With its dramatic landscapes and rugged beauty, Alberta's Bow River valley has inspired generations of artists. The Painted Valley 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.