Introduction
Early Years
Yellowstone
Green River
A Western Triptych
Moran and Photography
Turner's Influence
Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon: Late Views
From Long Island to Europe
Watercolors
Final Years

Final Years

Although Moran continued to produce paintings of Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon well into the twentieth century, he also completed, late in his career, a number of works that reflected new interests and new travel. Among these were a group of paintings that took as their subject the pueblos and cliff dwellings of the ancient people who had once lived in the American Southwest. On several occasions Moran visited pueblos and spoke with living descendents of these people. With sketchbook in hand and a camera in his pocket, Moran gathered the images and information he would need to produce studio paintings. In the photograph at left he may be seen speaking with a woman who carries on her head a pot similar to those being "fired" in the foreground of the painting titled Indian Pueblo, Laguna, New Mexico.

Late in his career Moran also completed several paintings of the Grand Teton Mountains in Wyoming. In 1872 Ferdinand V. Hayden, leader of the Yellowstone expedition Moran had joined the year before, named a peak in the Teton range after the artist.

In the summer of 1900 Moran traveled to Shoshone Falls on the Snake River in Idaho. Well before Moran's visit the falls had been described as the "Niagara of the West." Just a few months after Moran visited the site, an enormous reclamation project that tapped the Snake River as source of irrigation water was set in motion. Shoshone Falls would never again appear as Moran painted it.

In 1911, following a trip to Europe, Moran wrote to a friend that he was "working as hard" as ever and that he intended to continue to paint "as long as I can hold a brush." Thomas Moran died at the age of eighty-nine at his home in Santa Barbara, California, in 1926.