Art: Yellowstone Man

Months ago the Department of the Interior was proud to accept for Yosemite National Park Museum a collection of 108 paintings by the late Christian Jorgensen. the Norwegian-born artist largely responsible for the acquisition of Yosemite Valley as a National Park (TIME. Dec. 28). This week Manhattan’s Newhouse Galleries opened an exhibition of 14 large landscapes, the first of a series of shows honoring the 100th Anniversary of a far better painter, directly responsible for the entire program of U. S. national parks: Thomas Moran.

Artist Thomas Moran. was born in Lancashire, England exactly 100 years ago this week. The son of a handloom weaver, he was brought to the U. S. at the age of seven. In Philadelphia, where his elder brother Edward, later famed as a marine painter, was already studying drawing, Thomas Moran was apprenticed to a wood engraver, very soon won a modest reputation for himself as a painter of mildly romantic landscapes. He studied in Europe, became heavily influenced by Turner’s explosive sunsets, but Moran did not become a national figure until 1871, when the U. S. Geological Survey organized an expedition to explore the valley of the Yellowstone, asked Thomas Moran to go along as official artist.

Until that time few reputable witnesses had ever seen the wonders of the Yellow stone. In 1806 John Colter, a private soldier in the Lewis & Clark expedition, came back with stories of hot fountains and pools of yellow, pink and green mud too fantastic to be believed. In 1869 three amateur explorers made a 36-day pack trip into what was already known as “Colter’s Hell,” came back to report that they were so overwhelmed by what they saw that they would not risk their reputations by describing it.

No one could doubt the Geological Sur vey cr Painter Thomas Moran. When he came back from the Yellowstone with a tremendous canvas of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone seen through a romantic mist. Congress voted $10,000 to buy it and hung the canvas in the Senate Lobby, where it is today. In 1872 Yellowstone Valley became the first National Park, and Thomas Moran acquired the nickname that stuck to him for the rest of his life: Thomas (“Yellowstone”) Moran.

Yellowstone Moran grew a magnificent beard and lived to be 89, dying in 1926 in Santa Barbara, Calif. He continued to paint until the day of his death, never changing his archaic, meticulous style, never losing his interest in the Far West and the National Park movement.