A Passing Shower in the Yellowstone Canyon

Rain has just swept through this canyon, and Thomas Moran caught the moment when the clouds begin to break apart. Mist still clings to the cliffs on the left while sunlight reaches the pale gold spires in the center, turning them almost luminous against the gray sky. Those yellow walls are not artistic exaggeration. The rock in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is rhyolite, chemically altered by hot water and steam until it took on shades of butter, rust, and cream, which is how the river and the park got their name in the first place. Down in the shadowy gorge, barely visible, a thread of white water works its way through.

Moran first saw this place in 1871 as the artist attached to the Hayden Geological Survey, and the watercolors he brought back helped convince Congress that Yellowstone was worth protecting. It became the world's first national park the following year. He returned to the subject for the rest of his life, and he was so associated with it that he signed his work with a monogram containing a Y, calling himself Thomas "Yellowstone" Moran. This later canvas belongs to the Hudson River School tradition of grand American scenery, though by the early 1900s Moran had grown more interested in weather and atmosphere than in cataloging every rock. The windswept pines in the right foreground, small and dark against all that light, give you the scale of what you are looking at.