Thomas Moran came to the United States with his family when he was 7. They came from northwest England, the blackened heart of the Industrial Revolution, anchored by textile mills that employed Moran’s father and many relatives before him. Their town was among the bleakest spots: “ruinous and miserable,” according to one account, its main street “a dark, unattractive hole.” The creek that ran through it was “a string of stagnant puddles”—it was all the nature that Moran knew.
Moran’s “The Wilds of Lake Superior,” from 1864, in the collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art.
They settled in Philadelphia, and, by age 15, Moran was working in an engraver’s shop. He began painting, as well, inspired by the luminous landscapes of the British master J.M.W. Turner. There was plenty of landscape to be found in America, much of it virtually untouched. On his first long journey in search of wild scenery, in 1860, Moran came to Lake Superior, romanticized five years earlier by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in The Song of Hiawatha (“By the shores of Gitche Gumee…”).
But nothing stuck, subject-wise, until 1871, when Moran was 34 and had worked his way up to chief illustrator at Scribner’s Monthly in New York. The magazine had acquired a story called The Wonders of Yellowstone and needed to illustrate it. Yellowstone, with its geysers and hot springs in the wilderness of what is now Wyoming, was known as “the place where hell bubbled up.” Moran was fascinated.
Moran’s watercolor of the Upper Falls of the Yellowstone River.
The Philadelphia railroad baron Jay Cooke got him a spot on an expedition to Yellowstone that year. They both got more than they bargained for. The watercolors Moran brought back were passed around Congress, which Cooke and others were lobbying to create an attraction, a park of some sort, to draw people west. Moran made it an easy sell.
His images, in the mode of Turner, were more heaven than hell. He was not above subtracting buildings and other claptrap, or adding a waterfall. To give a sense of scale, or perhaps to exaggerate it, he threw in some specks of people. “I place no value upon literal transcripts from Nature,” he later said. “My general scope is not realistic; all my tendencies are toward idealization.”
Moran’s “Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone,” purchased by Congress, now in the collection of the Department of the Interior Museum.
In March 1872, just seven months after Moran returned from Yellowstone, Congress declared the area the country’s first national park. His paintings “did a work which no other agency could do,” said a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers captain involved in the process, “and doubtless convinced everyone who saw them that the regions where such wonders existed should be preserved to the people forever.”
Congress bought Moran’s panoramic painting The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone and displayed it in the Senate. Friends began calling him Thomas “Yellowstone” Moran, and he sometimes added a “Y” to his initials. It wasn’t long before he returned to the West.
In the summer of 1873, Moran first glimpsed the Grand Canyon in Arizona. In a letter to his wife, he called it “by far the most awfully grand and impressive scene that I have ever yet seen,” trumping Yellowstone. He was in his element, writing of “a wolf crunching the bones of a rabbit we had eaten” not more than a dozen feet from where he was sleeping on the ground.
Moran with his daughters at the Grand Canyon.
When he returned home, Congress bought another of his paintings, The Chasm of the Colorado, depicting the Grand Canyon, and hung it across from the first. Though born a Brit, he was established as the most American of painters.
“It has often occurred to me as a curious and anomalous fact, that American artists are prone to seek the subjects for their art in foreign lands,” Moran mused, “to the almost entire exclusion of their own.”
Yet in fact he was no different. At the close of the 19th century, with the West settled, its exoticism fading, the demand for Western art had slipped, and Moran began to travel: to Mexico and Cuba and Italy. He was as taken with Venice as many other artists before him.
In the end, he came “home.” The Grand Canyon, if not his first love, became his last: For nearly 25 years at the end of his life, he spent almost every winter at the Grand Canyon, producing paintings for promotional use by the Sante Fe Railroad in exchange for rail passes and hotel rooms.
Moran in 1921, five years before his death.
Moran’s painting in Seeing Nature, (above) on view at Mia through September 18, was painted in 1909, at the beginning of his long tenure at the canyon. By the time he died, in 1926, the canyon was a national park along with 18 other places, and the National Park Service—celebrating its centennial on August 25—was established to oversee them.
To celebrate 100 years of the National Park Service, Mia and the Mississippi Park Connection have placed frames at 19 museum-worthy views along the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, and invite you to share your pics tagged #parkconnection and #seeingnature.
Top image: Thomas Moran, Grand Canyon of Arizona at Sunset, 1909, oil on canvas, from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection