Article Database - Celebrating Leighton’s Landscapes

Just as significantly, Leighton’s decision to settle in the Calgary area, after he quit the CPR, found him in a regional art scene that was barely existent, says retired arts administrator Les Graff in Edmonton. Leighton’s art training, talent, and standing were extremely impressive to western artists. "It was so far and above what local people were doing, he was a kind of giant in the arena," says Graff, a director with the provincial government’s Alberta Culture department for 31 years.

Nationally, landscape painting was under the strong influence of the famous Group of Seven painters, notably A.Y. Jackson, and British Columbia’s Emily Carr, whose styles were at odds with Leighton’s Even so, many Alberta art students, a breed that would come into its own by the 1950s, learned from Leighton’s technical mastery, whether or not they copied his visually academic manner.

"Leighton was a very strong, skilled individual, and he contributed a great deal to those early years," Graff says. "I call him a very important foundation artist. He was one of the people who made art a thing unto its own in Alberta." Leighton proved you could survive financially as an artist in Alberta, Graff says. "It isn’t just a pastime or a hobby like the flower shows in the spring. You could take this stuff seriously."

Savage believes Leighton hasn’t received the national recognition his work deserves, in part because of central Canada’s range of attention to art, which "stops at Winnipeg."

But other factors, too, worked against him. In a biographical description of the artist for and exhibition at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in 1989, former Edmonton Art Gallery director Terry Fenton wrote that when Leighton quit as head of the art college in 1938 for health reasons, he effectively ended his public life.

"Leighton’s art deserves to be more widely known," Fenton wrote. "In Canada it should be measured against the best related work of his contemporaries. It seldom has been."

A.C. Leighton; Valley of the Giants, Banff, 1950, Oil on canvas, 45.7 x 55.9 cm, Collection of the Leighton Foundation.

Fenton continued, "Because he was so tenuously connected with the Canadian art world, he remains something of an artist without a country." The Depression didn’t help sales of his paintings, and by the late 1940s, "he was virtually a recluse, avoiding contact with his fellow artists in Calgary, let alone those in the remainder of Canada." (Leighton’s library, dominated by the published output of British painters, shows his indifference to Canadian art.)

Today, apart from a substantial collection at the Leighton Foundation and smaller collections at the Whyte Museum, the Glenbow [Museum, in Calgary, Alberta], and the Edmonton Art Gallery, most Leighton paintings remain in private hands in Calgary.

For all his reclusiveness, Leighton continued to paint, frequently not bothering to date his work—an omission that makes it difficult for curators and art critics to detail with precision the progression of his style. It is apparent, however, that his oil paintings of the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s (he began using that medium in the mid-1930s) are more complex in texture than his earlier work.

There is no doubt his technique and vision evolved after he relocated to Canada, says Lori Ellis, art and exhibitions coordinator with the Whyte Museum [in Banff, Alberta].

"It’s evident in his work that he probably relaxed a bit from that European influence and changed quite a lot in perspective about the types of views he would use in a work," she says. "I certainly believe that technically he was a fine painter. When I look at his work, I think there’s a certain air of romance about it in relation to the Canadian Rockies."

"Ace" died in 1965. In 1974, Barbara Leighton established the Leighton Foundation as a legacy to her late husband. She set up the Leighton Centre in their last home together, on 80 acres near the Millarville Valley with a 300-mile panoramic view of his beloved Rockies. About 13,000 Calgary school children each year take art instruction there.

A.C. Leighton’s paintings hang through the Centre, bearing witness to the artist’s undeniable ability to visually express the majesty and beauty of nature. "I’m in awe of his treatment of western skies," says artist Suzanne McCarthy, now on staff at the Centre.

But some of his methods for capturing scenes remain a mystery. He claimed to paint watercolours on location and oils in the studio. However, during research there, Fenton decided some of the former had been done indoors, while the artist left few details about whether the oils were completed from high-altitude sketches or from photos taken by him or somebody else. Clues may or may not reside in that secluded burial mound.

The Leighton Centre’s Paula Swann, assistant to the director, who knows where the treasure is hidden, doubts whether anyone will ever be permitted to put a shovel to it. "It’s part of the lore," she says. "Why go and dig it up?"

Bob Blakey is a veteran journalist in Calgary.

Reprinted from Legacy Magazine, Fall 2000, with the generous permission of the publisher and the author.