The maritime, wet, gray, cloudy, forested, vast, mountainous, desert, dry, empty, rural, and urban experiences of the Pacific Northwest are captured in a survey of evocative landscape paintings, depicted here in good color reproductions. The 131 paintings represented span the earliest made of the area, in 1778, to works from 1999. Jonathan Raban, a free-lance writer, has written an introduction that touches on the biographies of the artists and larger artistic movements as well as the social and political context of the work. An alphabetical list of the artists with a short biography for each concludes the volume. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)