Mr. Yellowstone Rises Again

One hundred twenty-five years ago, the watercolors of Thomas Moran helped persuade Congress to declare Yellowstone a national park, the start of the unique and vast U.S. national park system.

Moran basked in his newfound celebrity and took to calling himself Thomas Yellowstone Moran, even signing his paintings with a TYM monogram that looked like the brand of a Western cattle ranch. Congress bought two of his massive oil paintings--one of Yellowstone, the other of the Grand Canyon--and Moran was soon hailed as one of America’s foremost landscape painters.

That reputation lasted throughout the 19th century and, for a while, even beyond. But the 20th century has ignored Moran most of the time. There have been flashes of recognition: President Clinton selected Moran’s “The Three Tetons” for the wall facing the presidential desk in the Oval Office of the White House, and Moran’s “Mountain of the Holy Cross” is the main attraction of the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles. But the artist has mainly languished for decades as a kind of forgotten American hero.

The National Gallery of Art is trying to change that with a stunning exhibition of about 100 of his oil paintings and watercolors that opened Sept. 28 and will remain for almost four months before moving on to the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Okla., in February and to the Seattle Art Museum in June.

It is the first retrospective ever mounted of the works of Moran, works that gave 19th century Americans, almost all of whom lived in the East, their images of what the West was like. Until now, said Nancy K. Anderson, the associate curator of American and British paintings at the National Gallery, “no one alive has had a chance to see the works at all stages of his career.”

Anderson, who took five years to put the show together, is often asked why no one ever did it before.

“It’s a puzzle,” she said in a recent interview, seated in a room displaying three of Moran’s enormous canvases of the West. “I think it’s a tremendous oversight. But we have to remember that American art history is very young. . . . We didn’t really take American art history seriously until the bicentennial.”

On top of this, she said, “this kind of painting was out of favor for a long time. We have lived in a Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol era. Someone at the exhibition said to me, ‘I’m old enough to remember when paintings like these were kept in the attic.’ ”

But there has been a resurgence of interest in the great American landscape painters of the 19th century during the last 10 years or so, encouraged by exhibitions in the National Gallery. Since 1989, the museum has presented retrospectives of Frederick Edwin Church (1826-1900), whose panoramic landscapes of the Andes astounded the 19th century world; Alfred Bierstadt (1830-1902), Moran’s chief rival as the painter of the American West; and now Moran.

Moran was an obscure 33-year-old Philadelphia painter in 1870 when Scribner’s magazine asked him to transform the crude sketches of two amateurs into proper illustrations for an article titled “The Wonders of the Yellowstone.”

Moran, whose immigrant parents had brought him to the United States from Britain at age 7, had never seen the West. But he quickly sensed from the story and the sketches that the Yellowstone, described as “the place where hell bubbled up,” might prove a treasure-trove for an artist. Bierstadt, after all, had already established his reputation by painting the less spectacular Yosemite.

Raising $500 from the publisher of Scribner’s and another $500 from a Philadelphia financier of the Northern Pacific Railroad, the gangly, long-bearded Moran set out for the federally sponsored and U.S. Cavalry-escorted survey team exploring Yellowstone. So thin that he needed a pillow on his saddle, Moran withstood the rigors of horseback travel and outdoor camping and made scores of pencil and watercolor sketches in six weeks.

After he returned home, he worked incessantly at turning his raw material into commercial watercolors and a 7-by-12-foot oil painting called “Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,” which he would complete the following year. His hopes for the painting were high: “I feel confident that it will produce a most decided sensation in art circles,” he predicted.

As soon as the survey was completed, Ferdinand V. Hayden, the geologist who headed the team, lobbied Congress to declare Yellowstone a national park and thus keep it out of the hands of frontiersmen settling the West. To clinch his argument, Hayden showed the legislators the black-and-white photographs of survey photographer William Henry Jackson and the watercolors of Moran.

By all accounts, it was the watercolors--gathered together for the current show from the Yellowstone National Park Visitor Center and from the Gilcrease in Tulsa--that persuaded the senators and representatives. Moran, who was heavily influenced by British painter J.M.W. Turner’s use of color, depicted boiling red and yellow springs, soft-brown mountains, cascading foam-white falls, powerful steel-white geysers, enormous green trees, great blue and gray canyons and peaceful multicolored expanses.

The Senate passed the Yellowstone Park bill in January 1872, the House did the same in February, and President Ulysses S. Grant signed it into law in March.

Moran’s watercolors whetted Congress’ appetite for more. The artist offered to sell “Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,” which by May 1872 he was exhibiting publicly to great acclaim. New York Tribune art critic Clarence Cook wrote that next to Church’s “Niagara,” Moran’s painting “will, we are sure, be received by the best judges in America as the finest historical landscape yet painted in this country.”

Although Moran had originally asked for $20,000, Congress bought the canvas in June for $10,000, still a princely sum in those days, and exhibited it in Statuary Hall on the House of Representatives side of the Capitol.

The painting offers a breathtaking view of the Yellowstone River thundering down through the mountains, but it is not a completely accurate rendition of the scene. Moran acknowledged, for example, that some stone formations in the foreground of his painting could not be seen in the actual vantage. He believed he had the right to tinker with nature in the name of art.

“I place no value upon literal transcripts from nature,” he said. “My general scope is not realistic; all my tendencies are toward idealization. . . . Topography in art is valueless.”

What mattered to Moran was catching the essence of the wondrous Western scene.

“Europe has no scenery that is really comparable with the American,” he told a reporter once. “The American . . . scenery . . . is ruggedly grand, inspiring, impressive. It is heaped up, massed up, and often in a profusion of irregularities, tempestuous combinations and stupendous effects that fairly daze the beholder.”

Moran joined a second U.S. government team in 1873 on a survey of the Grand Canyon. When he came upon the Colorado River from the top of the canyon for the first time, he wrote, “it was by far the most awfully grand and impressive scene that I have ever yet seen.”

Using his pencil sketches, watercolors, memory and imagination, Moran completed the oil painting “Chasm of the Colorado” in 1874. The canvas was the same size as his painting of Yellowstone but, befitting the mood of the Grand Canyon, seemed infused with even more grandeur and mysticism.

“Heaven . . . looks down upon the very pit of hell,” Cook, the critic, wrote in the Atlantic Monthly. “Only Dante’s words seem fit to describe this scene.” An awe-struck Scribner’s critic exclaimed: “All is terrible, fantastic and weird.”

After a spirited promotional campaign by Moran, Congress paid $10,000 for the Grand Canyon canvas as well and displayed it near the Yellowstone canvas in Statuary Hall.

In 1875, after still another trip west, Moran painted a smaller canvas, “Mountain of the Holy Cross,” a depiction of a Colorado mountain with snow-packed crevices on its face that formed an enormous cross.

Moran regarded his latest painting as worthy of the two canvases in Congress, and he tried to have all three exhibited together as a grand triptych of the West at the Philadelphia centennial exposition of 1876. But Congress refused to lend its paintings. The three are exhibited together for the first time, just as Moran wished, at the current National Gallery show.

Congress disappointed Moran again in 1878. A historical painting by his archrival, Bierstadt, “Discovery of the Hudson River,” had been purchased by Congress and installed to the right of the speaker’s podium in the House of Representatives. Congress wanted a second historical painting for the space to the left of the podium.

The two competed mano a mano. Bierstadt submitted “Settlement of California--Bay of Monterrey, 1770” and Moran submitted “Ponce de Leon in Florida.” Neither painter was much of a historical artist, but history is what their distinguished customers wanted.

In the end, Congress, which already owned two Morans but only one Bierstadt, opted for the “Settlement of California” canvas.

“The chief excuse,” Moran noted in his records after hearing the disappointing news from members of Congress, “being that they had already bought two pictures from me. But professing at the same time that they preferred mine.”

Moran, who lived in the New York area for the rest of the century, traveled and painted in the Eastern U.S., Mexico, Scotland and Venice, Italy, but he would still be prized as a painter of the West.

On a return trip to Yellowstone in 1892, he wrote his wife: “I have been made much of at all the places in the park as the great and only ‘Moran’ the painter of Yellowstone, and I am looked at curiously by all the people at the hotels.”

After the turn of the century, Moran would winter almost every year at the Grand Canyon, turning out promotional paintings of the area in exchange for railroad tickets and hotel accommodations. The Sante Fe Railroad became his most important patron and even used a drawing of him sketching the canyon in its advertisements trying to lure tourists to the West.

Yet he could not sell one of his finest landscape paintings, “Shoshone Falls on the Snake River,” a 6-by-12-foot Idaho landscape with echoes of Church’s famous “Niagara.” Tastes had changed in the 20th century, and modern art scorned Western landscapes.

Moran railed in vain at the new fashion: “I have no patience with any of the modern fads in painting,” he said in 1916. “Most of them have been deliberate frauds, attempts in the hands of unprincipled men to fool people who never think for themselves.”

In 1915, he began to winter in California, first in Pasadena and then in Santa Barbara, finally settling year-round in California in the early 1920s. He died in Santa Barbara in 1926 at age 89.

The posthumous fortunes of Moran are reflected in the fate of the two giant canvases once owned by Congress. They were removed from Statuary Hall a few years after their purchase and displayed for seven decades on the walls near the Senate Gallery in the Capitol.

In 1950, when the Capitol was remodeled, wall space diminished, and Congress decided it no longer had room for Moran’s canvases, the first it had ever bought. The paintings were turned over to the Department of the Interior, which runs the National Park Service.

But Interior, which has a small, little-known museum, could find space for the large canvases only in two conference rooms. The paintings were seen by few outsiders.

The department lent the paintings more or less permanently to the new Smithsonian National Museum of American Art in the mid-1960s. They were displayed with great care and prominence there. But the museum is not one of the most frequented in Washington. These landscapes of Moran are finally getting the grand attention they deserve with the current show.

* “Thomas Moran,” National Gallery of Art, 4th Street and Constitution Avenue N.W., Washington. Ends Jan. 11. (202) 737-4215.