Green River, Wyoming

Those sandstone bluffs rising above the water are real, and you can still find them today just outside the town of Green River, Wyoming. Thomas Moran first saw them in 1871, when he stepped off a train on his way to join the Hayden Survey expedition to Yellowstone. The sight stuck with him. Over the next fifty years he painted this same view again and again, in oil and watercolor, dozens of times over, tweaking the light, the clouds, and the color until the cliffs glowed like something out of a dream rather than a geology report.

The small line of riders in the lower left is worth finding, since they tell you what Moran left out. By the time he painted most of these versions, Green River was a busy railroad town with a depot, a brewery, coal mines, and rows of buildings right below those cliffs. He erased all of it and put a group of Native American travelers in its place. The result is a landscape that never quite existed, painted in the grand manner of the Hudson River School, where American scenery was meant to feel vast and untouched. Moran knew exactly what he was doing. He once said his goal was not literal truth but the impression the place made on him, which is a polite way of saying he preferred the West as it looked in his memory.