I wanted to break this point out from the last post, because it doesn’t really have anything to do with my own personal history. Well, it sort of does, in the sense that my mother worked for the CPR for a lot of years and I grew up as a railway kid, and the railway looms large in the minds of a lot of people on the prairies. So I feel a kind of ownership of the CPR, and its various assets, including those that have been divested — Fairmont, I’m looking at you and your hotel properties — but this isn’t about that odd sensation.

The Glenbow Museum is currently hosting an exhibition called “Vistas: Artists on the Canadian Pacific Railway.” I’ll let them describe it, since they’re better at this sort of thing than I am:

In 1871, with a vision of a new nation spanning the continent, Sir John A. Macdonald promised a railway link to the Pacific Ocean if British Columbia joined Confederation.

Glenbow’s Vistas: Artists on the Canadian Pacific Railway features works by 20 artists who travelled west, courtesy of the CPR and William Van Horne. These remarkable artists captured images of the prairie and the mountains, incorporating them into Canada’s emerging national identity.

It is a spectacularly good exhibit. The CPR encouraged and paid for artists to travel with them as the railway was being built, and although a lot of it is quintessentially Canadian frontier stuff, it’s really really well done Canadian frontier stuff. We forget how important rail links were in bringing this country together, and this is the visual story of an age that we’ll probably never see again in our lifetimes.

I was particularly taken with the work of William McFarlane Notman, who was one of the only photographers who showed up in the entire exhibit. The quality is breathtaking. The fact that he was working with 30×40 view cameras probably didn’t hurt matters much. (The above link goes to his collected works, not the work in the exhibit.)