Glorious Venice

The painter who made America's West famous also had a serious soft spot for Venice. Thomas Moran built his reputation on enormous canvases of Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, works so persuasive that Congress bought one and the region became the country's first national park. But after visiting Italy in the 1880s, he returned again and again to Venetian subjects, and they sold well enough that he kept painting them for the rest of his life. Here the bell tower of San Marco and the pale arcades of the Doge's Palace float in the distance, while the foreground is busy with working boats, a stone bridge, and figures loading cargo along a sunlit quay.

Moran's hero was the English painter J.M.W. Turner, and you can see the debt in every brushstroke: the sky churning with light, the buildings dissolving into haze, the water reflecting more color than the actual scene would allow. This is Romantic landscape painting at its most atmospheric, less a record of a specific spot than an impression of warmth and shimmer. One detail worth catching is the pair of tall triangular sails just left of center, painted a rusty orange that pulls your eye across the canal. Moran often signed his work with a monogram that included a Y for Yellowstone, a reminder that the man dreaming up these Italian afternoons was the same one who had ridden on horseback through the American wilderness.