This illustrated catalog of Thomas Moran’s field sketches includes an interpretive essay tracing the artist’s seventy-year career in the field; a chronological, stylistic, and geographical survey of his fieldwork; an illustrated checklist of the 1080 sketches in public collections. Moran is best known for his work in the American West during the post-Civil War expansion, particularly in what would become Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite national parks. Yet this virtuoso painter and draftsman also traveled in search of inspiration in Pennsylvania, New York’s Long Island, Florida, Wisconsin, Mexico, England, Scotland, Wales, France, and Italy, returning repeatedly to favorite subjects. An almost compulsive desire to sketch refined his innate skill as one of America’s finest landscape artists. Most of Moran’s known field sketches are reproduced here. As described in the introduction, “their range encompasses summary contour drawings of the spectacular topography of the American West, luminous watercolors that simultaneously fix local color and evoke the artist’s rapturous response to the natural world, and fully realized works that nevertheless preserve the intensity of Moran’s firsthand experience of his plein air subjects.” No serious formal study of Thomas Moran can be made without reference to this volume.

This extensively revised edition of Thurman Wilkins’s masterful and engaging biography - well illustrated in color and black-and-white - draws on new information and recent scholarship to place Thomas Moran more securely in the milieu of the Gilded Age. It also portrays more fully the controversies that surrounded the art of Moran’s time, as he became "the Dean of American Painters." The American West was the subject of Thomas Moran’s greatest artistic triumphs - Yosemite, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, Zion Canyon, the Virgin River, Colorado’s Mountain of the Holy Cross, and the Grand Tetons - but his travels with Ferdinand V. Hayden’s geological surveys of the Upper Yellowstone were matched by trips to his native Britain and to Venice, Florida, the Spanish Southwest, and Old Mexico. These scenes inspired memorable landscapes and seascapes, as did the sojourns of the Moran family in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and East Hampton, Long Island, when they retreated from the demands of the New York art scene. In the 1880s Moran and his artist wife, Mary Nimmo Moran, also threw themselves into the etching craze of the period, creating some of the finest prints produced in the United States. Moran was an artist happy in his work. He wrote, "I have always held that the grandest, most beautiful, or wonderful in nature, would, in capable hands, make the grandest, most beautiful, or wonderful pictures." The New York Times said of the first edition of this unique account of his life, "Moran’s mastery comes through clearly and awesomely and often, pleasurably." Readers will find the new edition equally enjoyable.

Tom Moran had never ridden a horse or slept under the stars before, but the paintings he created on his journey from city boy to seasoned explorer would lead to the founding of America's first national park.

The companion book to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum's exhibition of the same name of America's scenic wonders captured by three of the greatest artists of the 19th century.

Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Remington, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and dozens of other artists have braved difficult conditions to capture the splendors of Yellowstone in many media, from delicate watercolors and pen-and-ink sketches to powerful oils and popular lithographs. They have portrayed the animals that lived there, the humans who passed through, and above all the remarkable features that have made Yellowstone a wonderland to so many artists and observers."--BOOK JACKET.

Describes an exhibit at the National Gallery, the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, and the Seattle Art Museum

"This book offers a tour of a collection of paintings of the American West still in private hands. The Anschutz Collection covers all the ground expected in a wide-ranging, major survey, yet still has plenty of room for surprises. Every phase in the history of American art since the 182Os is included. There are pictures of impressive quality by lesser-known artists and examples from all the major painters who have depicted the West. You'll discover works by artists such as Marsden Hartley, Childe Hassam, Jan Matulka, and John Henry Twachtman, who painted western subjects only rarely, and pictures by those whose subjects were predominantly western. The collection is particularly rich in paintings made in Taos and Santa Fe during the first half of the twentieth century, when major American artists often found inspiration and stylistic renewal in the Southwest. Among the American masters represented here are George Bellows, Albert Bierstadt, George Caleb Bingham, Ernest Blumenschein, George Catlin, Stuart Davis, Asher B. Durand, George Inness, John Marin, Alfred Jacob Miller, Thomas Moran, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frederic Remington, Charles Marion Russell, and Walter Ufer."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Table of contents

National Parks - 'America's Best Idea' - were from the first seen as sacred sites embodying the God-given specialness of American people and American land, and from the first they were also marked as tourist attractions. The inherent tensions between these two realities ensured the parks would be stages where the country's conflicting values would be performed and contested. As pilgrimage sites embody the values and beliefs of those who are drawn to them, so Americans could travel to these sacred places to honor, experience, and be restored by the powers that had created the American land and the American enterprise. This book explores the importance of the discourse of nature in American culture, arguing that the attributes and symbolic power that had first been associated with the 'new world' and then the 'frontier' were embodied in the National Parks. Author Ross-Bryant focuses on National Parks as pilgrimage sites around which a discourse of nature developed and argues the centrality of religion in understanding the dynamics of both the language and the ritual manifestations related to National Parks. Beyond the specific contribution to a richer analysis of the National Parks and their role in understanding nature and religion in the U.S., this volume contributes to the emerging field of 'religion and the environment,' larger issues in the study of religion (e.g. cultural events and the spatial element in meaning-making), and the study of non-institutional religion.