Moran, Thomas

Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape

During the years following the Civil War, many artists, including Homer, Church, and Moran, created images of America's scenic wonders and great landscape icons. These works, as well as decorative art objects, popular literature, photographs, and other ephemera helped to make the country's landscape a source of national pride and promoted landscape tourism.

FREDERIC CHURCH, WINSLOW HOMER, AND THOMAS MORAN: Tourism and the American Landscape is a major exhibition mounted by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum which will showcase, for the first time in more than two decades, the museum's extraordinary collection of more than 2000 paintings and drawings, which encompasses the largest grouping of Homer and Church objects in the world. Five original essays will accompany the 200 illustrations.

THOMAS MORAN AND THE SURVEYING OF THE AMERICAN WEST

Thomas Moran

Thomas Moran hiked through the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone in 1871, when most folks back East thought that stories of hundred-foot-high geysers, thousand-foot-deep canyons, and such were probably hogwash. After he submitted his glorious paintings of cliffs, rapids, and sun-struck vistas, Americans were finally persuaded that the West was as real as it was wild. It is largely because of Moran's glowing, oil-painted testimony that a formerly skeptical U.S. Congress soon preserved those spectacular lands. This book is the catalog of the 1998 retrospective of Moran's work, which opened on the 125th anniversary of the dedication of Yellowstone National Park. Anderson's essays cover every phase of Moran's life and career, from his work as an illustrator and printmaker to his success as one of the gentleman painters of New York City. It contains scores of archival photographs of the rather theatrical Moran as he aged, with his ever-lengthening, ever-whitening chin whiskers, and such treasures as a long letter he wrote from Yellowstone to his beautiful wife, Mary, in which he blithely describes rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and wolves observed at close range. The letter is signed "Your loving Hub." Along with Albert Bierstadt, Frederick Church, John Frederick Kensett, and other 19th-century landscape painters, viewers often associate Moran with what he called "a wonderful age," the optimistic years between the Civil War and the Great War. This book contains plates of every quintessentially American scene he painted--the pulsing sunset over the pristine wilderness, the windswept mountain pass, the misty, rushing stream. A scholarly book, it nonetheless captures much of the wonder Moran and his peers felt for the vast Western landscape and the glowing future it represented. --Peggy Moorman

Thomas Moran`s paintings of the American West secured his place as one of the most important landscape painters of the late nineteenth century. This lavishly illustrated book-a survey of Moran`s work throughout his career-presents nearly one hundred of his works, reproduced in color, along with essays by leading authorities that explore his virtuosity in various fields.

Thomas Moran: The Field Sketches, 1856-1923 (Gilcrease-Oklahoma Series on Western Art and Artists, Vol 4)

THE PRINTS OF THOMAS MORAN

Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains

Thomas Moran's West: Chromolithography, High Art, And Popular Taste

Watercolor images of Yellowstone Park painted in the early 1870s by artist Thomas Moran shifted America's gaze westward. Published as a portfolio of chromolithographs by Boston lithographer Louis Prang, these brilliant reproductions--with a companion text on Yellowstone geology by explorer Ferdinand Hayden--were the first color images of our first national park widely available to the general public. As such, they helped shape America's growing fascination with the West.

The Yellowstone National Park portfolio, comprising nine images of Yellowstone and six of other sites, is also now regarded as the finest example of chromolithography ever produced. Yet today these images are less well known than Moran's dramatic oil paintings and are usually admired merely as curiosities of an obsolete technology.

Joni Kinsey, a preeminent authority on Moran, shows that these and other chromolithographs by the artist in fact had an important place in American visual culture and were a vital part of the artist's career. Thomas Moran's West reproduces this renowned collection, along with two dozen other color plates and over 100 black-and-white illustrations, to recapture their impact on the American imagination.

Chromolithography was outmoded by 1900 but represented an important transition in American art. Whereas previously published images of the West had been black-and-white engravings, Moran's chromolithographs had the vivid beauty of high art but could be acquired by individuals who couldn't afford originals. Today the prints are highly valued by collectors, who will appreciate seeing them with related field sketches and watercolors--and in some instances rare printer's proofs from Joslyn Art Museum. Kinsey describes the making and popularity of "chromos," chronicles the debates over their artistic legitimacy, and tells how this medium competed with other forms of picture-making in the late nineteenth century. She also explores Moran's relationship with Prang and thoroughly analyzes the Yellowstone images--including those held back from publication.

Both a visual feast and an authoritative treatise, Thomas Moran's West gives us breath-taking images of unspoiled wilderness as it sheds new light on how artistic portrayals of the West contributed to our national identity.

This book features 167 photographs, 50 in full color.

The Poetry of Place: Works on Paper by Thomas Moran from the Gilcrease Museum

Splendors of the American West: Thomas Moran's art of the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone : paintings, watercolors, drawings, and photographs from the Thomas ... Institute of American History and Art

Thomas Moran's journey to the Tetons in 1879