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"Chasm of the Colorado" by Thomas Moran, 1874
Oil on canvas mounted on aluminum, 84 3/8" x 144 3/4"
U.S. Department of the Interior Museum |
I’m not sure when I first heard of Hudson River School painter Thomas Moran (1837-1926.) For a long time, he seemed to be somewhere just off-stage, a minor character sketching away. But once I started painting at Grand Canyon, he stepped into the limelight: I saw some of his work on a visit to Grand Canyon National Park’s art collection, and it took my breath away.
Born in Lancashire, England, to a family of handloom weavers, Moran moved with his family to the United States when he was seven. When he was a little older, he apprenticed to an engraver in Philadelphia. He found the work tedious and preferred painting in watercolor, which he did in his spare time. His watercolors were fine enough that he soon moved up to creating illustrations for the company. Engraving and printing, however, remained a foundation of his practice, and later in life, he learned how to make chromolithographs, using the process extensively to create popular colored prints of his work.
He ended up at Grand Canyon through a convoluted set of events. In 1871, he was recommended to the US Geological Survey, which was looking for staff artists for expeditions, as “an artist of Philadelphia of rare genius." Subsequently, he was invited to travel with a team to Wyoming’s Yellowstone area, a wilderness that remained mostly unexplored by white men. Moran spent 40 days there, sketching and recording his impressions. After he returned home, Scribner’s Magazine—one of the trip’s underwriters, along with the Northern Pacific Railroad—featured his illustrations. The US Congress, wowed by Moran’s depictions of the raw beauty, established Yellowstone National Park just a year later. But the article not only helped our first national park come into being, it helped Moran in his career. It wasn’t long before the railroad industry began to invite him regularly on trips to promote scenic destinations.
Grand Canyon was one such place. Moran first glimpsed the Canyon from the North Rim after a trip to Zion in Utah with John Wesley Powell’s 1873 expedition. He wrote: “The whole gorge for miles lay beneath us, and it was by far the most awfully grand and impressive scene that I have ever yet seen.” He returned again and again to sketch it, with the ultimate prize being the sale of “The Chasm of the Colorado” to the US Congress for $10,000 in 1874. (See the painting at the top.) In 1892, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway hired him to create illustrations of the Canyon for their promotional material, and thus began a flood of calendars, menus and posters that sustained Moran over the years.
“Of all places on Earth,” Moran said, “the great Canyon of Arizona is the most inspiring in its pictorial possibilities." I’ve painted at Grand Canyon many times over the years, and now, every time I set up my easel, I ask myself: "What would Moran do?"
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Portrait of Thomas Moran
by Howard Russell Butler, 1922
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; transfer from the Smithsonian American Art Museum; bequest of Ruth B. Moran, 1948 |
