintbox.
It’s not difficult to understand what drew these early-20th-century artists to the Rockies. Many were iconoclasts and adventurous free spirits. For some, this frontier represented freedom from civilization’s encrusted traditions. Independent women such as Mary Schaffer, the first white woman to see Maligne Lake, came to the Rockies to paint wildflowers and wear trousers. And a new generation of artists, which included members of Canada’s Group of Seven, whose works dating from the 1920s to the early 1960s can be found in the museum’s vaults, saw these New World mountains as a challenge to push beyond the picturesque landscape tradition inherited from Europe.
Even so, as Lang points out, it would be a mistake to paint these artists as environmentalists before their time. Not that these generations of painters didn’t cherish the wilderness, but some, like Rungius, were actually big-game trophy hunters.
Even Group of Seven painters such as Lawren Harris and A.Y. Jackson envisioned wilderness more in terms of its significance to Canadian identity than its intrinsic value. In their day, representational art was concerned with the personal meaning of the landscape on the artist. And, with a glorious vista at every turn of the road, the hard-won beauty of traditional landscape painting had lost some of the cachet it held in the days of the packhorse. Harris’s pared-down, almost abstract canvases of the Bow Valley peaks and Maligne Lake area are famous examples of this modernist trend.
So with the feeling that I had barely scratched the surface of all that the museum holds, I reluctantly move on. The sky is still clouded over and the wind icy as I make my way up Tunnel Mountain to The Banff Centre. This specialized arts and culture institution, which offers programs in creativity, leadership development, mountain culture and the environment, began life as the Banff School of Fine Arts in the 1930s, its painting program founded by artists Alfred Crocker Leighton and Walter Phillips.
Leighton and his wife, Barbara, were another unconventional artist couple, contemporaries of the Whytes who unapologetically eschewed society’s rules. (Their most famous exploit: missing their own wedding dinner to take a painting pack trip into the backcountry.)
Phillips, meanwhile, was a master printmaker and woodcutter. Much of his craft was learned from Japanese artists working in a tradition dating back to early masters like Hiroshige. Today, the Walter Phillips Gallery at the centre presents ancient aboriginal craftwork alongside contemporary work, such as a recent exhibit of snowboarding-inspired art in various media.
Back in Banff, I discover that despite its bustling cosmopolitan feel, the town is still small enough that I can explore most of its galleries on foot in a single afternoon. It’s also here that the modern themes of mountain art become apparent.
At Canada House gallery on Bear Street, landscape paintings have taken a backseat to wildlife art. Here, I discover that depictions of bears are prevalent. It seems the beleaguered grizzly, perhaps the most potent modern symbol of vanishing wilderness, roams through the imagination of many contemporary artists.
Just as Peter Whyte must have felt an urgency to paint the Blackfoot, so too are today’s mountain artists capturing what is most threatened. In the stacks of the Whyte Museum, I saw the work of Canmore artist Maureen Enns, the wife of grizzly bear researcher Charlie Russell. Enns, whose exhibition Grizzly! shows at the museum June 19 to October 11, was terrified of bears until she had a peaceful close encounter with a sow and her cub in 1991 while riding in the backcountry. Since that time, the study and understanding of bears has become a vital part of her life. Her paintings of grizzlies mingle photographic realism with more abstract forms that imagine a bear’s-eye view of nature.
Another contemporary exhibit at the Whyte featured work by Canmore artist Jan Kabatoff. Entitled Glacier: A Journey, the project charts the effect of climate change on these fragile frozen landscapes. Her multimedia work included painting, textiles, photography and mould impressions inspired by the artists’ visits to seven glaciers on three continents. The show was endorsed by Water for Life, the United Nations’ decade of action on water issues. In the artist’s words, glaciers are “sentient beings, and I strive to grasp their ephemeral nature to better understand our interconnectedness with the natural world.”
On my frosty, fogbound final morning, I drive up the Bow Valley parkway to another grand edifice, the chateau on the shore of what may be the most painted lake in Canada, if not the world. Lake Louise was dubbed “the heartbeat of mountaineering” in its early days, but it wasn’t only climbers who flocked here. Artists and photographers very quickly discovered the wonders of the lake and its surroundings. Early CPR artists like Bell-Smith had to camp out here with their easels, but the railway eventually built a log chalet to accommodate visitors. The lake became a starting-off point for art expeditions into the backcountry, just as it is today.
Now, entering the stunning, recently refurbished 552-room Chateau Lake Louise, I’m greeted by an understated but magical chandelier in the front lobby, which pays tribute to the wives of the early Swiss guides who led climbing expeditions through the Rockies. Back when the “chateau” was still a small log structure amid the vastness, the guides’ wives would stand at the doorway after sunset with lanterns to show the returning climbing parties the way home.
The Mount Temple Wing, completed in 2004, boasts lofty stained-glass windows that depict, not saints or divinities, but wildlife. Each window displays the web of interrelationships that develop around a particular animal, such as the wolf or the lake trout. The effect is surprisingly moving, especially as one gazes through these cathedral-sized windows to the far older Cretaceous-era cathedrals of stone outside.
These windows, along with the wing’s murals describing the history of human activity in the Lake Louise area, serve as a vivid reminder of the changes in attitude towards these mountains that art has reflected over the last century and a half. From a trickle of hearty explorers, the CPR turned the Rockies into a playground for the wealthy and, eventually, the “age of the automobile” opened up the mountain parks to the masses.
As I drive out of Banff the following day, the sun is shining and the mountains at last emerge. Taking advantage of the change in weather, a young man sets up an easel on the sidewalk to paint the same dazzling peaks that the railway artists beheld more than a century before. I’m struck by how little these awesome, abiding presences would have changed in that time compared to the art that depicts them. While early artists set out to subdue wilderness on canvas, contemporary artists seek to remind us of how enmeshed we are with nature, and how little we still understand it.
