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Expanding Horizons is the first exploration and analysis of this visually splendid subject. It will employ a revolutionary approach to landscape painting and photography in the period stretching from the outset of the American Civil War to the close of World War I, an era of artistic and historical transformation coinciding with the westward expansion of the two countries. Close to 200 works by American and Canadian artists will shed light on the national and regional identities of these two great countries, in which nature is ever-present. Organized around six themes, the exhibition draws upon stylistic similarities and differences, while revealing key cultural contrasts. Moreover, this exhibition鈥檚 innovative and 鈥渆nvironmentally friendly鈥� design and catalogue will provide a contemporary take on its subject. Following its presentation in Montreal this summer, Expanding Horizons will travel to the Vancouver Art Gallery in October. The generous co-operation of outstanding international public and private collections will enable us to exhibit some of the most celebrated examples of landscape painting and photography ever produced by these two nations. American painting will be represented by such artists as Bierstadt, Chase, Church, Cropsey, Duncanson, Eakins, -Hartley, Hassam, Heade, Homer, Inness, Kensett, Moran, O鈥橩eeffe, Remington, Sargent and Twachtman; and photography by Coburn, Curtis, Jackson, -Muybridge, O鈥橲ullivan, Steichen, Stieglitz, Strand and Watkins, among others. Outstanding paintings by Canadians, including works by Brymner, Carr, Cullen, Edson, Fraser, Gagnon, Harris, Jackson, Jacoby, Leduc, MacDonald, Milne, Morrice, Suzor-Cot茅, Thomson and Verner, as well as works by photographers, including Baltzly, Henderson and Notman, will also be presented. While some of the Canadian figures are well known internationally, -others have undeservedly received less recognition than their American counterparts. The exhibition will address this imbalance. The period of 1860 through 1918 was chosen -precisely because it encompasses the searing -experience of the Civil War (which witnessed over 600,000 casualties) and its aftermath in the United States, Canadian Confederation and the emergence of a more sophisticated community of painters and photographers, the focus on expansion westward to the Pacific coast and the realization of the transcontinental political definition of both countries. In the United States, expansion outward and across the North American continent to the limits of both coasts and extending north and south of its existing borders was given conscious expression in the concept of Manifest Destiny, which built upon earlier territorial speculations and saw rapid development from the 1840s on throughout the remainder of the century. The thesis of Manifest Destiny was that the diversity, great democratic freedoms and moral virtues embodied in the American people and their system of government destined them, with Divine blessing, to establish a cultural and political entity under the auspices of the federal Union across the western hemisphere. While the origins of the concept of American 鈥渆xceptionalism鈥� could be traced back to seventeenth-century New England writers and preachers, the full development of its territorial implications was a phenomenon of the nineteenth century. Canada knew no such phenomenon as Manifest Destiny. Yet the history of Canadian Confederation, the country鈥檚 expansion westward and the crucial unification of the provinces by means of the Canadian Pacific Railroad cannot be understood without reference to its neighbour to the south. A symbiotic relationship with the United States underlay the development of Canada and the evolution of the Canadian national identity, despite festering and, at times, explosive internal divisions among English, French and M茅tis communities. Apart from speeches in the United States Congress and articles in the American press urging, at different times throughout the century, the integration of the Canadian north into the Union, specific events south of the border motivated the unification of British North America. A tense Civil War neutrality, seen by the Americans as biased towards the secessionist South (as was Britain鈥檚), frequently threatened trading restrictions and cross-border incidents spurred the negotiators of unification in Quebec City in 1864 and the subsequent meetings that led to the 1867 accord instituting Confederation. The American obsession with closing off British territorial access to North American ports played a role in encouraging an increasingly isolated British Columbia to enter Confederation in 1871, a proposition sweetened by Ottawa鈥檚 offer to build a transcontinental railroad. On the heels of Seward鈥檚 purchase of Alaska in 1867, the United State鈥檚 aggressive bid to acquire Rupert鈥檚 Land, a territory comprising a quarter of the North American continent, from the Hudson鈥檚 Bay Company was reluctantly refused by the company due to pressure from Britain and Canada. The latter acquired the immense territory in 1869 for the bargain price of $1,500,000. Beginning in the 1840s, the idealized vision of the North American landscape, given a profound spiritual dimension as an expression of Divine covenant with America by the artists of the Hudson River School, resonated with this call westward and outward. It also found other stylistic expressions over the succeeding decades, characterized by a visionary and, at times, missionary zeal. The American landscape was proclaimed as offering both self-revelation and the fulfilment of a national destiny, in which Indigenous populations were mythologized, played no role or a subsidiary role, or were seen as obstacles. Thus, this exhibition thematically explores the evolution of Canadian and American national self-definitions through the depictions of the two countries in painted and photographed landscapes. Canadian artists were very aware of and many of them profoundly influenced by stylistic movements and major cultural events in the United States during these sixty years. Works by the Hudson River School, the influential visits of American artists such as Robert S. Duncanson, the art commerce offered by Boston and New York, the Armory Show in New York and the Buffalo exhibition of contemporary Scandinavian art in 1913 had a great impact on the history of Canadian painting. Canadian artists distinguished themselves, both aesthetically and literally, through their more domestic and less monumental approach to landscape 鈥� their canvases were in general considerably smaller, and they did not tend to share the American taste for cycloramas and enormous scale. They also carried within them different attitudes towards their relationship with nature. Furthermore, since Montreal was the centre of Canadian artistic activity during the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a marked openness to continental European trends. As for photography, the changing aesthetics and subjects selected by American artists, beginning with the documentary Western survey images of the American post-Civil War, later paralleled by the Canadian Pacific Railroad鈥檚 commissions to Canadian photographers, and the implications of the technical innovations realized by George Eastman impressed themselves upon photographers in both countries. At the same time, a dynamic, independent photographic enterprise, most notably achieved and perpetuated by William Notman and his successors, existed in Canada. It is the thesis of this exhibition that, through the presentation and comparison of American and Canadian depictions of landscapes, the similar and differing intentions underlying their production and commissions, their complementary yet distinctive compositional structures and styles, and their prioritizations of subjects, much can be revealed about both nations. To better explore and analyze these distinctions, the exhibition has been divided into six thematic sections that, while inevitably maintaining a certain chronological flow, also serve to focus the viewer on the different attitudes towards the terms of encounter with nature in the two nations. Nature Transcendent explores the spiritually infused idealization of landscape conjoined with the meticulous detailing embraced by the Hudson River School and its followers. That style and vision also influenced painters in Canada, and its resonances continued to inform landscape imagery to the end of the century, metamorphosing into Luminism, which favoured a more internalized evocation of spiritual experience before nature. The Stage of History and the Theatre of Myth explores the historical and mythic framework into which landscape was projected in the two countries and its concomitant depictions of Native peoples. Landscape thus served as manipulated backdrop for consciously modelled histories, even in the choices and framing of photographic imagery. Man versus Nature investigates the manners in which the transformation, exploitation and destruction of nature were presented in the name of progress. Generally, in Canadian imagery, with the -notable exception of photographs documenting the laying of the transcontinental railroad, artists focussed on the dynamic challenges and interplay between man and nature, while their American counterparts tended to emphasize domination and mastering of nature鈥檚 powers and obstacles. Nature Domesticated turns to the different vision of nature that evolved in North America as a consequence of its wide-open spaces and the importance of the city, i.e., as a source of leisure for an increasingly urbanized public seeking relief from daily stress, the personal reassurance of individualism, and idyllic escapism. The dramatic shift of population to urban centres in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the rise of major metropolises across the continent provided a novel perspective on nature for photographers and painters in both countries. The Urban Landscape examines the rise of an -alternative expression of the optimism and Providential destiny previously articulated by the evocation of Virgin Nature. This new frontier, however, was also capable of entrapping man in a debasing and dehumanizing existence. Return to Nature addresses the 鈥渞ediscovery鈥� of the transcendence of nature and its spiritual facets through landscapes by artists working within the stylistic terms of the twentieth century, using vivid, abstract colour, simplified forms, and minimizing or eliminating human activity, to evoke nature鈥檚 spiritual dimension. Expanding Horizons has been organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition is presented in Montreal by Sun Life Financial. The exhibition is also supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art. The Museum would like to recognize the tireless support of the Association of Volunteer Guides of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The Museum also thanks the Conseil des arts de Montr茅al and the Minist猫re de la Culture, des Communications et de la Condition f茅minine du Qu茅bec for their ongoing support. Catalogue The 320-page lavishly illustrated exhibition catalogue has been published in English and French by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and edited by Hilliard T. Goldfarb, Associate Chief Curator at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and chief curator of the exhibition. The catalogue contains essays by a team of experts, including Philip Brookman, Brian Foss, Fran莽ois-Marc Gagnon, Hilliard T. Goldfarb, Richard Hill, Lynda Jessup, T. J. Jackson Lears, Rosalind Pepall and Ian Thom. Graphic design is by orangetango.