• About the Work of Art

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Thomas Moran established his artistic reputation with his paintings of Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. By 1876 Moran was regarded as one of the major landscape painters of his day, rivaling in stature Albert Bierstadt, who had introduced the panoramic western landscape a decade earlier. Unlike Bierstadt, who painted almost exclusively in oil, Moran also created some of the most dazzling watercolors of the late nineteenth century.

Born in England in 1837, Moran moved with his parents to the United States in 1844. His father, a handloom weaver, first settled the family in Baltimore and then Philadelphia. The young Moran received art instruction from his elder brother, Edward, and later was apprenticed to a wood engraver. In 1861 Thomas and Edward went abroad to tour English museums and galleries to study works of other artists, including Joseph Mallord William Turner.

Returning to the United States in 1862, Thomas married and settled again in Philadelphia where he opened his own studio. Throughout this period he made excursions into the Pennsylvania countryside to sketch river views.

From 1867 to 1879 the U.S. government supported four great surveys of western territory as part of its domestic plan to promote settlement, commerce, and use of natural resources. In 1871 Moran volunteered to accompany Ferdinand Hayden’s U.S. Geological Survey expedition into the Yellowstone area, largely unknown at the time.

When Moran arrived by stagecoach in the mining town of Virginia City, Montana Territory, the novice traveler from Philadelphia was a gaunt and heavily bearded thirty-year-old. Astride a horse for the first time in his life, the artist met Hayden and his men and rode out to the Yellowstone Valley. Riding, made torturous by his bony frame, was eased somewhat by a pillow on his saddle. Moran wrote in his journal that this was his first experience sleeping out in the open air, and he was ready for the adventure.

Moran worked with William Henry Jackson, the expedition photographer, to complete numerous watercolor sketches of Yellowstone's mountains, hot springs, mud pots, geysers, and waterfalls. From his field studies, Moran composed structured, exquisitely painted watercolors in his studio. These paintings and illustrations were produced for the magazines Scribner’s and Harper’s Weekly and would ultimately help transform public perceptions of Yellowstone as a hellish place into one of awesome beauty.

Soon after Moran returned east, Hayden and others, including executives of the Northern Pacific Railroad, began promoting the idea that Yellowstone should be preserved as a national park. Because no member of Congress had yet seen the Yellowstone region, Hayden brought Moran’s watercolors, along with Jackson’s photographs from the expedition, to Capitol Hill. Their images were later reported to have played a decisive role in the debate that led to the establishment of Yellowstone as the first national park in March 1872.

In 1872 Congress also appropriated $10,000 for the purchase of Moran’s Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Measuring seven by twelve feet, the panoramic view featured the canyon’s distant falls and golden walls. The sheer size of this canvas created a spectacle for viewers, much like going to a movie today.

At the time of his death in 1926 at age eighty-nine, Moran had produced more than 1,500 oil paintings, 800 watercolors, and scores of other drawings and prints. He had seen and described more of the North American wilderness than any other artist of his generation. Moran’s art played a significant role in helping the government promote and develop the West.

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