Yellowtone Canyon Analysis

Thomas Moran’s painting captures the essence of the true spirit of the Yellowstone Canyon and overwhelms any viewers who go up to it. With a size of 7’ by 12’ and a mastery display of vivid colors with hues of orange and yellow contrasted with the dark cold colors of the shadows, anyone would be overwhelmed. Under the cool shade, the path extending in front invites the viewer to join the tiny figures in the distance who seem to overlook the grand valley of the canyon below. The view from where those people are in the distance could be quite breathtaking, and this adds to the painting’s value. Moran captured the public and the government’s fascinations with the beauties of America’s Wild West. Moran’s mastery of composition within landscape

works like this one is what garnered so much attention. There is more to Yellowstone Canyon than what meets the eye. Moran's painting, the Yellowstone canyon became like a beacon of light for other artists to follow in the 19th century with its impact on history, and its form and content. Moran's painting is far by one of the most important paintings in 19th century United States. Not just what it accomplishes with its content, but also what it impacts.
It was 1871, the beginning of events that ultimately started the creation of the painting, Yellowstone Canyon.

Thomas Moran has just been invited to join Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden in his Hayden Geological Survey of 1871 where they will be adventuring into the great unknowns of the Yellowstone Canyon. Thomas Moran only imagined what the canyon would look like prior to his trip on the expedition and often made sketches of Yellowstone without seeing the canyon in person. When Moran and the expedition team got there, it was as every bit breathtaking as they hoped it would be. Thomas Moran captured its sheer beauty and essence in a series of paintings and sketches while a fellow expeditioner, William Henry Jackson, captured it in photographs. Those photographs and paintings was enough to convince the president and US congress to make Yellowstone into a national park like it is today. The government even purchased Moran’s other painting, The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, for $10,000. This shows that Moran created a painting that could impact government politics. However, one of the reasons why the Yellowstone Canyon would be so captivating to the government is because it makes the viewers experience the

“sublime.”
Thomas Moran saw the Yellowstone landscape as a natural environment, inherently nationalistic and he followed the principles of landscape art.

However, Moran sided with the “sublime” aspect of Romantic landscape in which he uses the properties of form and color to evocatively paint a landscape meant to push the limit of formal expression. Moran doesn’t use just these techniques of the “sublime” to make the painting overwhelming, but also combined it with the sheer size of the canvas. He utilizes his space very well to make his viewers feel like he did when he found the canyon. He involves an aesthetic attack on our senses as viewers. Moran uses all of these elements to make the viewers feel like they are actually at the canyon. He used other tactics like the expansive sunlit landscape of the valley below, the tiny people that are dwarfed by the enormity of the landscape around them, and the enormous shadowing of the plane in the foreground which is symbolic of the fleetingness of a storm passing overhead. There is a tree that looks to have had barely made it through a powerful storm. All of these elements are meant to communicate just how small humans are in the wake of the destructive elements and splendor of nature. Yellowstone painting signifies the sheer power of nature and what it can bring which Moran uses to his advantage to captivate the masses.

It is almost as if Moran is trying to advertise the Wild West and its canyons to the eastern side of the US. He is trying

to convey the idea through his painting, that the Wild West is a wonderland full of adventure, geysers, hot springs, colossal waterfalls capable of tons of hydraulic pressure, and turbulent rivers that stretch far into the horizon. The wilds of the West, contains a grace about it, as precious as diamonds or gold. This is how his theme communicates the “sublime.”
To add to the subliminal effect, Thomas Moran textured the different objects in the painting to add to the authenticity. If the viewer notices where the path starts right in front of them, they’ll see that even the stone has a significant amount of texture where there are little indents, holes, and cracks typical for the rock type that would be present there. The stony path has a lustrous quality about it that even the rocks on canyon walls in the distance don’t contain. While the stony path is smooth and reflective, the canyon walls seem to have a texture of being rusty yet still smooth in some places. If you look beyond the canyon walls, there is a misty cloud that hangs above the rocks in the valley and ascends out of the waterfall below. Because of the mist’s opaqueness quality, it’s illuminated by the light. The light would’ve reflected off of what would be tiny droplets and yet it partially hinders the audience’s view of the atmosphere. That still doesn’t allow the viewer to still see that there is the use of atmospheric perspective in which the landscape in the distance, beyond the canyon is blurry and not crisp. The details within the painting and the textures applied to the land formations is partly why the Yellowstone Painting made waves in the artistic community, but Moran couldn’t have done this entire painting on his own. He needed help with the accuracy of the canyon’s characteristics from a geologist’s guidance.
Thomas Moran was interested in the metamorphic aspects of the canyon and didn’t follow the (norm belief?) that many people had believed. The masses of people had the notion up until now that the Earth was only 6,000 years old and that the biblical floods had made the rock formations and it has remained static ever since. Moran fell into that belief and he sought out Ferdinand Hayden to accurately capture what the Yellowstone canyon actually looks like from a geologic standpoint, but not a religious standpoint. Moran used Hayden’s mentoring to paint the scene that was formed out of exceptional change. Volcanic ash and sediment piled on the ground and then an erosive river cut through the tough crust of the earth to make the enormous rock formations called canyons. They are the long term effects of centuries of the Earth’s elements clashing with the crust of the Earth and Moran illustrated this with his Yellowstone Canyon. Even with one painting, Thomas Moran made his entrance into the artist’s world in the 1800s.
The field of geology was growing bigger and more complex and became intertwined with the genre of landscape paintings. For a landscape artist, being attracted to the field of geology meant that artist entered high society and earned a social reputation. However, at the same time, the artistic world also started heading in a different path as the masses became less receptive to precise interpretations of canyons, mountains, rivers, etc. and instead, personal interpretations of landscape. This is when, the artistic movement, Impressionism started taking over as the more popular art genre, and Moran’s Yellowstone Canyon came into the scene at this turning point of change in the artistic world.
The overwhelming spirit of the Yellowstone Canyon and all of its elements is what persuaded the government to preserve Yellowstone as a national park. The painting persuaded the government and its audience, not with words, but with a single picture. That’s why this makes the Yellowstone Canyon painting a leading landscape work for its time and its category of the 19th century. Viewers are pulled in to the work, with the path that winds out in the foreground--- almost like a hand reaching out. Also, what pulls in the viewers is the sheer largeness of the painting, almost as if it surrounds the viewers with its mishmash of complimentary yet contrasting colors. The painting is so complex in its content and history that it easily trumps most landscape paintings of the 19th century.