St. Mary's Lake, by A.C. Leighton

This is the kind of painting that resulted in AC Leighton becoming an artist for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Scenes of wherever their tracks went, became posters and were displayed on train coaches, and in railroad stations and magazines. They inspired people to travel - and to visit Canada from abroad.

This painting reflects, Leighton's English watercolour background. While the scene is beautiful, its colours are muted and the power and grandeur of the Rockies is only one step removed from the hills and the lake country of northern England.

Leighton paints with a restricted palette. This is a picture of blues and browns and with a reduced middle range of light values. This constriction has sensory and emotional consequences. The edges of emotion are rubbed out...almost mistified, and indeed, almost mystified. And, this is the power of the painting. St. Mary's lake reaches across the globe into travel offices and its neutralized, dreamlike quality suggests that there is beauty to be seen, beyond the horizon, and this beauty is untrammeled by wires and crowds, and that this beauty is available if you let the Canadian Pacific Railrroad take you there.

Leighton's art can be seen in Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, in Banff, Alberta.

Please visit: www.sharecom.ca/leighton

AC Leighton, Painter of the Rockies

AC (Alfred Crocker Leighton) emigrated to Canada in 1924, at the age of 23. He was hired by the Canadian Pacific Railway to paint scenes which enamoured Canada to the rest of the world. And, no area in Canada seized the imagination of people at home and abroad as the Rocky Mountains. The CPR, provided Leighton with accommodation and food in return for first rights of purchase of his paintings. Leighton's imagination was seized by the Rocky mountains and in 1933 he established the visual arts programme for the Banff School of Fine Arts. Leighton's health began to fail him when he was about 35 years of age and he returned to England. He returned to Canada prior to WW2, and moved to Vancouver Island, and for a time he lived in California. He died at the age of 64, leaving one of the most visual records of the Canadian Rockies, ever painted at that time.

Collections of his works can be seen in the following museums:
Glenbow Museum, Calgary: http://www.glenbow.org/
The Whyte Museum of Banff, Alberta. http://www.whyte.org/

Source: Terry Fenton: http://www.sharecom.ca/leighton/rockies.html