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Thomas Moran's paintings brought home America's Wild West
Tuesday, March 20, 2001 By Mary Thomas, Post-Gazette Art Critic
American artist Thomas Moran did a tremendous favor for his fellow citizens. In 1871 he traveled to what is now Wyoming with a U.S. Geological Survey expedition. The sketches and paintings he made of the landscape, and later showed in the East, helped to persuade Congress to establish Yellowstone as America's first national park.
Some of these images are among more than 80 works in an exceedingly fine exhibition at The Frick Art & Historical Center, which has smartly decided to address that contribution, as well as the fine art component of the exhibition, in its literature and program scheduling.
"The Poetry of Place: Works on Paper by Thomas Moran from the Gilcrease Museum" has a very personal feel that comes from the art's intimate scale and detail and also from the omnipresence of Moran's hand, whether in the exquisitely drawn line of a bluff or the written notations of what color it should be.
Also making this work personal is the poetic approach, alluded to in the title, that Moran took when interpreting the land.
Moran, who was born in 1837 in Bolton, England, and died in 1926 in Santa Barbara, Calif., was a self-taught painter from a talented family. His father was a weaver who in 1844 moved his family to Philadelphia, where Moran was reared. His brother John was a photographer, printmaker and critic; brother Edward, a painter; and Moran's wife, Mary, whom he married in 1863, was a well-regarded etcher.
In 1862, Thomas and Edward traveled to England to study and walk in the footsteps of the noted romantic painter J.M.W. Turner, whose vibrant use of color and emotional interpretation of landscape complemented Moran's own aesthetic philosophy, as did the writings of the great English romantic poets like Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron.
Moran gained a sense of freedom during this trip when he found that he couldn't locate the vantage points Turner's landscapes had been painted from, and realized the value of artistic license for communicating the essence of reality to the viewer.
This he would later apply to a landscape too grand, geologically diverse and topographically dramatic to present straightforwardly to an uninitiated public who might dismiss such baroque reality as exaggeration.
Sarah Boehme, curator at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyo., points out that Moran was painting at a time when America and American painting were first finding their identities, and that he was well suited to the task of creating national icons.
The Hudson River School artists were striving to instill American wilderness landscapes with notions of the sublime. Others, like Albert Bierstadt, were painting the American West (although his scenery more closely resembled the Alps than the Rockies, perhaps due to his training at the prominent Dusseldorf Academy in Germany). Romance and adventure were in the air, as the country pushed into new frontiers.
Moran's interest in those frontiers was sparked by a commission he received from Scribner's Magazine to illustrate the account of an 1870 expedition to the Yellowstone area. He created images based upon written accounts and crude pencil drawings provided by the explorers. That experience made him yearn to sketch this near-mythical land first-hand.
In 1871 he traveled to Wyoming to join the Yellowstone expedition led by Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, director of the U.S. Geological Survey. When he got there, he succumbed to the land.
"First Sketch Made in the West at Green River, Wyoming" -- the title an indication of the significance he attached to the trip and his own excitement -- shows Moran's ability to capture the vastness of the Western landscapes within a small frame, and his free and adept use of color to project their individuality and vibrancy. The absence of the rustic frontier town at the site also illustrates Moran's emphasis on the land over people.
At the Frick Art & Musical Center in Point Breeze, these presentations are scheduled:
Reservations are required for both lectures and there is an admission fee.
He would paint Green River frequently during his career, but it was the landscape of Yellowstone, with its thundering waterfalls, mineral-painted earth and thermal features that infatuated Easterners, and led to the national park and succeeding tourism in the region.
It also secured an international reputation for Moran.
Several richly composed watercolors with veils of color highlighting rocky knolls or blending to suggest the biological and mineralogical bands that enliven the geyser basins were part of a commission by English industrialist William Blackmore.
Even more vivid are four magnificent chromolithographs -- two geyser and two mountain scenes -- on loan from Mellon Financial Corporation for this venue only, that are from a portfolio of 15 commissioned and published by Louis Prang of Boston in 1876. In a near case is a fifth scene with book.
Moran would later travel to other parts of the West and became a regular visitor to the Grand Canyon, his passage and lodging paid for by the Santa Fe Railroad in exchange for permission to use one of his paintings of the canyon in their advertising.
Moran also drew illustrations for other railroad companies, realizing the value of having his work distributed this way, and had no conflict with being what was negatively referred to as a "Railroad Artist," as long as the artist was "sincere" he said.
Two sketches of Ohiopyle and one of a "Hillside, Pittsburgh" -- the bulk of the composition given over to the hill at the bottom of which a river passes distant factories and a bridge -- were made while on commission from the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.
Other, more complete, Pennsylvania scenes picture the central or eastern part of the state and were made while he lived in Philadelphia. In the Pennsylvania works, Moran captures the essence of an Eastern terrain, one that is humanly scaled and tree patterned, by giving attention to identifying detail. What is stylistically constant is his sensitivity to the land.
This intensity of working the page manifests in remarkable etchings, including "The Much Resounding Sea," an exercise in line, or "An Apple Orchard," of 1883, infused with wisdom of place.
A thoughtful component of this exhibition is the inclusion of a variety of early and process pieces -- such as the rocky cliff of "Hastings," the double row of sails in the Chioggia scene, and the Espanola, N.M., watercolor on B&O RR letterhead -- that give a sense of the man and the artist.
When the popularity of the West began to wane, Moran traveled to new locations. Surprising are several atmospheric scenes of Mexico, including an especially imposing watercolor of a huddle of people entering a mission church -- on newsprint.
He would also paint Havana, Vera Cruz and ever-popular Venice, their buildings nearly abstracted into landscape, forming geological long views, horizon lines against a grand expanse of water, evoking calm and reasserting the sublime.
The only oil painting is of Vera Cruz, the sun heated sky and water a blaze of Turner's drama cascading towards Whistler.
It is an exhibition rife with grace and beauty, of another time but relevant to this one. As Thomas Smart, director of Museum Programs at the Frick, puts it, "Moran created a new vocabulary for describing the West, for describing the landscape -- a very American vocabulary. In a very high way, art created the landscape. His art gave us a mode of description for understanding the West and describing the West."
The exhibition was organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Gilcrease Museum, of Tulsa, Okla., the world's largest repository of works by Moran, and owner of most of the works in the exhibition.
A small treasure of a catalog includes color plates of the artworks and informative curators' essays ($18). The undersized, but faithful, reproduction fittingly turns the works into a volume of poetic visual verse.
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"Poetry of Place" is at The Frick Art Museum through May 8.