An Indian Paradise, Green River, Wyoming

A small group of riders threads along the sandy trail in the lower right, so modest in scale you could almost miss them against the cliffs rising across the water. That was Thomas Moran's point. He first saw the Green River bluffs in 1871 from a train window in Wyoming, on his way to join the Hayden survey of Yellowstone. What he actually looked at was a rough railroad town with a roundhouse, warehouses and a brewery. He painted it out. In its place he put horseback travelers, untouched riverbanks and a wall of eroded rock catching the late light.

Moran returned to this view again and again over some forty years, producing dozens of versions and rarely bothering to make them match the real thing. He stretched the buttes taller, warmed their color, and softened the distances with haze borrowed from the European landscape painters he admired, especially Turner. The result belongs to the Hudson River School tradition of the American West as a kind of Eden, painted at the exact moment that Eden was being crossed by rail. Worth noticing: the still stretch of river in the middle, where the whole rock face repeats itself upside down without a ripple. Rivers do not usually behave that way, but the mirror was too good to pass up.