The Golden Hour

A sandstone butte rises out of orange haze like something half remembered, and everything around it dissolves into light. Thomas Moran painted this in 1875, a few years after his trip west with the Hayden Survey to Yellowstone, and the influence of that journey shows in the scale of the rock formations. But he was never interested in copying a place exactly. He once said he placed no value on literal transcripts from nature, and scenes like this one are best understood as inventions assembled from memory, sketches, and a great deal of imagination. The butte may resemble places in Utah or Arizona, yet it belongs to no map.

Moran was born in England and brought to Philadelphia as a boy, and he studied the work of J.M.W. Turner closely, which explains why this looks less like a document of the American West and more like a sunset burning through mist. The Hudson River School painters he is grouped with often chased this sort of glowing atmosphere, though Moran pushed it further than most. Down in the lower right corner you will find his monogram, a T and M wrapped around a Y. The Y stands for Yellowstone, a nickname he adopted with obvious pride after his paintings helped persuade Congress to protect the region as the first national park. Also worth spotting: a single bird skimming the water near the bottom of the canvas, the only living thing in the whole scene.