With its dramatic landscapes and rugged beauty, Alberta's Bow River valley has inspired generations of artists. The Painted Valley : Artists Along Alberta's Bow River, 1845-2000 brings together a collection of works by local and visiting artists from 1845 to 2000 that captures the many moods of the river and its valley from its source high in the Rocky Mountains down to the city of Calgary and eastward across the open prairie.

Christopher Armstrong and H.V. Nelles have selected works from a number of Alberta museums and national collections, which depict the Bow River and its valley, representing a broad array of historical periods, artistic styles, and points of view. From European topographers and military artists to painters commissioned by the Canadian Pacific Railway, from the Group of Seven to modernism and abstraction, these pictures of the Bow valley tell us much about changing attitudes toward nature and the environment as well as the evolution of an artistic community in western Canada.

Christopher Armstrong is co-author, with H.V. Nelles, of The Painted Valley: Artists Along Alberta's Bow River, 1845-2000.

Christopher Armstrong's profile page

H.V. Nelles is the L.R. Wilson Professor of Canadian History at McMaster University and Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at York University. Both have written and published extensively on Canadian history and are widely recognized as two of the foremost scholars in the field.

H.V. Nelles' profile page

The Painted Valley is a significant contribution to the documentation of the history of Western Canadian Landscape. It is beautifully illustrated with carefully selected examples of paintings that inform the text. The authors, Christopher Armstrong and H.V. Nelles, are environmental historians and they bring a fresh perspective and original approach to the development of Western Canadian representational landscape painting.

?Graham Fowler, The Free Library