Thomas Moran (1837–1926)
The Yellowstone National Park, and the Mountain Regions of Portions of Idaho, Nevada, Colorado and Utah
Described by Professor F. V. Hayden · Boston: L. Prang and Company, 1876
Folio, 21 x 17 inches. Fifteen chromolithographs after watercolors by Thomas Moran, each approximately 9 3/4 x 14 inches, or the reverse for the three upright subjects, printed on heavy stock and mounted on card. Two lithographed maps after Hayden. Title, contents, preface, and introductory text, with one or two leaves of descriptive letterpress accompanying each plate. Original publisher’s portfolio. 
Each plate is titled in the stone and carries Moran’s interlaced monogram, “TYM.” 
Exceptionally rare complete

THOMAS MORAN’S GLORIOUS YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK
VIEWS THAT INSPIRED THE CREATION
OF OUR NATIONAL PARK SYSTEM

The most important American color plate book of landscape scenery from the post-Civil War era and the chromolithographic masterwork of Louis Prang. It has been called the greatest American landscape book of its generation, and Peter Marzio, writing the standard history of the medium, judged it the high tide of chromolithography in America.[1] Moran’s work is the reason a great many nineteenth-century Americans knew what Yellowstone looked like. Before these sheets appeared, the region existed for most people as rumor defined by boiling ground, water thrown a hundred feet into the air, a canyon painted in colors no one would credit. Moran’s imagery revealed the scale and splendor of that still untouched landscape and supplied the visual evidence that helped make the case for the first national parkComplete sets almost never appear. The edition was limited to one thousand copies at $60, a considerable sum in 1876.[2] Many of the prints, along with many of the stones, was destroyed in a fire at Prang’s premises in September 1877, barely a year after publication, making the portfolio a rarity almost immediately after being published.[3]  Because the plates were mounted and titled for framing, most surviving copies were long ago broken up and sold sheet by sheet, so that a complete set with its text, both maps, and its original portfolio is now a genuinely rare opportunity in the market.[4]

Thomas Moran was born in Bolton, Lancashire, in 1837, into a family of handloom weavers displaced by the power loom and came to the United States with them in 1844. He grew up in Philadelphia, took his first art instruction from his elder brother Edward, and in 1853 was apprenticed to a wood engraving firm, where he spent three years learning how a picture behaves when it has to be translated into another medium. That apprenticeship matters enormously to the story of this portfolio. Two of his brothers, Edward and Peter, were also trained lithographers. Moran grew up inside the printing trade and never regarded a printed image as a lesser thing.

A trip to England in 1862 put him in front of the Turners at the National Gallery, and he copied them with a devotion that shaped everything afterward, reflected in the dissolving distances, light used as a structural element, the willingness to let atmosphere do work that drawing cannot. By 1871 he was thirty-four and working as an illustrator for Scribner’s Monthly, having already made a set of Yellowstone drawings from other men’s rough sketches without ever having seen the place. He wanted to see it. There was no money in the survey’s budget for a second artist, so Jay Cooke of the Northern Pacific Railroad advanced him $500 and wrote to Hayden commending him as an artist of Philadelphia of rare genius.[5] Scribner’s covered the rest.

What followed made his career and, in a real sense, helped make the country’s idea of itself. He went on to Yosemite in 1872, to the Colorado River with John Wesley Powell in 1873, and back to Colorado with Hayden in 1874. Congress bought The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone in 1872 and Chasm of the Colorado in 1874. He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1884 and worked prolifically into his eighties, dying in Santa Barbara in 1926. A remarkable number of the places he sketched are now national parks and monuments. On his death the first director of the National Park Service observed that Moran, more than any other artist, had made Americans acquainted with the Great West.[6]

Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden led the United States Geological Survey into the Yellowstone region in the summer of 1871, a year before it became a national park. He brought scientists, engineers, the photographer William Henry Jackson, and, unofficially, Moran. It is hard to imagine a better-assembled party that included the head of the federal survey, the finest photographer then working in the West, and a painter who would become the preeminent landscapist of the Rocky Mountain School.

For roughly sixteen days in the geyser country Moran sketched and Jackson photographed, often working the same vantage points and lending one another equipment and judgment. Moran was slight, not a natural horseman, and by his own cheerful account no great camper, but he came away with the watercolor field studies that would occupy him for the rest of his life. What Hayden then did with those studies in Washington is the reason this portfolio matters to more than the history of printing.

The Case Before Congress

The obstacle Hayden faced in the winter of 1871 was not indifference but disbelief. For two generations the reports coming out of the upper Yellowstone had been treated as frontier invention. Trappers described ground that boiled, water thrown a hundred feet into the air, and a river running through a gorge stained in colors no one would credit, and their listeners set the whole account down to exaggeration or delirium. Almost no member of Congress had ever seen the northern Rockies. The measure Hayden wanted asked the federal government to do something it had never done, namely to withhold more than two million acres from survey, sale, and settlement in perpetuity, and no legislature votes for that on the strength of a story it suspects of being a tall tale. What was needed was evidence.

Hayden supplied it in the most direct way available to him. Alongside his official report he brought east the pictorial record of the survey and made it the center of a lobbying campaign whose modernity is still striking. Jackson’s photographs were mounted in albums and put into the hands of individual senators and representatives. Moran’s field watercolors, the first images of the region in color that anyone had ever made, were carried into committee rooms and passed along the table. Specimens and pictures from the expedition were placed on exhibition at the Smithsonian and in the rotunda of the Capitol, so that a member could look at Yellowstone on his way to the floor. Copies of the Scribner’s Monthly numbers Moran had illustrated were distributed to legislators who wanted something to take away and read.[7]

The two bodies of work did different jobs, and it is the combination that accounts for the result. Jackson’s wet plates settled the question of fact, since a photograph in 1871 was understood to be incapable of inventing anything: the terraces stood where the survey said they did, the geysers erupted, the canyon was as deep as reported. What the camera could not do was carry color, and color was precisely what was at issue, because the palette of that country was the feature that had made every earlier account sound like a lie. Moran’s watercolors answered the objection. They gave the cobalt of the Firehole pools, the apricot and sulfur of the terraces at Mammoth, and the stained rhyolite walls of the great canyon in pigments a viewer could test against the photographic record lying beside them on the same table. Proof and persuasion arrived as a pair. Jackson, writing long afterward, judged the survey’s watercolors and photographs “the most important exhibits brought before the Committee,” and singled out the coloring of Moran’s sketches as the thing that made the difference.[8]

The legislation then moved with a speed that has few parallels in the history of American land policy. A bill was introduced in both chambers on December 18, 1871. The Senate passed it on January 30, 1872, the House on February 27, and President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act on March 1, reserving the tract as “a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” Seven months had passed since Moran packed up his color box in the geyser basins. Hiram Chittenden, the army engineer who wrote the park’s first serious history, judged a generation later that the paintings and the photographs had done work no other agency could have done, and that they convinced everyone who saw them that a country holding such things ought to be kept.[9]

The persuading did not stop at the Capitol steps, and it did not stop in 1872. The vast canvas Moran worked up that spring, The Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone, was put on public exhibition in New York and in Washington before Congress voted the ten thousand dollars to buy it, and those showings belong to the argument rather than to the celebration that followed it. Between the wood engravings in the magazines, the paying crowds who filed past the large canvases in the eastern cities, and at last these fifteen chromolithographs, the American public was handed a Yellowstone that displaced the older one entirely. What had been Colter’s Hell, a rumored waste of fire and brimstone fit for nothing and worth nothing, became a wonderland worth keeping, and the word wonderland entered the promotional vocabulary almost at once. That shift mattered as much as the vote, because the act of 1872 carried neither appropriation nor enforcement, and a park the public wanted was a park that would survive the next Congress.[10]

Hayden and Moran had, without setting out to do it, established a procedure: send an artist with the survey, bring the pictures home, and put them in front of the people who decide. It was used again and again over the next half century. A striking number of the landscapes Moran painted afterward, among them Yosemite, the chasm of the Colorado, the Mountain of the Holy Cross, and the sandstone canyons of southern Utah that close this portfolio, came under federal protection within his lifetime or soon after it. That six of the fifteen plates here lie outside Yellowstone is therefore not a matter of filling out a volume. This suite is the Yellowstone argument carried outward to the rest of the mountain West, published four years after the vote, over the name of the geologist who had made the case.

Hayden was also alert to what would follow in that he understood that tourism would shape the region’s future, and his introduction to this volume reads as much like an invitation as a report. So strange, he warned, are the freaks of color in which nature habitually indulges in this country that the reader will need strong faith in the truthfulness of both artist and writer. He then added that it is a just subject for national pride to see a work of this character, equal to anything of the kind undertaken in Europe, produced wholly on American soil.[11]

Moran gave Yellowstone to the public in three forms, and they are not in competition with one another. There were the enormous exhibition canvases, seen by relatively few people and owned by fewer still. There were the watercolors, intimate and immediate, mostly held privately. And there was this portfolio, the only form in which the full color of the West reached a wide audience at anything approaching the intensity Moran intended.

Writing to Hayden in 1872 Moran insisted that he placed no value upon literal transcripts from nature and that all his tendencies were toward idealization, while maintaining in the same breath that every form in the picture was visible from a given point and that his aim was to bring the character of the region before the public.[12] Both halves of that statement hold true of these fifteen plates. The geology, the weather, the light, and the emotional pitch are composed. Kinsey has emphasized how deliberately Moran used print to disseminate his vision and how seriously he took the medium; this suite is the fullest evidence of it.[13]

Nine of the fifteen views are of Yellowstone; the remaining six carry the viewer across the wider mountain West, to Colorado, the Sierra, Idaho Territory, and Utah. The sequence is not an afterthought, rather it serves as guide. It opens on the terraces at the park’s northern gate, moves through the geyser basins to the lake and the canyon, then widens outward until it closes in a quiet sandstone valley in southern Utah. Moran submitted twenty-four subjects to Prang; fifteen were chosen, and the editing was as much his as the publisher’s.[14]

Louis Prang, a Prussian emigrant who had built a thriving Boston commercial lithography business, believed that fine art should not be the property of the rich, and chromolithography was his instrument. He was the finest color printer of his day, and he declared the Moran Yellowstone his masterpiece. Moran collaborated closely on the choice of subjects, and his watercolors, with their crisp delineation and clear, unmuddied washes, were ideally suited to what the process demanded.

The method bears explaining, because it accounts for everything a collector notices standing in front of these sheets. In chromolithography there is no black key image doing the drawing with color laid on top. The colors are the picture. A specialist called a chromiste studied the original watercolor and decided how to decompose it, then drew each separate color onto its own stone. The sheet was passed through the press once for every stone, and every impression had to register against the last within a hair. For this portfolio Prang used somewhere between forty-four and sixty stones per image, with fifty-six a figure often cited.[15] Printed on sturdy card stock, the layered inks achieve a depth and faint surface luster that reads, across a room, as paint. That was exactly the intention.

Marzio put the artistic case plainly: Moran’s technique, grounded in a commercial printshop apprenticeship and refined by his admiration for Turner, was perfectly suited to color printing from stone, and he remains one of the most gifted artists ever to have worked in the medium. Each chromo, Marzio wrote, is a masterpiece.[16]

The reception was immediate with The Nation praising the boldness and finesse of the drawing and called the result “a genuine triumph of American graphic art.”[17] The Times of London conceded that “no finer specimens of chromo-lithographic work have been produced anywhere.”[18] Whitman Bennett later observed that “hand work could never give the effect of perspective and distance” achieved in these scenes.[19] Prang sent copies to heads of state in search of endorsements; Queen Victoria declined to supply one but kept hers and deposited it in the Royal Library.[20]

 A COMPLETE SET OF PHOTOS AND LONGER DESCRIPTION AVAILABLE ON REQUEST