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

Green River

Thomas Moran first saw the dramatic castellated buttes of Green River, Wyoming, in 1871, while on his way to Yellowstone. Stepping off the train, he painted the tiny watercolor on view in this room that he later inscribed "First Sketch Made in the West." Three years earlier, when the need to bridge the Green River delayed Union Pacific construction crews in their race to span the continent by rail, Andrew Joseph Russell took the photographs also on view in this room. These images record not only the stark, overpowering grandeur of the landscape as it appeared in 1868, but also the intrusion of man.

By the time Moran arrived in Green River, the bridges shown under construction in one of Russell's photographs had been completed, and the town, which already boasted a schoolhouse, church, hotel, and brewery, was still growing. In a series of Green River paintings produced over several decades, Moran exercised a high degree of artistic license, for he stripped the original landscape of all signs of technological "progress"--eliminated all buildings and bridges, railroads and smokestacks--creating instead a stunningly beautiful setting for Indians traveling through sandy foregrounds toward distant villages. Using sketches made on site, Moran composed studio paintings that reflected a view of the Indian and the West that was already nostalgic even for his contemporaries.