From The Painted Valley
A cursory look at Alberta’s Bow River Valley, when combined with a little historical knowledge of Calgary, suggests that the overwhelming desire of all those who set eyes on the landscape — explorers, early immigrants — was the irresistible urge to build something. However, first came the craving to draw and paint. In their new book, The Painted Valley: Artists Along Alberta’s Bow River, 1845-2000 (University of Calgary Press, 200 pp.), authors Christopher Armstrong and H.V. Nelles display a wide array of images created along the Bow over 150 years. These works demonstrate the region’s enduring appeal for anyone with an artistic bent.
At the book’s official launch at the Glenbow Museum, Armstrong noted in his speech that gifted amateurs and seasoned professionals alike have been drawn to the Bow River Valley between Banff and the prairie east of Calgary. They’ve displayed many artistic styles and points of view, starting with sketches that were more of a means to an end (eventual political or economic development) than framed pictures for a gallery or living room.
“The first Europeans who came to paint were what we call imperial topographers,” says Armstrong. They were military officers or police officers sent, in the pre-photography years, to create a visual record.
“Before the camera, you had to know how to make watercolour sketches and take them back to your commander-in-chief,” says Armstrong. “The earliest European we’ve been able to find came in 1845. He was sent by the British commander-in-chief of North America during the Oregon boundary dispute with the United States. He went to the West Coast, came back down the Bow and did watercolours all along the way.”
With the coming of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1883, the surveyor-sketcher gave way to the “railway romantics,” the painters whose lush colours and majestic mountain vistas established an image of this region that endures to this day, especially among Europeans.
The railway encouraged this view, of course, because it was great for business. CPR boss William Van Horne, who famously remarked that you couldn’t export the scenery, so you had to import the tourists, understood the value of posters and brochures. Consequently, renowned artists were given free train tickets and often paid for their paintings of the mountains and the Bow Valley, in all their seductive grandeur. Sometimes, the book observes, they gave the landscape the look of New York’s Hudson River or Europe’s Alps, because those were part of the visual vocabulary in which the artists were trained.
“Some of them came for several years and painted up and down the region — particularly Lucius O’Brien,” says Armstrong. “Some of their paintings were bought by the railway, while others were used as advertising illustrations. That’s how people in the 19th century came to know this wonderful scenery.
“But the artists were mostly interested in those snow-covered mountains and more or less ignored the river down below, (including) my good friend Ted Godwin,” adds Armstrong. “His picture of the lower Bow is on the cover of the book.”
Granted, the mountains were a visual hit — Mount Rundle being the Rockies’ superstar, judging from how often it turns up in paintings — but the Bow Valley is often there as well, even if it’s just to provide a visual balance of the horizontal and the vertical. The book’s best examples, unsurprisingly, come from the palettes of Carl Rungius, Catharine Whyte, Roland Gissing, A.C. Leighton and that watercolour genius, Walter J. Phillips. These and others are showcased in colour plates at the back of this otherwise black-and-white book.
Armstrong and Nelles are both York University academics, but that doesn’t seem to skew their view of the topography and its artistic chroniclers. They recognize the valley as a remarkable visual entity worthy of the best landscape artists and perhaps even beyond the skills of some. “The Group of Seven did pass through, but they didn’t do so well with the mountains,” Armstrong says. “Some of the pictures are good, but A.Y. Jackson always said mountains are really hard to paint.”
Among the book’s most interesting images are photographs of artists at work, such as George Pepper in the 1940s and an undated shot of Leighton, with corncob pipe hanging from between his teeth. Some later paintings of the period depict the encroachment of construction, including views of Calgary, Canmore and an irrigation weir on the river.
It’s the images of the undeveloped Bow, however, that charmed Armstrong the most during the book project, especially Ted Godwin’s blue-green rendering of the river’s little islands on a hazy summer day. “I’d like to get that painting,” Armstrong confessed, “but Godwin said it isn’t going to be sold to me.”
