We’ve seen this cover before on a menu from the Chung collection. As I pointed out then, Canadian Pacific ordered 18 dome-observation cars from the Budd Company, each named after a national or provincial park, and decorated the interiors with paintings by a different Canadian artist. Two of the paintings were put on covers of beverage menus used in the lounges under the domes.

Click image to download an 881-KB PDF of this menu.

All of the murals themselves (except one from a car that was wrecked in 1959) were in storage in a museum, so at the time I posted the Chung menus I was unable to identify for certain which murals were on the menu covers. Based on photographs of the parks, I guessed that one was of Laurentide National Park and the other Kootenay National Park.

Since then, I’ve learned that a whole book has been written about the murals, Murals from a Great Canadian Train, by Ian Thom. It turns out I was right: the menu covers represent Laurentide and Kootenay national parks.

The cover of this menu, from my own collection, is Laurentide, and was painted by Albert Edward Cloutier (1902-1965). While most of the paintings used in mural lounges were fairly realistic, Cloutier took a lot of liberties with his mural: using different scenes in one painting; warping perspectives; and even including an oversized image of an artist, presumably himself. In addition to the mural lounge, Cloutier painted a mural and carved some wood panels for Canadian National’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal.