Max Jacquiard’s CNR Portraits in Paint How he became the Robert Bateman of trains

Max Jacquiard (1934-2022) was not a railway artist in a casual sense of the term. He did not set out to paint steam locomotives as symbols, nor as exercises in nostalgia or vehicles for abstraction. His work arose from proximity, observation and memory — the lived experience of growing up in Flin Flon, Manitoba, a railway town served exclusively by Canadian National Railways, where steam locomotives were part of daily life rather than distant spectacle. In 1944, in his pre-teens, he moved to British Columbia with his parents.

Jacquiard never worked for a railway, yet those early sights and sounds clearly infiltrated his subconscious. Barrie Sanford, author of the 2012 book Train Master: The Railway Art of Max Jacquiard, documents the artist’s career, starting in a print-shop darkroom. The setting likely suited Jacquiard well. There, he would have learned to coax the best from commercial imagery, refining tone, contrast and balance. Perhaps this experience allowed him to later include so many night scenes in his repertoire.