Banff’s streets weren’t paved, and telephones, water lines, and electricity were a year away when he was born in 1905. Banff was already a tourist town, and his father had started a grocery and dry goods firm here. The presence of good resident artists - as well as visitors - induced Peter Whyte to consider painting as a career.
At Art School in Boston Peter met Catharine Robb, also a painting student. Boston debutante, sailing companion of the Rockefeller boys, heir to the intellectual and collecting talents of her grandfather Edward Sylvester Morse, Catharine grew up in a home that was nearly a mansion, but she was certainly expected to knit and mend and practice the crafts that her mother had made a career in designing and selling.
Romance did not thicken rapidly. It was 1927 before they fell silently and secretly in love, and Pete took a trip around the world by himself before they married in 1930. Catharine fell in love with Pete’s mountains quickly. Their first summer they dedicated to painting wilderness and Indian subjects, and in the autumn they arranged with Earl Spencer to build their log home studio, principally following Pete’s design.
In the spring of 1931 they returned to the mountains from Concord, Massachusetts, and skied the Skoki region while their home was being finished.
Springs and summers they spent in the Rockies, but as autumn’s first snow threatened, they went back to New England to visit Catharine’s mother. In February 1932 they returned to the Rockies and took over the management of the Skoki ski lodge which Pete’s brother Cliff and another Banff pioneer, Cyril Paris, had started. Pete had been an active ski jumper in his youth, and Catharine was quite outdoors oriented and took to skiing easily. In 1933 a ski accident which took the life of the British mathematician R.E.A.C. Paley, led to the Whytes’ forsaking management of the lodge.
Through the 1930s Peter and Catharine painted industriously, both the mountain wilderness they loved, particularly the Bow Lake and Lake O’Hara regions, and a series of portraits as well, painting both the famous (like Tom Wilson and William Twin) and the no-so-well-known (like Pete’s grandfather, John Donaldson Curren). They travelled extensively in those years as well, painting in Norway, Switzerland, Japan, China, and Bali, and collecting the memorabilia in which their home abounds.
In the war years Peter joined the militia. In 1941 he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, becoming a photo technician at Tofino on Vancouver Island. A painting he entered in an airmen’s competition won second prize and brought his artistic talents to the attention of the people running Canada’s War Painters’ Programme. Pete became a sergeant, but did not see active duty overseas.
After the war the Whytes spent most of their time in Banff, and turned their home into a fully winterized house, digging a basement for central heating, no longer relying on stove, Quebec heater, and fireplaces during cold snaps. The home had grown to accommodate a larger and concealed studio, a dark room, and a woodworking shop.
In the 1950s the Whytes, interested in preserving more of the Rocky Mountain heritage, established what they then called the Wa-Che-Yo-Cha-Pa Foundation. Among their goals was the eventual preservation and exhibit of their home as an example “of a pleasant way of living in these times.” They assembled the properties which Pete’s father had owned, and adjacent properties along the river. When Pete fell ill in 1965 plans moved rapidly forward. The Foundation created the Archives of the Canadian Rockies, drew up plans for the large building which would house the Archives and the Peter Whyte Gallery [now known as the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies.]
Pete died in December 1966 at the age of 61, but he saw the plans before he died. In June 1968 the new building opened, and the Foundation began to serve its public directly.
After Pete’s death Catharine plunged into interests in the cultural community, attending museum association meetings, being a Glenbow Governor, painting in the arctic at Povungnituk, Pangnirtung, and Chesterfield Inlet, hiking in Nepal, Patagonia, and the Rockies, skiing in the Bugaboos, touring to Skoki each spring with other members of the family, and - of great importance to her - competing annually in Banff’s Veterans’ Ski Race. Year after year she won awards for being the oldest competitor.
A great letter writer, Catharine and her mother preserved nearly every document that passed between them from 1916 to 1961. Those letters provide an unmatched record of social life in Banff from 1930 on. Rich in anecdote and description, they are constantly engaging. The interested person can peruse a sample of them in The Peter and Catharine Whyte Commemorative Portfolio , a copy of which is available for reading in the Museum’s Archives.
At the age of 72 (1979) Catharine died, and work began on the development of the Whytes’ home, as well as the Moores’, into the sorts of publicly accessible museums they have become.
