Green River Cliffs, Wyoming

Thomas Moran first saw these sandstone buttes in 1871, when his train stopped at Green River Station on his way to join the government survey of Yellowstone. The rocks, banded in cream and rust and catching the low sun, stuck with him. He would go on to paint them again and again over the next forty years, more often than any other subject in his long career. This version shows the cliffs glowing against a sky streaked with pink and orange cloud, with a line of riders on horseback following the low ground toward the river.

The riders are where Moran quietly rewrote the facts. By the time he arrived, Green River was a rough railroad town with a hotel, saloons, and a brewery sitting right at the base of those cliffs. He left all of it out and replaced it with Native travelers, giving buyers back East the untouched wilderness they wanted to imagine. That was standard practice for the Hudson River School painters and their western successors, who treated landscape as something to be arranged rather than recorded. Moran also admired the English painter J. M. W. Turner, and you can see it in the loose, smoky handling of the clouds, which look almost dissolved compared to the sharply lit rock below. The lone horse in the foreground, trotting up the sandy slope without a rider, is a small odd detail worth finding.