Shoshone Falls on the Snake River

Thomas Moran painted this canyon spectacle in 1900, when he was in his sixties and looking to make a final grand statement. Shoshone Falls on Idaho's Snake River drops about 212 feet, higher than Niagara, and nineteenth century travelers nicknamed it the Niagara of the West. Moran first saw it in 1874 and found it a frustrating subject. The surrounding country was bare rock and sagebrush with almost no trees, none of the picturesque framing that landscape painters relied on. His solution was to let the weather do the work: towering storm clouds pile up over the canyon, sunlight breaks through on the right, and spray from the falls climbs halfway up the canvas as a pale wall of mist.

The canvas is enormous, roughly six feet tall and twelve feet wide, and Moran hoped it would sell for a fortune, perhaps to the U.S. government. It never did. The painting stayed with him, unsold, and only found a permanent home decades after his death at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa. Moran belonged to the later generation of the Hudson River School, the American painters who treated western scenery as something close to scripture, and his Yellowstone watercolors had helped convince Congress to protect that region in 1872. One small human touch hides in all this geology: a lone gnarled tree clinging to the rocks on the right edge, the only living thing standing up to the wind.