With its vast prairies and impressive mountains, Colorado has been a mecca for painters since the beginning of the nineteenth century. This latest volume in the Denver Art Museum's Western Passages series celebrates a diverse group of painters who found special allegiance to the Rockies and to the human history of Colorado.

Many who ventured into Colorado in the 1800s sought inspiration in the land. The state attracted such masters of landscape painting as Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Worthington Whittredge. So pervasive and popular were images of Colorado's peaks that some art historians have dubbed those who portrayed these sites as the "Rocky Mountain School." During the 1900s, focus shifted to the human story, and artists benefited from the organizational activities of the Denver Artists Club, founded by a group of women artists who were instrumental in the eventual founding of the Denver Art Museum.