Mountain of the Holy Cross

1890

Thomas Moran

Artist, American, born England, 1837 - 1926

We look across a bank of large boulders that give way to a waterfall in the middle distance, behind which a towering mountain marked with a white cross rises near the top of this vertical watercolor landscape. Painted with swirling washes of topaz and powder blue, cream white, and some touches of pale golden yellow, the central mountain ascends amid the clouds that settle around the peaks to either side. Slivers of white along the central and neighboring mountains echo the white cross, which seems to have been made with fallen snow on the face of the central peak. Clouds or fog eddying around the neighboring peaks make the middle distance hazy. Closer to us, some scrubby pine-green trees line a riverbank that feeds a waterfall in the lower third of the composition. The water falls behind the slate-gray boulders hulking in the lower left corner of the paper. A bird flies in the mist near the falls.

Media Options

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Thomas Moran saw the wondrous landscape that the world would come to know as Yellowstone National Park for the first time in the summer of 1871. He had journeyed west to join F. V. Hayden's survey expedition bound for a region rumored to contain steaming geysers and boiling mud pots. Traveling by train and stagecoach, he arrived in Virginia City, Montana, where he met William Henry Jackson, a young photographer whom Hayden had hired to document the purported "Wonders of Yellowstone." Moran and Jackson quickly became a team, working side by side to select subjects for photographs and sketches. Together they gathered the first visual evidence confirming stories of an astonishing region in the Far West full of geological marvels.

Hayden, Moran, and Jackson returned east in the fall of 1871. Required to submit a report to Congress, Hayden supplemented his survey data with photographs taken by Jackson. Soon Congress began drafting legislation to protect Yellowstone. In support of the proposal, Jackson's photographs and Moran's watercolors (the only color images available) were passed among congressmen on Capitol Hill. With nearly unprecedented speed, Congress approved a bill declaring Yellowstone the nation's first national park in the spring of 1872.

Moran's watercolors of Yellowstone were so admired that within a short period of time the artist received multiple invitations to join government-sponsored expeditions to western territories. In 1873 he accompanied John Wesley Powell on a journey down the Colorado River to the Grand Canyon. That same year, William Henry Jackson photographed Colorado's "Mountain of the Holy Cross." When Moran saw the photograph, he quickly recognized a subject perfectly suited to his brush. The following year he traveled to the Rocky Mountains, where he undertook an arduous climb to complete field studies of the celebrated mountain with a cross of snow near its summit.

During the following decades Moran traveled west many times. In the field and later in his studio, he produced a number of stunning watercolors that introduced the remarkable canyons, peaks, and geysers of the Far West to the American people. Critically important as historical documents, Moran's western watercolors are also among the most beautiful paintings produced during the nineteenth century.


Artwork overview


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Commissioned 1890 by Miss Caroline Phelps Stokes [1854-1909]; Caroline Phelps Stokes Hunter [1878-1964], her niece, by bequest; Robert Hunter, Jr., her son, by bequest; Margaret McGrew Hunter, his wife, by bequest; Mariette B. Hollins, her daughter, by bequest; private collection, 1998; acquired by NGA, 2012.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

2017

  • American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 2017, unnumbered catalogue.

Bibliography

2006

  • Kinsey, Joni L. Thomas Moran's West: Chromolithography, High Art, and Popular Taste. Lawrence, Kansas, 2006: 47, 77-78,106,111,126, 129-137,161,163,171,178,228 (versions of the same subject).

2012

  • Anderson, Nancy. "Gifts and Acquisitions: Thomas Moran, Mountain of the Holy Cross". National Gallery of Art Bulletin 47 (Fall 2012): 16-17, repro. 16.

2016

  • National Gallery of Art. Highlights from the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Washington, 2016: 251, repro.

2017

  • Foster, Kathleen A. American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent. Exh. cat. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2017: 105, no. 83.

Inscriptions

lower right in watercolor: T Moran (TYM monogram)

Wikidata ID

Q64633261


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