Green River Cliffs, Wyoming

1881

Thomas Moran

Artist, American, born England, 1837 - 1926

Sheer, vertical, cliffs, brightly lit in cream white and rust orange by the low sun, tower over a band of people riding horses into the distance in this long, horizontal landscape painting. The glowing cliffs dominate the upper right quadrant of the painting. They lighten from burnt orange along the jagged tops to flame orange down the steep sides, and are and warm, parchment white near the earth. One tall, narrow promontory to our right looms over a range of lower, rounded cliffs. As the cliffs move into the distance, they are shrouded with a lavender-purple haze. The land closest to us dips into a shallow valley at the bottom center of the composition, leading away from us. The dirt-packed earth is dotted with pine-green, scrubby bushes and vegetation and a grove of low, gnarled trees a short distance to our right. One chestnut-brown horse walks along the path at the bottom center of the composition, lagging behind a cluster of at least two dozen horses and riders winding into the distance. The horses range from ivory white to tawny brown and charcoal gray. The riders are loosely painted so some details are indistinct, but they all seem to have brown skin and dark hair. They wear feathered headdresses and garments in teal blue, fawn brown, or golden yellow. They ride over a low hill toward a crystal-blue river, and then back along a flat expanse toward a row of minuscule, triangular tepees lining the horizon in the deep distance. The horizon comes halfway up the composition, and the tepees are backed by a row of rose-pink, flat-topped cliffs. A pale yellow disk hangs low in the sky, over the distant cliffs. The sky above deepens from soft, lilac purple along the horizon to ice and sapphire blue along the top. A few wispy clouds are burnished orange in the sunlight. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right corner, “TYMoran 1881,” with the T, Y, and M overlapping to make a monogram.

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In June 1871, Thomas Moran, a gifted young artist working in Philadelphia, boarded a train that would take him to the far reaches of the western frontier and change the course of his career. Just a few months earlier he had been asked to illustrate a magazine article describing a wondrous region in Wyoming called Yellowstone—rumored to contain steam-spewing geysers, boiling hot springs, and bubbling mud pots. Eager to be the first artist to record these astonishing natural wonders, Moran quickly made plans to travel west.

Yellowstone was Moran's ultimate destination in the summer of 1871, but before he reached the land of geysers and hot springs, he stepped off the train in Green River, Wyoming, and discovered a landscape unlike any he had ever seen. Rising above the dusty railroad town were towering cliffs, reduced by nature to their geologic essence. Captivated by the bands of color that centuries of wind and water had revealed, Moran completed a small field study he later inscribed "First Sketch Made in the West." Moran went on to join F. V. Hayden's survey expedition to Yellowstone and complete the watercolors that would later play a key role in the Congressional decision to set the region aside as America's first national park. Over the years, however, the subject Moran returned to repeatedly was the western landscape he saw first—the magnificent cliffs of Green River.

Green River, Wyoming, was a bustling railroad town when Moran arrived in 1871. Three years earlier, Union Pacific construction crews had arrived intent on bridging the river. Their tent camp quickly became a boomtown boasting a schoolhouse, hotel, and brewery. Yet none of these structures appear in Moran's Green River paintings. Even the railroad is missing. Instead, the dazzling colors of the sculpted cliffs and an equally colorful band of Indians are the focus. In a bravura display of artistic license, Moran erased the reality of advancing civilization, conjuring instead an imagined scene of a pre-industrial West that neither he nor anyone else could have seen in 1871. Ten years after his first trip west, Moran completed Green River Cliffs, Wyoming, the most stunning of all his Green River paintings.

On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 67

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Artwork overview

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Mr. Clapp, Chicago, or Dr. Williams, Chicago.[1] (Julien Levy Gallery, New York). Frank Glenn [d. 1960], Kansas City, Missouri; purchased by Frederick W. Allsopp [1867-1946], Little Rock; gift 1937 to the Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock [since 1960, the Arkansas Arts Center]; de-accessioned 1983 and sold through (Ira Spanierman, New York); sold to William I. Koch;[2] (American sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, New York, 30 November 1994, no. 40); Vern Milligan [d. 2012], Denver; gift 2011 to NGA.[3]
[1] The provenance given here is based on the list of former owners as published in the 1994 sale catalogue. Two entries in a notebook in the Thomas Moran Papers held by the Archives of American Art specify the painting was sold to Mr. Clapp; copies kindly provided by Joseph Ingrum and in NGA curatorial files.
[2] The painting was on loan to NGA from September 1986 to August 1992 from the Spring Creek Art Foundation, established by Charles Koch "for the purpose of making fine art accessible to the public through loans of art objects to public institutions."
[3] The gift to NGA was made by Mr. Milligan and his two children.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1881

  • Inter-State Industrial Exposition, Chicago, 1881, no. 401, repro.

1975

  • A Southern Sampler: American Paintings in Southern Museums [Inaugural Exhibition], Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, 1975, no. 6, as The Cliffs of Green River.

1976

  • This Land is Your Land, New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, 1976, unnumbered checklist.

1986

  • Loan to display with permanent collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1986-1992 (lent to other exhibitions during the loan to NGA).

1990

  • Rendezvous to Roundup: The First One Hundred Years of Art in Wyoming, Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, 1990, pl. 19, as Green River, Wyoming.

1991

  • The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920, National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Denver Art Museum; Saint Louis Art Museum, 1991-1992, fig. 216 (shown only in Washington).

1992

  • European and American Masterpieces from the William I. Koch Collection, Wichita Art Museum, 1992.

1997

  • Thomas Moran, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa; Seattle Art Museum, 1997-1998, no. 61, repro.

Inscriptions

lower right, the letters T, Y (for Yellowstone), and M in monogram: TYMORAN. / 1881.

Wikidata ID

Q20188880

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