Thomas Moran

Thomas Moran hiked through the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone in 1871, when most folks back East thought that stories of hundred-foot-high geysers, thousand-foot-deep canyons, and such were probably hogwash. After he submitted his glorious paintings of cliffs, rapids, and sun-struck vistas, Americans were finally persuaded that the West was as real as it was wild. It is largely because of Moran's glowing, oil-painted testimony that a formerly skeptical U.S. Congress soon preserved those spectacular lands. This book is the catalog of the 1998 retrospective of Moran's work, which opened on the 125th anniversary of the dedication of Yellowstone National Park. Anderson's essays cover every phase of Moran's life and career, from his work as an illustrator and printmaker to his success as one of the gentleman painters of New York City. It contains scores of archival photographs of the rather theatrical Moran as he aged, with his ever-lengthening, ever-whitening chin whiskers, and such treasures as a long letter he wrote from Yellowstone to his beautiful wife, Mary, in which he blithely describes rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and wolves observed at close range. The letter is signed "Your loving Hub." Along with Albert Bierstadt, Frederick Church, John Frederick Kensett, and other 19th-century landscape painters, viewers often associate Moran with what he called "a wonderful age," the optimistic years between the Civil War and the Great War. This book contains plates of every quintessentially American scene he painted--the pulsing sunset over the pristine wilderness, the windswept mountain pass, the misty, rushing stream. A scholarly book, it nonetheless captures much of the wonder Moran and his peers felt for the vast Western landscape and the glowing future it represented. --Peggy Moorman