Review of The Painted Valley: Artists Along Alberta’s Bow River, 1845-2000, by Christopher Armstrong and H.V. Nelles (University of Calgary Press, 2007) 160 pp. paper $54.95 Indexed

   

The present collection contains 200 paintings by about 70 artists, produced between 1845-2000.  The editorial imperative excludes photographs as art, but does offer photos: of Carl Rungius sketching a bear at the Jonas Pass, Alberta, 1910 and painting under an umbrella, Banff.; of George Pepper, painting beside a lake in the Rockies, 1940s; of A.C. Leighton, painting in the mountains (n.d.); of H.G. Glyde at McDougall Church, Morely, Alberta; of James Nicoll, with dog, 1946; and of Marion Nicoll with dog, Calgary, circa 1946.  There are lists of the colour plates and black-and-white illustrations, spanning a 150-year period.

 

According to the authors, there were five “schools” of art: 1) “Imperial Topographers”; 2) “Railway Romantics”; 3) “The Long Shadow of Impressionism”; 4) the British watercolour tradition, and 5) Abstraction and return to landscape painting in  “Modernism and After”.

 

In group 1) we find:  Henry James Warre (the first European painter) and his Sketches in North America (1839-1847), based on Edmund Burke principles on the Sublime.  Others artists were:  R. Barrington Nevitt, a physician without formal art training; Governor General, Lord Lorne, a talented amateur; and C.W. Jeffreys.

 

In group 2) we learn that, although the steam engine was excluded from art, tourism promotion was funded by the CPR railway, in the mid-1980s.  “[It] did not ruin paradise, but rather made paradise more accessible to the artist.” (p. 39). William Van Horne was an amateur artist himself and Melton Prior was an English illustrator, for the London Illustrated News.  Others artists were: Thomas Moran; Lucius O’Brien (influenced by Ruskinian art that  should have a moral purpose,  for Picturesque Canada); Albert Bierstadt, of  the Hudson River School; John A. Fraser; Frederick M. Bell-Smith, T. Mower Martin, Marmaduck Matthews; John Hammond; Fredrick Verner, Edward Roper, and Leonard Davis.

 

Group 3) is about Impressionism, in the 1870s and 1889s.   European subjects painted by Canadian artists did not sell well at home.  (European outsiders brought the new techniques to Canada.)  Some artists mentioned are: Lars Haukaness, Carl Rungius, and Belmore Browne.  Of Peter and Catharine Whyte, it is said that she was the more talented of the two” and he “was considerably less accomplished than his wife” (pp. 57-8). Peter’s nephew was Jon (a former president of the Writers Guild of Alberta). The Whytes’ regard for the late stylized mountain paintings of Lawren Harris is described thus, “[It] seems to have stumped the Whytes, for they complained that these paintings looked more like jelly moulds than the real thing.” (p. 58) Robert Gissing is mentioned. There are also a few problems in style.  For example, narrating from the point of view of Canadian artists, the authors discuss the influence of the Group of Seven members before the artists themselves (pp. 58, 60).  Other artists mentioned are: France Pepper, Kathleen Daly, and Doris McCarthy.  Of Illingsworth Kerr, we are told, his paintings were “too modern” for some tastes.  Marion Nicoll( née McKay) was anaemic and underweight”, according to her mother.

 

In group 4), there is a comparison between local artists and “visitor” artists, during the 1920s-1930s.   A.C. Leighton, who disliked modernism, was associated with the foundation for the visual arts section of the new Banff School of Fine Arts. He married Barbara Harvey.  He was friends with H.G. Glyde, who disliked restrictions of the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art (an education intended for school teachers).  Glyde, founded the University of Alberta Fine Art Department, in 1946.  Reginald L. Harvey was a roving supervisor of art education for the Calgary school system from 1922to 1931.  Harvey, with Leighton, organized the Alberta Society of Artists.

 

There are some repetitive (or overlapping) biographical details: on Harvey (p. 73-4, 84); on James Nicoll (p. 67, married to Marion McKay, then met and married Marion McKay, pp. 86-89); and on Illingsworth “Buck” Kerr (pp.64- 68, 96).

 

Walter J. Phillips, an art teacher at St. John’s Technical High School., taught at Banff School of Fine Arts, in 1940, and was appointed to the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art. (He died in 1963).  Other artists mentioned are: Robert Campbell, Herbert Earle, William Hobson; Frederick Cross, James Nicoll, Richard Moore; Luke Lindoe, Holly Middleton, and Margaret Shelton.

 

In group 5) several artists are mentioned:  J.W.G. (Jock) Macdonald (who spent only a single year in Alberta); Marion Nicoll, (of the first Emma Lake Workshop); Ted Godwin, Dorothy Knowles, Ken Christopher; Walter Drohan, Lynn Malin, J.B. Taylor; David Pugh, and Sydney Barker. (See: aboriginal artists referenced below).

 

In the Conclusion, Chapter 8, “The Power Of Landscape”, the authors sum up how painters have imagined the Bow River Valley: what they expressed about changing views of the natural world and the environment.   Mitigating factors that must be considered are outside cultural influences, human agents, public policy, and the post-Edenic perspective.

 

Since the nineteenth-century, (with Fort Calgary and after the Second World War), The Bow River has been imagined in maps, the law, science, and literature.  The authors consulted libraries, archives, government records and newspapers.  They culled items from the City of Calgary, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Library and Archives Canada, the National Gallery of Canada, and very few from the Banff School of Fine Art.

 

Their selection was informed by the imperative that it must be of commercial value, yet they acknowledge: “Alberta had almost no full-time resident professional artists able to earn a living from the sale of their work before 1930.” (p. 71) Armstrong and Nelles, as Professors Emeritus, stipulate that they act as “environmental historians rather than art critics.  However, they view nature as art, rather than as mimesis (art “aping” or imitating nature). 

 

Of the indigenous, they refer to aboriginal traditional modes of artistic expression, such as: carving, decoration of objects, and recording collective histories.  Except for artists Norval Morriseau and William Huston, the producers of objects art on the Bow River and its Valley “are surprisingly scarce”. (p. 104) Two Gun (also known as “Percy Plain Woman” or Plainswoman”) and  folk artists such as Eric Hartmann, Virginia Hemmingston, E.J. Hughes; Magic Realist Rene Thibault, and Jeffrey Spalding are mentioned.

 

The first draft of the text , by Armstrong, was written for the American Society for Environmental History, re: a meeting in 2004, in Victoria, B.C. It was rewritten for presentation by Nelles.   See also: H.V. Nelles, “How did Calgary Get its River Parks,” Urban History Review 34 (2005).

 

Other sources are: The Bow:  Living with a River (presented at the Glenbow during the Alberta Centennial) which contains essays by Gerald Conaty, Daryl Beneti and Catharine Mastin, published by Key Porter Books, 2005 and A History of Art in Alberta, 1905-1970, by Nancy Townshend, from Bayeux Arts of Calgary, in 2005.  See also: An Alberta Art Chronicle: Adventures in Recent and Contemporary Art by Mary-Beth Laviolette (Canmore: Altitude, 2006) and Lisa Christensen, A Hiker’s Guide to the Art of the Canadian Rockies (Calgary: Fifth House, 1996 and 1999).

 

The Bow River and Valley is a region, about which the authors offer a brief account of the “urban” river compared with the pastoral, the picturesque; throughout it operates as a symbol and is seasonal.

 

I highly recommend this resource as more than another coffee table book, since it offers a sumptuous assortment of delights for the eye.

                                                 

Anne Burke