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

Introduction

Long celebrated as the premier painter of Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, Thomas Moran produced a remarkably varied body of work during a career that spanned more than sixty years. Best known for his panoramic views of the American West, Moran demonstrated the breadth of his vision in equally accomplished paintings of the Pennsylvania countryside, the landscape of Long Island, industrial complexes in Mexico and America, the harbor of Venice, and numerous seascapes.

During his extensive travels, Moran created hundreds of open-air color studies that recorded his immediate response to a landscape. Impressive in their own right, these watercolors often served as the basis for the large-scale oil paintings that brought him his greatest success. Extraordinarily adept at recognizing the "visual potential" of newly discovered lands in the Far West, Moran offered Americans and Europeans their first look at several spectacular sites later preserved as national parks.

Now, nearly a century after Moran completed the last of his great western landscapes, more than ninety of his finest watercolor and oil paintings, representing all phases of his career, have been gathered together from public and private collections for this exhibition, the first retrospective of his work ever held.