Thomas Moran, Mountain of the Holy Cross-Colorado, 1888. Etching on parchment, 28 x 18 3/4 inches. Photograph by: Tad Fruits

At the height of his career, Thomas Moran was one of the leading painters of the American West. Although born in England, Moran, who came to America as a child, was outspoken in his determination to paint “as an American, on an American basis, and American only.” As one of an elite group of “Western artist-adventurers,” he rendered the West’s emblematic scenery in paintings that emphasized their symbolic significance. His paintings equated the grandeur of the West with essential qualities of American spirit and character.

Moran was the youngest of four brothers, all accomplished artists. He learned basic art techniques from his brothers before apprenticing in 1853 to a commercial Philadelphia wood engraver. Inevitably, he decided to become a professional artist and exhibited his first important painting at the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy in 1858. During the 1860ss, he toured Europe, studying the works of masters such as J. M. W. Turner, whose flamboyant, myth-tinged landscapes influenced him profoundly.

Moran’s first opportunity to go west came in 1871 when he was commissioned by Scribner’s Monthly magazine to illustrate an article about the Yellowstone area. Learning of a government-sponsored survey expedition that was headed there, he asked the party’s leader, geologist Ferdinand V. Hayden, if he could go along. Hayden agreed, thus launching Moran’s career as America’s preeminent painter of the western wilderness.

Both Hayden and John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran who had been exploring the Colorado River and its Grand Canyon since the 1860s, were critical to Moran’s success. Becoming his close friends and admirers, they took him along on expeditions to what photographer Jack Hillers once called “all the best scenery” in the West: Hayden to the Yellowstone and the Mountain of the Holy Cross, in Colorado, and Powell, to the Grand Canyon.

Moran relied on photography to compose his paintings, especially the work of his friends Hillers and William Henry Jackson. As official photographers on Hayden’s and Powell’s expeditions, they collaborated with Moran to photograph the spectacular sites that made his fame. They relied on his artistic eye for composing the scenes they shot and he in turn used their photographs as studies for the paintings he created in his Newark, New Jersey, studio.