Thomas Moran
National Gallery of Art, Washington
September 28, 1997 - January 11, 1998
The first retrospective of paintings by THOMAS MORAN (1837-1926), long recognized as one of America's foremost landscape artists, is on view at the National Gallery of Art. The exhibition features approximately 100 of Thomas Moran's finest watercolors and oil paintings, which provided Americans with breathtaking views of the American West, including the first images of Yellowstone. Viewers can see a selection of Thomas Moran's paintings of Yellowstone that inspired Congress to establish the first national park in the United States. The Thomas Moran exhibition coincides with the 125th anniversary celebration of the creation of Yellowstone National Park. Also included in the exhibition is the painting, The Three Tetons, which hangs in the Oval Office of the White House.
The Thomas Moran exhibition is being organized by the National Gallery of Art, in association with the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma, which holds the largest collection of works by Thomas Moran. After its showing in Washington, the exhibition will be at the Gilcrease Museum, February 8 - May 10, 1998, and the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, June 11 - August 30, 1998.
In the period of renewal following the Civil War, the government sponsored survey teams to explore and map the vast resources of the American West. Thomas Moran's original watercolors, completed on the first survey expedition to Yellowstone in 1871, are being lent by the National Park Service as part of its anniversary celebration. They are installed with photographs by the noted photographer William Henry Jackson who traveled with Thomas Moran on the historic expedition.
Thomas Moran's watercolors of Yellowstone played a decisive role in the creation of the first national park in the United States just a few months after being seen by the public and the U.S. Congress. Thomas Moran subsequently rose to national prominence when his first great painting of the American West, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (1872), with its vast, spectacular landscape, was purchased by Congress to hang in the U.S. Capitol.
The exhibition includes Thomas Moran's three most famous oil paintings, hung together for the first time as the western triptych he intended: Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (1872) and Chasm of the Colorado (1873 - 1874) from the Department of the Interior, and Mountain of the Holy Cross (1875) from the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Los Angeles.
While Thomas Moran's great Western paintings form the heart of the exhibition, visitors also have an opportunity to see his rarely exhibited Italian, English, and Mexican scenes, as well as his little known Pre-Raphaelite-style landscapes of the eastern United States.
In addition to loans from private collectors, public lenders to the exhibition include the Gilcrease Museum; The White House; the National Park Service; the Smithsonian Institution; the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming; the Museum of Western Art, Denver; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; the Detroit Institute of Arts; Berea College, Berea, Kentucky; the Union Pacific Museum Collection, Omaha; the National Archives, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Accompanying the exhibition is a comprehensive, fully illustrated catalogue with contributions from Nancy Anderson, associate curator of American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art, along with other leading Thomas Moran scholars including Anne Morand, curator of art, Gilcrease Museum; Joni Kinsey, professor of art history, University of Iowa; and Thomas Bruhn, acting director, Benton Museum, University of Connecticut, Storrs. The catalogue, published by the National Gallery of Art in association with Yale University Press, is the first extensive, scholarly work on Thomas Moran. It includes an illustrated chronology, color plates of every painting in the exhibition, and appendices of rare Moran documents available in part for the first time. One of the appendices includes illustrations of the series of chromolithographs that Thomas Moran did for Louis Prang in 1876, widely recognized as the finest chromolithographs done in nineteenth-century America. For the first time these are reproduced in color together with original text.
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