A railway that defined the country’s image
CP’s Montreal studio commissioned work from Group of Seven artists
When the last spike was driven into the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885, the company that had connected Canada from coast to coast faced a whole new challenge: generating traffic on the line.
In less than five years, CP had expanded its railway from northern Ontario to the Pacific coast, crossing the wilds of the Prairies and the rugged mountains of southern British Columbia in the process.
To do so, the railway was granted 25 million acres (10 million hectares) of land by the federal government, but it knew that land would be worthless if it wasn’t settled.
“If you don’t attract people to develop that land, you don’t have enough traffic on your line because nobody’s producing anything on that land, and there you are — you die,” said Marc Choko, the author of Canadian Pacific: Creating a Brand, Building a Nation, a new coffee-table book that explores CP’s impressive legacy of commercial art and design. So CP began a fervent campaign to attract settlers and tourists to Canada, and particularly the West, led by Cornelius Van Horne, who rose to be the railway’s president in 1888.
“It was a matter of survival to change the image of Canada and attract as many people as they could,” said Choko, who is professor emeritus of the school of design at Université du Québec à Montréal.
At first, CP focused on changing “the image of this very rough, terrible, cold, inhospitable country into a paradise for settlers” through hundreds of thousands of leaflets, brochures and posters printed in several languages, Choko says.
But Van Horne quickly realized there was also an opportunity to attract tourists to Canada, and began building luxury lodging like the Banff Springs Hotel, the Empress Hotel in Victoria and the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City to cater to wealthy visitors from Europe and the United States.
This coincided with the launch of a complementary pillar of CP’s business: steamship operations that offered around-the-world trips with stops in exotic locations such as Egypt, Sumatra and Japan.
To advertise its new offerings, CP began producing reams of iconic commercial art out of its own silkscreen studio in Montreal, commissioning work from famous Canadian artists — including members of the Group of Seven — and, in the process, redefining what it meant to be Canadian.
CP no longer operates hotels or steamships, or even carries rail passengers, but according to Choko, many of the images we associate with Canada — from beavers to Banff to big game — were widely disseminated by CP.
“I think they succeeded in changing the image of Canada as they wanted,” he said.
Choko said it’s impossible to measure the quantity of commercial art that CP churned out over the years — even today, previously unknown posters still pop up in European auctions.
The only company that would come remotely close to CP in terms of producing iconic commercial design is Coca-Cola, but even that’s not really comparable, Choko said.
“We’re talking about thousands of different posters printed, each one in hundreds or in thousands of copies in many different languages,” he said. “I really don’t think there was any equivalent.”