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Trading Cultures - The Biennial Conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies Copenhagen, August 8-11, 2001 PLENARY LECTURE. Associate professor Arne Neset Stavanger University College

You know the Catskills, lad; for you must have seen them on your left, as you followed the river up from York, looking as blue as a piece of clear sky, and holding the clouds on their tops, as the smoke curls over the head of an Indian chief at the council fire. Well, there’s the High-peak and the Round-top, which lay back like a father and mother among their children, seeing they are far above all the other hills. But the place I mean is next to the river, where one of the ridges juts out a little from the rest, and where the rocks fall, for the best part of a thousand feet, so much up and down, that a man standing on their edges is fool enough to think he can jump from top to bottom." "What see you when you get there?" asked Edwards, "Creation," said Natty, dropping the end of his rod into the water, and sweeping one hand around him in a circle, "all creation, lad. (Leatherstocking in Cooper's The Pioneers, ch. 26.)

CAVERNS MEASURELESS TO MAN Thomas Moran and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone 1. MORAN'S TRIPTYCH • The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (1872) • The Chasm of the Colorado (1874) • The Mountain of the Holy Cross (1875) The first two paintings attracted so much attention when they were exhibited that they were almost immediately purchased by Congress to be hung on the wall in the Senate Lobby. The third painting was exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 where it was awarded a medal and a diploma. There are not many examples in the history of art of works that have attracted so much popular attention and received so much honor and been displayed so prominently in the corridors of power.

Moran himself seems to have conceived of his three paintings as constituting a triptych because he wanted them to be exhibited together at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.i Unfortunately Moran was not able to get Congress, who had just bought the two

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canyon pictures, to send them to Philadelphia, so only The Mountain of the Holy Cross was hung up in the exhibition hall.

It did take a long time for Moran's triptych to be assembled. It did not happen until four years ago, in September 1997, when the first retrospective exhibition of Moran's works was held at the National Gallery in Washington as part of the 125th anniversary celebration of the creation of the Yellowstone National Park. At last Moran's three monumental landscapes, which he had repeatedly tried to exhibit together during his lifetime, were brought together.

It is easy to see from the history of the three pictures that it is the two canyon landscapes that have attracted most of the attention. In my opinion they deserve it. The Holy Cross painting on the other hand, seems today quite naïve and sentimental in its mixture of landscape and piety. However, I think it ought to be included in an interpretation of the meanings of the other two, particularly since Moran considered them to be thematically related.

The meanings of these paintings go far beyond the landscape spectaculars of the Hudson River school. They reflect some important contemporary cultural conflicts and concerns of the second half of the 19th century in America. It is here relevant to ask questions like the following: Why did these three works of art receive such extraordinary attention and honor in the 1870s? Why would Congress want to purchase two pictures of giant holes in the earth's crust to be displayed as national icons? Why were pictures of the more exceptional types of American landscape perceived as important political or social statements? Why were Moran's landscapes mostly chosen for the political scene and not those of Moran's contemporary, Albert Bierstadt, whose enormous panoramic landscapes of the Rockies also had attracted a lot of attention?

Secondly these paintings also need to be interpreted in the context of the history, iconology and conventions of landscape in European art.

So, in the solid tradition of crossing cultures and disciplines within American Studies, I want to explore some of the contexts and relationships between art and politics, between landscape iconology and ideas about the sublime, between nature worship and geological science, between railroad interests, tourism and publishing industry. This will reveal a complex interplay between facts and fictions, conventions and ideas, money and politics, religion and science, in short, the whole complex web of culture at a given time in the history of the United States. The two Capitol pictures.

Seldom have politicians and government acted so quickly to preserve for the nation's posterity a vast stretch of wild mountain terrain as when the Ferdinand Hayden expedition, with the painter Thomas Moran and the photographer William Henry Jackson among the party, came back from the Yellowstone area in the fall of 1871. Moran's paintings, as well as William Henry Jackson's photographs of the area, particularly inspired the virtually unanimous and unchallenged political commitment to national parks in a period when the republic was licking its wounds after a long and bloody civil war and the life of the nation was being transformed by industrial enterprise, rapid urbanization and mass immigration. On March 1, 1872, Congress passed a resolution declaring the 3.472 square miles of the Yellowstone areaii a National Park, President Ulysses Grant signed the Yellowstone park bill into law, and in June Congress appropriated $ 10.000 for the purchase of a painting made by Thomas Moran titled The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. After a tour of several American cities, the painting was placed in the Senate lobby. There it remained until 1950

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when it was moved to the Department of the Interior, which later lent it to be displayed by the National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution.

In 1874 Congress also purchased Moran's second large scale painting of a canyon, this

time of the Grand Canyon itself, for the same sum as it had given for the Yellowstone painting. This picture, titled The Chasm of the Colorado, was the result of Moran's participation in another expedition, this time the John Wesley Powell expedition to the Grand Canyon in 1873.iii The Grand Canyon painting was also hung in the Senate lobby and placed opposite the Yellowstone. Moran's pictures were the first pure landscape paintings to be acquired by politicians to be hung in Congress. Until that date all pictures installed in the Capitol were either portraits of politicians, famous Americans, and the grand history scenes in John Trumbull's large canvasses (e.g. The Signing of the Declaration of Independence).iv Apart from having been displayed at the Centennial in Philadelphia and referred to in poetry and religious tracts at the time, The Mountain of the Holy Cross, (1875) was not acquired by any public institution, but ended up for a long time in private ownership in Denver. 2. LANDSCAPE PAINTING In order to understand the success of Moran's canyon pictures when they were painted in the 1870s and to assess their iconological significance, one has to interpret them both within the conventions of landscape painting and in relation to their contemporary social and philosophical context.

Landscape painting as a genre in European pictorial art came into its own in the 17th century in the baroque landscapes of Claude Lorrain (1600-82) and Salvador Rosa (1615-73). Medieval and early Renaissance painters had normally treated landscape as a background of symbolic importance to the figures in the picture. Particularly the mountains became symbols of inaccessibility where man should not tread. Only the gods could inhabit Olympus, and only a Moses could ascend to the top of Mount Sinai to talk to God. Mountains, writes Kenneth Clark, "are in fact part of a very ancient pictorial tradition. They certainly go back to

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Hellenistic painting, and survive in those manuscripts … which are based on antique models. They were common in Byzantine art, as it has come down to us, in mosaics and illumination; and they become the central motive of those icons which represent the desert of Sinai."v When landscapes became more common in European art in the 17th century they were not intended to be realistic renderings of actual landscapes. The landscape was a construct which was meant to reveal an ideal or symbolic reality. Art historian Kenneth Clark defines the preoccupations of the landscape genre as follows:

Both in content and design landscape must aspire to those higher kinds of painting which illustrate a theme, religious, historical or poetic. ... The features of which it is composed must be chosen from nature, as poetic diction is chosen from ordinary speech, for their elegance, their ancient associations and their faculty of harmonious combination. Ut pictura poesis.vi

It was not until the Romantic Period that landscape took on a new, independent and important function of revealing nature as an extension of the human mind capable of both terror and beauty, but even more importantly, as force and immutable natural laws.

Hudson River romanticism. From a European point of view the landscapes of the Hudson River School were crude and provincial and the artists had had little academic and professional training. This might in some cases be turned to an advantage because Americans sometimes assumed that their artists possessed a degree of "innocence" and originality which was superior to that of their European counterparts. We remember William Cullen Bryant's advice to Thomas Cole on his departure to Europe to "keep that earlier, wilder image (= America) bright" and not become too infatuated with European scenes and tastes.vii In order to paint their preferred landscape forms the Hudson River School painters did not travel much further afield than to New England, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Their landscapes are characterized by the importance of the middle landscape which was basically Claudian, pastoral and Jeffersonian. The cultivated, mild, dreamy and largely domesticated landscape was what these painters preferred. It usually had the undramatic qualities of Thoreau's Walden landscape, and it reflected the dreamy moods of lakes and rivers. viii

River bends, ponds or lakes in early 19th century American landscape art often function as topoi that signify spiritual stasis; a reflective, stagnant, transparent, narcissistic and meditative mood. The pond - like Walden Pond - is a blank in the landscape with a capacity for physical metamorphoses into ripples, waves, storm and evaporation and, in winter, turning into ice. And these modes of being also symbolize the way the human imagination transforms, reflects and reconstitutes itself. At the same time water is a lifegiving and life preserving force in nature and in the mighty river it assumes a power and momentum that, at least before the 20th century technology of building dams, dwarf the efforts of men to tame it or change it. The river easily becomes a symbol of the "river of life" and the relentless passing of time, and as such an archetypal image in man's experience.

Inventing the Rockies.

After the railroads were extended into the west, and particularly after the completion of the Union and Pacific Railroad in 1869 and the Northern Pacific Railroad in the 1870s, the

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Rockies became far more accessible, and the wonders of the western landscapes became more generally known. This landscape could now be described not only in survey reports and crude sketches, but in the language of land agents, journalists and tourists and the descriptions could be accompanied by engravings, photographs and paintings. Painters could now portray the West, often as members of expeditions and surveying parties, or being commissioned by railroad interests to do so in order to attract customers to the railroads. With Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran the Hudson River painters went west and became the Rocky Mountain Schoolix in American landscape painting. Some of the Hudson River painters had tried to make their landscapes more dramatic and sublime by exaggerating the dimensions of the actual landscape they used as models. Out in the real Rocky Mountains the scale was grander than they had ever imagined. The problem now was that reality surpassed the means they had to render it. John Wesley Powell, the leader of the expedition down the Grand Canyon in 1873, had hired Moran to paint scenes "too vast, too complex and too grand for verbal description."x Moran's problem was that these scenes might also be too vast for effective pictorial representation. Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) tried to solve the problem by extending the formulas of the Hudson River painters by leaving out the half cultivated Arcadia. His Rocky Mountains pictures, for example The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak (1863) and Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California, (1868) show majestic towering mountains as a backdrop and in the foreground there is a clear mountain lake, which mirrors the snowcapped peaks, with grazing deer on the shore. The human figures that constitute the foreground in Lander's Peak are Indians and therefore an undisturbing "part of nature." Bierstadt was also commissioned to paint the achievements of the Central Pacific Railroad in crossing the Sierras, and in his View of the Donner Lake (1871-72), the natural sublime parallels the technological achievement of the conquest of the Donner Pass. The perspective from the "normal" Hudson landscape has been turned round. From the rim of the canyonlike valley, along whose right side the railroad track runs, we look down a ravaged incline revealing the impact of construction towards a shimmering Edenic lake in the background. In the "generic" Hudson landscape the lake would constitute one of the arcadian elements in the foreground and the mountain peaks would close the view in the background. The visitors who assembled to view this tour de force, Robert Hughes writes, learned three things:

first, that the Donner Pass held no more terrors for the traveler; second, that the railroad did not damage nature; and third, that the deep cushions of a Pullman Palace car on the CPR were the right throne from which to view its splendors. Donner Lake from the Summit was the patriarch of all American travel posters.xi

In the second half of the 19th century American landscape painters began to record the kind of landscape, which, according to Edmund Burke's definition (in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful) from 1757, could truly be called sublime. This was obviously an aspect of the increasing accessibility of the West. The chasms of the Grand Canyons of the Colorado and of the Yellowstone exerted en enormous fascination on travelers, painters and the general public. Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran's pictures generally reflect the sublimeness of nature and the smallness of man. In order to capture the grand panoramas they blew up their formats to become the widescreen CinemaScopes of their time. The sketches were made on the spot and spectators

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would demand to be able to recognize these spots and vistas in the finished paintings. Any generic mountain would not do. The popularity of the Rocky Mountain School served as an impetus to set up national parks for the preservation of the more spectacular parts of the Western landscapes for posterity. The Rocky Mountain school also served a need for visual information about natural wonders of which there were no color photos in any National Geographic at that time. It also represented a degree of "gothicism" and sensationalism which stimulated the imagination and the interest in natural science and the forces of nature in an age which was trying to harness these forces and exploit them commercially. The school is one of nature megalomania, of melodramatic landscape sometimes exaggerated beyond what was the actual fact. And when reality surpassed the fiction as in Moran's The Chasm of the Colorado, the artist begins to move toward expressionism. 3. THOMAS MORAN'S ROMANTICISM

In American landscape painting Moran occupies an interesting position between the romantic Hudson River School and impressionism and realism in the arts of the later part of the 19th century. Thomas Moran was born in Lancashire, England in 1837, came to America with his parents at the age of seven and was raised in Philadelphia. His British family background may account for his fascination with English romanticism. As Robert Hughes points outxii, one of his early interests was the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and one of his first canvasses (1856) took its title from Shelley's poem from 1816 titled Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude. Alastor is a story about a young man who starts out on a quest through imaginary landscapes in search of truth. The landscapes are typically romantic and gothic and contain descriptions of caverns and canyons which remind one Moran's paintings in he Salvadorian tradition.

The young man Alastor follows a stream running between rocks down a deep ravine.

On every side now rose Rocks, which, in unimaginable forms, Lifted their black and barren pinnacles In the light of evening, and its precipice Obscuring the ravine, disclosed above, Mid toppling stones, black gulfs and yawning caves, Whose windings gave ten thousand various tongues To the loud stream. …

The near scene, In naked and severe simplicity, Made contrast with the universe. A pine, Rock-rooted, stretched athwart the vacancy Its swinging boughs, to each inconstant blast Yielding one only response, at each pause, In most familiar cadence, with the howl The thunder and the hiss of homeless streams Mingling its solemn song, whilst the broad river, Foaming and hurrying o'er its rugged path,

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Fell into that immeasurable void, Scattering its waters to the passing winds.xiii

In addition to the romantic influence from Shelley, the baroque landscapes of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosaxiv also inspired Moran. From the former he would acquire an understanding of the studio arrangement of a landscape, how to manipulate its elements in an overall design to create the generic arcadian scenes of the Italian Campagna. From the latter he got the models for the sublime baroque and gothic landscapes which he tried to copy in his own work from 1860 in a painting called Salvator Rosa Sketching the Banditti.

Equally important in understanding Moran's style and taste in painting is the influence of J.M.W. Turner (1775 – 1851) on his art. Moran spent a year in England studying and copying Turner in 1861-62, and became very influenced by Turner's impressionistic use of light and color. The three paintings, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (1871), The Chasm of the Colorado (1873-74) and Mountain of the Holy Cross, (1875) which became public icons and a religious triptych of wilderness America in the 1870s, all reveal manipulation of actual scenery, religious sentiments, gothic taste and the accepted vistas of the Hudson River school. 4. YELLOWSTONE

When Thomas Moran, at the age of 34, joined the expedition of the United States Geological Survey in 1871 led by Dr. Ferdinand Hayden (1829-1887) into the Yellowstone area of Wyoming, it was supposedly to provide realistic and true-to-life pictures from Western landscapes which had remained largely unseen by most people in the East.

The earlier valley vista pictures. The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is a valley vista picture. The valley vistas were favorite motifs with the early Hudson River painters. These views could include both pastoral and wilderness elements. Thomas Cole's The Oxbow (1836)

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and Asher Durand's Kindred Spirits (1849) illustrate this convention. In The Oxbow we look down on the broad floor of the Connecticut River Valley near Northampton. The left side of the picture shows the top of a ridge, which is a piece of untouched wilderness, from which we look down onto a fertile plain with a majestic meandering river bathed in golden sunlight. It is only the forest ridge that represents any wilderness in which there is hardly any touch of the sublime. The violent forces of nature are underlined in the splintered tree trunk in the foreground and the storm clouds which are either moving away or advancing toward the river valley. In the valley vista pictures after the 1850s the wilderness views tend to narrow and deepen as in Asher Durand's Kindred Spirits (1849). In Kindred Spirits we look down into a wild narrow gorge which ends in a waterfall in the middle distance. There are no cultivated fields, no trace of either axe or spade. However, the picture does not express any experience of the truly sublime. The drop from the cliff where the two figures in the landscape, Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant, are standing is considerable but not overwhelming. The mountains are covered with trees and greenery. A passage through them may be strenuous, but definitely not impossible, which is indicated in the elegant city clothes of the two gentlemen. In Sanford Gifford's Kauterskill Clove (1862),xv a much more impressionistic picture, the vista is now much longer and the distances make the observer feel small in relation to the majestic valley landscape with the waterfall at the end. However, the valley is bathed in a golden light, there is a mirrorlike Walden Pond at the valley bottom and a clearing with a log cabin in the foreground, which gives the scene a strong pastoral and arcadian quality. Moran's The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. If we now compare Moran's Yellowstone to the real place or compare it with William Henry Jackson's photographs taken at the same time, we discover that Moran has taken

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liberties with the co-called reality. He must have painted his picture from what today is called Artist's Point and it is obvious that Moran has altered the scene considerably both in perspective and in the topographical details. Moran admits that his composition is not absolutely true to life.

Every form introduced into the picture is within view from a given point, but the relations of the separate parts to one another are not always preserved. For instance, the precipitous rocks on the right were really at my back when I stood at that point, yet in their present position they are strictly true to pictorial nature; … My aim was to bring before the public the character of the region. (Kinsey, p. 55xvi )

And in an article in Scribner's Monthly in 1871 Moran wrote about his work:

I place no value upon literal transcripts from Nature. My general scope is not realistic; all my tendencies are toward idealization... Topography in art is valueless. The motive or incentive of my "Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone" was the gorgeous display of color that impressed itself upon me. Probably no scenery in the world presents such a combination. The forms are extremely wonderful and pictorial, and, while I desired to tell truly of Nature, I did not wish to realize the scene literally, but to preserve and to convey its true impression.xvii (Jules David Prown et al. Discovered Lands Invented Pasts, p. 16)

And what statement does Moran want to make in the picture? Let us inspect it more closely. We look down into the vista of the sunlit canyon of the Yellowstone where the foreground is in the shade. The earth occupies most of the picture. The sky is just a narrow strip at the top. We may perceive three main elements in the composition: The waterfall in the background obviously occupies the central place and it provides a point of light in the landscape. This is continued in the river at the bottom of the valley. The other two features are the pine tree to the left which breaks the horizon and the rock formations to the right which are lit up by the sun shining into the canyon. Among the details which are worth noticing are the smoke and steam rising from the geysers on the horizon to the left in the picture indicating the volcanic activity in the region in addition to the volcanic origin of the cliffs in the immediate foreground to the right. Moran even claimed that "the rocks in the foreground are so carefully drawn that a geologist could determine their precise nature" (Kinsey, Thomas Moran, p. 55). The impression is of a landscape in the making. We see the mighty geological forces of volcanic eruptions and the slow but relentless erosion of waterpower. We look down into the secrets of the earth and it does not require a lot of imagination to perceive the anthropomorphic features of the landscape: the phallic shape of the cliffs to the right and the centrality of the womb of the earth from which the water of life – but also of destruction - gushes forth. The spray and steam rising from the waterfall symbolically rise above the horizon toward the sky. The pine tree to the left may carry a similar meaning. In the iconography of landscapes the tree is often a religious symbol, and here it clearly connects the earth to the sky.

In the foreground, placed upon a cliff, we can spot two small figures, a white man pointing his arm toward the canyon and a Native American in Indian costume facing the spectator. Apart from the obvious function of providing a human scale to show the smallness of man and the majesty of the landscape, the figures may also illustrate the white man's

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discovery of the place. These people were geologists who brought a new and scientific understanding of the formation of the landscape. This is underlined in the group of men and horses next to the two figures, where one of the persons is reading or writing in a book he supports on his knees, possibly Moran himself. The Native American is turning away from the white person and retreating into the shadow in the foreground where Moran has placed small details like a dead deer lying on the cliff (in the lower left corner). This is most likely a comment on the banishment of Indians from their native land, and on the decimation of wild life in the West. 5. GRAND CANYON

In the summer of 1873 Thomas Moran headed west to join John Wesley Powell (1834-1902), also a trained geologist and leader of the Grand Canyon survey, on a trip to the Grand Canyon. Four years earlier Powell had captured the nation's attention when he led a small group of men in custom-crafted boats through the whitewater of the Colorado River. Already planning a pendant for Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Moran accepted Powell's invitation to join him the following summer. The result was Moran's second great picture, The Chasm of the Colorado, unveiled in the spring of 1874 and soon after purchased by Congress ($10.000) to hang in the Capitol opposite The Yellowstone. The canyon vistas.

What the first national park, the Yosemite, in 1864 (1890), the Yellowstone in 1872 and the Grand Canyon after the turn of the century, have in common (with the possible exception of Yosemite) is that in those areas the deep valley or canyon formations are so spectacular and dramatic. From various vantage points the spectator or tourist normally looks down into enormous dizzying chasms. In an alpine landscape the eye is guided upwards toward the summits of the mountains, whereas the canyon is normally approached from a plateau and the observer looks down its sides toward the river which is always at the bottom of these geological formations. Since canyons have been cut vertically down into the earth crust, the section reveals the different periods and stages in its geological formation. The informed geologist can read important passages of the history of the earth from the pages of the book of canyons. Moran's The Chasm of the Colorado. The Chasm of the Colorado is also a composite of different vistas and perspectives which the artist has put together to achieve the effect he wants. The painting is not realistic, but Moran attempts, in the manner of Turner and in the spirit of John Ruskin's philosophy of landscape art, to convey an emotional experience and to illustrate some philosophical and scientific issues. There are no human figures in the picture and the scene shows no trace of any human activity at all. We look down into the enormous hole in the earth in the foreground and the background is filled up with the jagged rock formations in the area. There is a storm passing on the left side of the picture while the right part is mainly lit up by the sunshine which creates a partial rainbow in the middle of the picture. There are large patches of fog down in the canyons. The landscape is Salvadorian, wild and forbidding. This is certainly no arcadia.

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The painting conveys a sense of CHAOS and geological CREATION. This is a representation of what the earth might have looked like at the time of creation when chaos reigned and according to Genesis "the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." The rainstorm and the cloud formation in the middle of the picture which divides it into a sunny side and a dark side may have a certain parallel in the biblical story about how God divided the light from the darkness, the firmament from the waters and finally the separation of the waters so that the dry land appeared which God called Earth. These biblical associations are probably intended by the artist, particularly since the only living creatures in the picture are a snake writhing on the rock in the immediate foreground just to the left of center and an eagle soaring in the sky. Both are obvious religious symbols, but they are also very common in the conventions of the imagery and iconography of the Salvadorian and romantic landscapes which Moran knew so very well.

The iconology of chasms. As opposed to the iconology of the tall mountains, the function of chasms and canyons, deep valleys and depressions in the landscape was to lead the spectator's eyes downward into the darkness of the bowels of the earth. To look down into a real canyon generally causes vertigo in the spectator, a feeling of giddiness and even attraction for the chasm. Already the Flemish painter and art historian Karal van Mander wrote in 1603 about Breughel's pictures that

... in these pictures he [Breughel] shows us, when he was in the cragged Alps, how, without much trouble, to portray the view downward into valleys which makes one dizzy, the sheer cliffs, the cloud-kissing pines, the far and distant prospects and the rushing streams.xviii

Mythologically death was also imagined as a descent into the abyss, into Hades or, in Christian vocabulary, into Hell. Demeter's grief after Persephone's annual descent into Hades explained the cycle of the seasons. Orpheus had to descend into the subterranean world to recover and then lose his Eurydice. The topography of Dante's Purgatorio was a funnel-shaped hole in the earth arranged in nine steep concentric descending circles. It even had a waterfall between circles seven and eight, and in the eighth circle there were eleven descending ditches (bolgie) and finally in the ninth and last circle, at the center, the devil stood frozen in a block of ice at the bottom of the pit. In European folklore caves and caverns were often associated with either mystery or holiness, or they could be the abodes of giants, gnomes or deities. The places where underground rivers gushed into broad daylight were revered as particularly "poetic." The fountain of Vaucluse reputedly inspired poets like Petrarch to write his sonnets to Laura. And in Kubla Khan Coleridge describes the extraordinary place of Xanadu where "Alph the sacred river ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea." (See Joni Louise Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West, p. 113) The sublime. It is the frightening or astonishing aspect of landscape which has been defined as expressions of the sublime. In Edmund Burke's classical definition of the sublime (1757), the essential experience is one of astonishment:

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The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is the state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force.xix

Burke also noted "that height is less grand than depth; and that we are more struck at looking down from a precipice, than at looking up at an object of equal height."xx

Thomas Cole tried to evoke astonishment "with some degree of horror" in many of his symbolic landscapes. The Titan's Goblet is a surrealistic picture of an edenic landscape lifted above a mountainous chaos similar to Moran's Chasms. In The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (1827-28) Adam and Eve are driven out of the cavernous entrance to the Garden into a craggy, frightening landscape, and in An Evening in Arcady (1843) we look through a corresponding exit or entrance into something that may look like a canyon outside the Arcadian foreground.xxi Geology and creation.

There is another important context in which Moran's paintings ought to be considered and that is the new understanding of the geological history of the earth and of the evolution of life on our planet which gained ground in the 1870s and 80s and created a lot of debate and intellectual agony. These ideas also had an impact on landscape art in painting. Kenneth Clark, in his Landscape into Art, maintains that by 1850 the ideals of the Virgilian landscape were disappearing under the impact of naturalists like Malthus and Darwin. The classical compositions would certainly not disappear, but "the feeling that 'some God is in this place' and has given to nature an unusual perfection, was bundled away, together with less agreeable attributes of classic painting, and can never be revived."xxii

The expeditions in which Thomas Moran participated were led by geologists. Dr. Ferdinand Hayden (1829-1887), who led the expedition to the Yellowstone in 1871, was working for the United States Geological Survey. John Wesley Powell (1834-1902), leader of the Grand Canyon survey in 1873, was also a trained geologist and served as director of the U.S. Geological Survey from 1880-94. There is every reason to assume that the participants in those expeditions, including the painter (Moran) and the photographers, would have been discussing around the campfires at night, the origin of these immense canyons and their age in particular. There would also have been discoveries of fossils in the canyon walls, and with the general theory of evolution formulated by Charles Darwin only about fifteen years earlier, conceptions of the immense creative forces of nature must have been formed in the minds of the expedition members. The awe and wonder of strange fossils was not new in America and artists (Charles Willson Peale) had earlier recorded the scientific interest in securing these fossil remains.xxiii The first decades of the 19th century is the period in which modern geology developed, particularly through the investigations of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). The British scientist Sir Charles Lyell published his revolutionary Principles of Geology in the early 1830s in which he formulated new and shocking theories about the age of the earth and set forth the idea that changes in the earth take place through the operation of constant and not cataclysmic forces. In 1859 the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species gave new impetus to

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Lyell's work. Lyell accepted evolution by natural selection in his The Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man in 1863. It is also interesting to notice that Darwin's The Descent of Man was published in the same year (1871) as Moran accompanied Hayden to the Yellowstone area. Also prominent American geologists like James Hall (1811-98) and geologist/artist William Henry Holmes (1846- 1933)xxiv had delivered important studies and reports in geology and paleontology in the same period.

According to art historian Barbara Novak there was one idea that obsessed the period, namely the CREATION of the earth.xxv The age of the earth was probably one of the most controversial scientific questions in the 19th century. The church and orthodox theology, joined by many creationists, still believed and taught that the earth, according to the Bible, had been created about 6000 years ago, and that the Flood had wiped out all life except those species on board Noah's Ark. The Flood was assumed to have been responsible for a number of observable geological phenomena such as erosion and sedimentation, and fossils were assumed to be antediluvian creatures which had died when the whole world was submerged. However, it became increasingly obvious that the biblical timescale was totally inadequate to explain the formation of mountains, the sedimentation of dust, sand and rocks from the activities of rain, rivers and glaciers, the rock formations from volcanic activity and above all the fossil forms of animal life that were often found buried in rock. It would have taken hundreds of millions of years for the sediments to form the plateau around the Grand Canyon, and the water erosion of the canyon proper is a process which had taken around six million years. Also the popular interest in geology and the interior of the earth must have been high in the second half of the 19th century if one can read Jules Verne's popular book, Voyage to the Center of the Earth (1864) as an index of that interest. The publication of Mark Twain's travelogue, Roughing It, in the same year as Yellowstone was made into a National Park, also boosted the interest in the western landscape. In his book Twain describes the freaks of the landscape like Mono Lake, the Humboldt Sink and salt and lye water in the lakes west of the Rockies. The book fired the American imagination to the strangeness and mysteries of the western landscape. Volcanic activity was also an awesome natural phenomenon. In the Yellowstone the volcanic activity was considerable, and boiling mud pots and geysers like Old Faithful would soon attract hordes of visitors from the East. 6. THE MOUNTAIN OF THE HOLY CROSS

In the Rockies, just west of Denver, Colorado, people had observed a strange phenomenon, a mountain with a cross of snow at the top, and - with some imagination - a woman kneeling with outstretched hands at the foot of the cross. Both the photographer William Henry Jackson and Thomas Moran made their way into the mountains to catch a glimpse of the phenomenon and get pictures of it. Moran's Mountain of the Holy Cross, based on Jackson's photographs and his own observations, was finished in 1875 and exhibited, as already mentioned, at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia the following year.

This picture, like his two canyon paintings, is not a "true" to fact rendering of the real place, but an attempt to capture the "true impression" of the scene rather than a topographical view. For example, Moran has freely invented the waterfall in the foreground in his painting.

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The painting is quite conventional in several ways. It contains some stock romantic elements like the stream tumbling town a steep mountain side among big rocks. The forest is primeval and virgin with fallen timber in the riverbed and with old gnarled trees growing along the banks. The river valley is mostly in the shade whereas the sun shines on the mountain top with the cross of snow. The peak is surrounded by clouds which cuts it off from the earth and turns it into an apparition in the sky.

In mythology the mountain usually was as a symbol of the divine and served to lift man's eyes toward God. The mountain tops were the abode of the gods. Zeus and Jupiter resided on the top of Olympus. In Christian iconography the mountain top is where God gave Moses the tablets or showed him the promised land. At such a place Christ spoke the Sermon on the Mount, was transfigured and finally ascended to heaven.

In the imagery of the Romantic Period, the tall Alp and the generic snow clad mountain rose above the often chaotic world of man and beast as the domain of inaccessible purity. In the 1860 and 70s the influence of the writings of John Ruskin, who was an important arbiter of art theory and practice, was also considerable. Ruskin thought that art should reveal the religious nature of landscape, and mountains were of particular importance. "Mountains are the beginning and end of all natural scenery," Ruskin declared in vol. 4 of Modern Painters (1856).

Romantic art often combined the wild landscape with Christian symbols, above all the cross. Crosses could be seen or imagined in wild places. The German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) painted crucifixes among snowcapped pines, or spires of gothic cathedrals that one could barely distinguish through the fog in the forest. (Transparency) Friedrich could have been an inspiration for Thomas Cole who sometimes did the same thing, namely put a cross in a wild place where it would be very unlikely for people to see it. Cole's The Cross in the Wilderness provides an example of this convention. There could also be signs and hidden messages to be read in the landscape. In Cole's well known painting, The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton, 1833), one can discern the Hebrew letters for Shaddai, or the Almighty, carved on the hillside in the background.xxvi (In his book Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama gives us a fascinating, if somewhat idiosyncratic, survey of the different meanings of rocks, Sacro Monte and the sublime and delightful horrors of mountains and chasms.)

Therefore, in painting The Mountain of the Holy Cross, Thomas Moran simply exploits an already well established iconographical convention. In addition we have already observed the strong influence from gothic romanticism on Moran.

American geopiety Moran's painting of the Mountain of the Holy Cross is a reaffirmation of religious

faith and a confirmation of the geopiety that had dominated the understanding of nature and life in America for decades. However, on the background of the new science of geology, Charles Darwin's new evolutionary theories and the new understanding of geological forces, one may see a contradiction here in Moran's triptych since the Holy Cross picture is such a clear statement about the relationship between God or Christ and nature. If there is a contradiction here at all, it is probably more obvious to us today than to the general public and the cultural elite in America in the 1870s. As Barbara Novak states it in her book Nature and Culture,

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Pre-Darwinian science accommodated discovery to design. Each new revelation was quickly enlisted as proof of providential creation. Paradoxically, the last thing the age intended was to disprove God. But it had an obsession to uncover and share His earthly secrets. The artists, like the scientists, wanted to discourse "face to face with spirit." If science could help them, they eagerly accepted its aid. To assume a scientific attitude towards nature, to read its "manner and method" through the lens of science, was, in this sense, a religious act. (Novak, Nature and Culture, p. 54.)

Landscape was consumed like an exhilarating drug, stones could deliver sermons, and

a spear of grass, was according to Walt Whitman, "the handkerchief of the Lord,/ a scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,/ Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?/. (Song of Myself, ll. 102-104.) Even as late as in 1952, the photographer Ansel Adams explained to the director of the National Park Service that he photographed Yosemite in the way he did to sanctify "a religious idea" and "to inquire of my own soul just what the primeval scene really signifies." (S. Schama, Landscape and Memory, p. 9) Picturesque America. Both geopiety and science were promoted by a number of publications in the 1860 and 70s. The publishing firm of D. Appleton & Co. published books on geologic history and a Journal (Appleton's Journal, founded in 1869) which was largely devoted to prints and engravings of American landscapes. Thomas Moran was also hired to provide pictures for the magazine. He also delivered pictures of the Yellowstone to Scribner's Monthly in May and June 1871. The picture sections of Appleton's Journal were later collected and published in book form with the title Picturesque America, from 1872. (Sue Rainey's book, Creating Picturesque America (1994) is a very useful and well documented history of that publication.) Appleton's science editor, Edward Livingston Youmans (1821-87), himself an interpreter of evolution through lyceum lectures, published Darwin's Origin of Species in the United States as well as works by Thomas Henry Huxley and Herbert Spencer. While Picturesque America was being prepared for publication the firm published Darwin's The Descent of Man in 1871. Picturesque America made a significant contribution to America's self image particularly in the troubled 1870s. This was the difficult period after the Civil War, when politics often meant corruption, e.g. the Tweed Ring, and in 1872, when Yellowstone was set up as a national park, the Credit Mobilier scandal erupted in the Grant Administration. Americans now wanted to invest their national pride in an unspoilt picturesque western landscape.

Conclusion: Setting up the Yellowstone as a national park and the purchase of Moran's pictures were the results of a long history of complex, deep-rooted American geopiety, stemming from religious Edenic ideas, Romanticism, Emersonian transcendentalism, and the wilderness mystique of Thoreau's Walden and other writings. In society and politics the ideas and sentiments of Manifest Destiny, of economic and commercial interests concerning land use, settlement, the development of railroads and tourism were equally influential. Finally the publishing industry, e. g. D. Appleton & Co. in their Picturesque America, made the images of the western wilderness available to the general public. These ideological, philosophical,

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political and economic conditions and factors are important in explaining the choice of the first wilderness areas to be protected from development and be set aside as national parks in the 1860s and '70s. A number of issues are coming together in Moran's pictures: (1) The terribilitá of the Salvadorian landscapes, (2) the geopiety and nature worship of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, (3) the moral philosophy of art represented by John Ruskin and practiced by J.M.W. Turner, (4) the concept of CREATION and the science of geology and (5) a personal and emotional experience of chaos and salvation. 7. THE NATURAL AND TCHNOLOGICAL SUBLIME: The 1880s and 90s Moran's later career.xxvii

Moran's later pictures not only reveal his basic romantic disposition, but they probably also reflect the art market and popular taste in the 1880s and '90s. The public largely wanted nostalgic, romantic landscapes of an America which was rapidly disappearing under the pressure of agro-business, industrialization and urbanization. For example in his Cliffs of the Upper Colorado River, Wyoming (1882), all reference to the burgeoning town of Green River has been edited out and Moran has replaced the railroad tracks with Indian caravans. The popularity of the Currier & Ives sentimental lithographs also indicates what kind of pictures the general public wanted in their homes. After 1900 Moran often spent the winters in Yellowstone and continued to paint his western landscapes.xxviii Moran increasingly lent his talent to advertizing for the commercial interests in the Yellowstone.xxix His pictures of the Yellowstone canyon were used as promotion in hotels, offices, and railroad cars. Also Grand Canyon interests bought extra promotion from Moran. He was commissioned by the Santa Fe Railroad to produce paintings of the Grand Canyon that could be used for marketing. Thomas Moran therefore became closely identified with the National Parks as no other artist in this crucial period for the preservation of spectacular wilderness areas. Landscape of enterprise. The ideas of the strangeness and uniqueness of the West led to demands for its preservation in national parks. Ecological arguments were not very important in motivating the politicians to protect large areas of wilderness. The main motivation was economic, the potential for tourism was quickly perceived by the railroad companies, for example the Northern Pacificxxx, and the marketable commodity was unspoilt Western landscape. In his book Narratives and Spaces, David Nye shows how the Grand Canyon was developed as a tourist attraction, particularly after 1900, and the way the image of the place was constructed in the minds of Americans. In quite recent time it is interesting to notice how the purity of the Grand Canyon is affirmed and set up against the corruption of media and Hollywood in the recent feature film of the same title.

The alliance between business and the resources in the West also needed a display window for other heroic enterprise in the West. Therefore the technological sublime in the age of enterprise could easily become allied to the sublime wilderness landscape. In a way it only remained to put the Hoover Dam into the canyon and carve the presidents' heads on

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Mount Rushmore. Even Thomas Moran had been moving toward the inclusion of the industrial landscape in his art. His Lower Manhattan from Communipaw, New Jersey (1880),xxxi is a view across the Hudson River from the sugar refineries on the Jersey waterfront with the Manhattan skyline in the background. The 1880s would also see the sublimeness and poetry of suspension bridges in John Roebling's Brooklyn Bridge. Robert Hughes describes this transition as moving from the Temple of Nature to the Cathedral of Making:

Within the New World, the Grand Canyon and Peale's mastodon had testified to an unimaginably old one, ruled by geological - or better, theological - time. But its counterpart was an even newer world, created from day to day by Homo artifex. Europeans might sneer at the sight of rampant American positivism, the belief in ordained progress that filled every corner of American rhetoric and was eventually to decay into mere advertising slogans and styling. But to Americans, by the 1880s it was an extremely serious affair: the factory, the bridge, the dam, the dry dock were all parts of the Cathedral of Making, as the Grand Canyon was the Temple of Nature.xxxii

It was a relatively small step from the fascination with the sublime aspect of the natural landscape during the Age of Enterprise to the technological sublime in the same period. And the cityscapes and industrial landscapes that developed after 1900 recreated the mountain peaks in the skyscrapers and the canyons in the city streets below. As Daniel Boorstin points out:

In an age of great architects like Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, Kahn and his associates created a new genre of architectural greatness. Their factory buildings, fashioned for the new logic of production, brought a new man-made grandeur to the American landscape. The mystery in Thomas Moran's vast canvases of Yellowstone and of the Grand Canyon was rivaled by the man-made brilliance of Charles Sheeler's paintings of Ford's plant at River Rouge.xxxiii

Moran does not admit the human figure as any important element in his canyon landscapes. The human figure is a disappearing one. In the 1872 version of The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (2,13 x 3,66 m) there are a couple of tiny figures placed in the middle ground. In a later version (2,45 x 4,27 m) painted in 1893 (-1902) and exhibited at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, there are no human figures at all. It is a "pure" non-human landscape which point forward to the smallness of the human figure in Charles Sheeler's American Landscapexxxiv

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of the River Rouge plant where one can barely discern an ant-like human figure placed on the tracks between two railroad cars below the towering smokestack. In Moran's and Sheeler's landscapes one may find the void and eerie stillness of worlds indifferent to, and independent of, man. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Thomas Moran (1837-1926). Lower Falls, Yellowstone Park. Oil on canvas. 40 1/2 by 60 1/4 inches. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma Painted in 1893.

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i He told a Denver reporter in 1874 that the paintings were three of the grandest subjects on this continent (Kinsey, p. 150).

ii The area had some 10.000 geysers, hot springs, mud volcanoes, fossil forests, a volcanic glass mountain, the 1.000 feet deep canyon and 308 feet waterfall of the Yellowstone River and a wide variety of wild animals living in their natural habitat.

iii The story of the great surveys of the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest in the 1870s and the role that Thomas Moran and other artists like the photographer William Henry Jackson played in them, is well documented in Joni Louise Kinsey's Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992). Another study by Nancy K. Anderson, "The Kiss of Enterprise, " discusses the relationship between visual art and enterprise in the West, and is printed in The West as America. Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press,1991), edited by William Truettner.

iv Other paintings in the Capitol that may qualify as landscapes are a series of paintings by Seth Eastman done between 1870-75 of historic forts in addition to some of his Indian scenes. There are two history pieces by Albert Bierstadt, Discovery of the Hudson River and Entrance into Monterey, purchased in 1875 and 1878. The only landscape picture that could rival Moran's paintings is a picture titled Niagara Falls in Winter (1848) by Regis Gignoux (1816-82), accepted as a gift in 1901. See Art in the United States Capitol, (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976).

v Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art, London: John Murray, 1976, p. 17. vi Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art, London: John Murray, 1976, p. 109. (“Ut pictura poesis” (Horace) =

As with painting, so with poetry.) vii William Cullen Bryant, "Sonnet - to an American Painter Departing for Europe" (1832). viii For more dramatic scenery the painters usually traveled up the Hudson River to the Catskill Mountains in

the Adirondacks. The early Hudson River landscape painters like Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, Jasper Cropsey, George Inness and Sanford Gifford did not stray very far from the Hudson and the Catskills for the simple reason that traveling in the West, and certainly in the Far West, was difficult, hazardous and expensive. Besides the landscapes of New England, Upstate New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania provided enough variety of scenery to inspire their views and vistas of the pastoral as well as the wilderness scenes. Painters like Frederick Church, who was particularly attracted to the sublime aspects of enormous mountains and canyons, would find them at the Niagara Falls (Niagara, 1857). When he wanted to add the extra exotic elements of palm trees and volcanoes to create echoes of the pastoral Italian landscapes with Vesuvius or Etna, he went to South America and painted pictures like Heart of the Andes (1859), Cotopaxi (1862) or Rainy Season in the Tropics (1866).

ix A term introduced by James Thomas Flexner in That Wilder Image (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1962), p. 293.

x Robert Hughes, American Visions (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1997), p. 201. xi Ibid, p. 198. xii Hughes, American Visions (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1997), p. 189. xiii Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alastor (1816), ll. 539-570. Calm, he still pursued The stream, that with a larger volume now Rolled through the labyrinthine dell; and there Fretted a path through its descending curves With its wintry speed. On every side now rose Rocks, which, in unimaginable forms, Lifted their black and barren pinnacles In the light of evening, and its precipice Obscuring the ravine, disclosed above, Mid toppling stones, black gulfs and yawning caves, Whose windings gave ten thousand various tongues

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To the loud stream. Lo! where the pass expands Its stony jaws, the abrupt mountain breaks, And seems, with its accumulated crags, To overhang the world: for wide expand Beneath the wan stars and descending moon Islanded seas, blue mountains, mighty streams, Dim tracts and vast, robed in the lustrous gloom Of leaden-coloured even, and fiery hills Mingling their flames with twilight, on the verge Of the remote horizon. The near scene, In naked and severe simplicity, Made contrast with the universe. A pine, Rock-rooted, stretched athwart the vacancy Its swinging boughs, to each inconstant blast Yielding one only response, at each pause, In most familiar cadence, with the howl The thunder and the hiss of homeless streams Mingling its solemn song, whilst the broad river, Foaming and hurrying o'er its rugged path, Fell into that immeasurable void, Scattering its waters to the passing winds.

xiv Salvator Rosa's paintings must have been well known, because Merriwether Lewis writes in his Journals upon seeing the Great Falls of the upper Missouri River: "I wished for the pencil of Salvador Rosa or the pen of Thompson, that I might be enabled to give the enlightened world some just idea of this truly magnificent and sublimely grand object which has from the commencement of time been concealed from the view of civilized man;" (From Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804-1806, ed. Reuben Gold Twaites (New York: Arno Press, 1969, vol. 2, pp. 149-50.) Quoted from Joni Louise Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West, p.3.

xv Sandford Robinson Gifford, Kauterskill Clove, 1862. Oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

xvi Sheldon, George. American Painters, New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1881, pp.125-126. xvii Quoted in Nancy K. Anderson, "Curious Historical Artistic Data," in Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts:

Transforming Visions of the American West, ed. by Jules Prown et al, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1992), p. 16.

xviii Karel van Mander, "On Landscape Painting," (1603-4). Flemish minor painter, historian of the Northern art in his Painter's Book, often called the Northern Vasari. (Quoted in James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin, eds., The Portable Renaissance Reader, The Viking Portable Library, Penguin, 1977, p. 550.)

xix Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1756. Quoted from Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, The sublime: a reader in British eighteenth-century aesthetic theory (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,1996), p. 132. xx Burke, Enquiry, pp. 58-59??

xxi The landscapes of the Voyage of Life (1842) series are filled with caves and chasms. The boat carrying the child (Childhood) issues symbolically out of a cave, and in Manhood the boat of life is heading down the terrifying rapids of a canyonlike river.

xxii Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (London: John Murray, 1976), p. 145. xxiii A major excavation project for the bones of a mastodon had had been vividly recorded, in the spirit of

the Enlightenment, in Exhumation of the Mastodon (1806) by Charles Willson Peale who had met the famous explorer and natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt in Philadelphia in 1804.

xxiv Fernlund, Kevin J. William Henry Holmes and the Discovery of the American West. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2000.

xxv Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture. American Landscape Painting 1825-1875 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), p. 47.

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xxvi See Don Scheese, Nature Writing. The Pastoral Impulse in America, p. 3. xxvii In 1884 Moran built a cottage and large studio in East Hampton, Long Island. Here the artist had access

to the beach, and in the style of the older seascape painters, Martin Johnson Heade and Fitz Hugh Lane, he began to paint the sea in all its moods including the old theme of shipwrecks along the shores. Some of the seascapes remind us of Moran's contemporary Winslow Homer. ( E.g. The Much Resounding Sea, 1884. National Gallery of Art, Gift of the Avalon Foundation.) He also painted several pastoral, impressionistic pictures from Long Island, scenes from Mexico, and several pictures in the Turner style from Venice. (E. g. View of Venice, 1888. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gift of James Parmalee.) Earlier he had even made an attempt to outdo Bierstadt in painting a history picture (Ponce de Leon in Florida, 1878).

xxviii One of his pictures from 1900 is Shoshone Falls on the Snake River which has a close resemblance to Frederick Church's Niagara picture of 1857.

xxix See accompanying text to the website of National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., devoted to the exhibition Thomas Moran, Sept. 1997 - Jan. 1998. (http://www.nga.gov/feature/moran/moranhome.html)

xxx See Joni Louise Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), p. 68.

xxxi Moran, Lower Manhattan from Communipaw, New Jersey ,1880. Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, Maryland. See also the website of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., devoted to the exhibition Thomas Moran, Sept. 1997 - Jan. 1998. (http://www.nga.gov/feature/moran/new2.html)

xxxii Robert Hughes, American Visions (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1997), p. 279. xxxiii Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Vintage Books,1974), p. 551. xxxiv Charles Sheeler, American Landscape, 1930. Oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.