The Castle Rock, Green River, Wyoming

That pale tower of rock rising out of the haze is a real place, the sandstone bluffs above the Green River in southwestern Wyoming. Thomas Moran first saw them in July 1871, when he stepped off the train at Green River Station on his way to join the Hayden Survey expedition to Yellowstone. He made sketches during a brief stop, and those sketches followed him for the rest of his life. He painted the Green River cliffs more than forty times over five decades, tweaking the proportions each time, usually making the buttes taller and grander than they actually stand.

One thing Moran left out tells you a lot about his intentions: Green River was a scruffy railroad town with shacks, a roundhouse and a brewery, and none of it appears here. Instead he added a small band of mounted Native American riders on the trail at lower right, the same figures he inserted into nearly every version, turning a stop on the Union Pacific line into untouched wilderness. Moran worked in the grand scenic tradition of the Hudson River School painters, carried west into the Rockies, and his tools here are light and air more than rock. The cliffs dissolve into lavender and cream, the river runs a chalky blue, and distant peaks barely hold their edges. It is a memory of a place rather than a record of one, painted by a man who knew exactly what his audience back east wanted the West to look like.