View of Zion

Red sandstone cliffs rise out of a haze of blue and cream, their tops catching a warm light while everything below them dissolves into mist. Thomas Moran painted this view of Zion Canyon in southern Utah with a loose, breathy touch that owes a lot to the British painter J.M.W. Turner, whose work Moran studied closely and copied as a young man. The foreground rocks are blocked in with thick, quick strokes, and the far ridges are barely more than stains of color. It reads less like a record of a specific place and more like the memory of standing there while weather moved through.

Moran came west in the 1870s as an artist attached to government survey expeditions, and his pictures did real political work. His Yellowstone paintings helped convince Congress to protect that region in 1872, earning him the nickname "Yellowstone" Moran, which he folded into the monogram he signed his canvases with. He reached the Zion area in 1873 while traveling with John Wesley Powell's survey, and his images of the canyon were among the first many Americans ever saw. Zion did not become a national park until 1919, decades after Moran sketched it, but the pictures helped plant the idea. This particular painting is a modest one, more study than statement, and its pleasure lies in watching a painter chase light across stone.