Grand Canyon of the Colorado River

Thomas Moran painted this view of the Grand Canyon in 1892 and then went back into it years later, in 1908, adjusting and deepening the canvas until he was satisfied. That patience shows in the weather: a rainstorm trails down on the left while sunlight skims the flat-topped mesas in the distance, and pale mist rises out of the gorge like steam. The boulders in the foreground are painted with far more crispness than anything beyond them, a trick that shoves the far wall of the canyon miles into the distance. Moran never claimed to be making a map. He wanted to convey the feeling of standing on the rim, and he freely rearranged buttes and clouds to get there.

Moran belonged to the later generation of American landscape painters who followed the Hudson River School west, chasing scenery big enough to match the ambitions of a young country. He first saw the canyon in 1873, traveling with explorer John Wesley Powell, and his earlier Yellowstone painting had already helped persuade Congress to protect that region as a national park. By the 1890s, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway was giving him free passage west, happy to trade train tickets for images that would lure tourists to the Southwest. Look for his signature at the lower right: a tangled monogram of T, Y, and M, the Y standing for Yellowstone, a nickname he enjoyed enough to sign with for the rest of his life.