Thomas Moran (February 12, 1837 - August 25, 1926) from Bolton, England was an artist of the Hudson River School who often painted the Rocky Mountains. Thomas Moran’s vision of the Western landscape was critical to the creation of Yellowstone National Park. Thomas Moran along with Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill, and William Keith are sometimes referred to as belonging to the Rocky Mountain School of landscape painters because of all of the Western landscapes made by this group.

Thomas Moran apprenticed to a Philadelphia wood engraving firm, but by 1858 at the age of twenty-one, he had exhibited an oil painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Encouraged by the marine painter, James Hamilton, Moran traveled to London in 1861, where he was deeply impressed by the dynamic effects and glowing color of J. M. W. Turner. He also visited France and Italy in 1866 to study the Old Masters, but his early American reputation was gained as an illustrator. In 1871 Moran went west with the Hayden Expedition to record the wonders of the Yellowstone area, making annotated drawings and watercolors later used to illustrate articles in the popular press as well as the official report. Moran’s watercolors and his very large oil painting, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, convinced the U. S. Congress to set this area aside as America’s first national park.

Moran’s earlier pictures also tended to give landscape sharp, clearly defined features suggesting truth to topographical reality when, in fact, elements seen from different viewpoints were often combined in order to recreate the effect of the actual site. In his later paintings, landscape features tend to be less insistent in outline, more gentle in contour and enveloped in a more poetic atmosphere. Here the glowing sunset sky impressively silhouettes trees seen as a dark green mass and picks out the edges of the rock formations, separating them from deep shadow. It is more a picture of general atmospheric mood than the sum of topographical details, reflecting the late nineteenth-century taste for poetic image rather than sunlit description.

Moran continued to paint the landscape moods of the Southwest, returning almost every year between 1901, when the Santa Fe completed the rail line to the Grand, Canyon, and his death in 1926. Since his first visit in 1873, he had traveled to the Rockies, Europe and Mexico, yet he was drawn back again and again to the Southwest. Alongside him now came travelers attracted to the region for the first time by the landscape images he had created.