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Shoshone Falls, Snake River, Idaho
Artist:
Thomas Moran
(American, 1837 - 1926)
Date: ca. 1875
Medium: Watercolor on paper board
Dimensions:
Overall: 10 x 14 in. (25.4 x 35.6 cm)
Classification: American art
Credit Line: Gift of Hugh Gordon Miller
Object number: 60.52.47
Terms
- Waterfall
- Idaho
- Blue
- White
- Brown
- Tan
- Idaho
In Collection(s)
Not on view
DescriptionThis is an opaque watercolor on paperboard painting depicting Shoshone Falls, Idaho, with red cliffs in the background.
Exhibition History"The Most Remarkable Scenary: Thomas Moran's Watercolors of the American West," Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Tex., May 23 - July 13, 1980; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, August 5 - October 5, 1980; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn., October 23 - January 4, 1981.
"Thomas Moran," The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., September 28, 1997 - January 11, 1998.
"The American West: Out of Myth, Into Reality," Trust for Museum Exhibitions with the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, Miss., February 8 - June 8, 2000.
"Behind the Seen: The Chrysler's Hidden Museum," Large Changing Gallery, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va., October 21, 2005 - February 19, 2006.
"Watercolor: An American Medium," Photography Gallery, Chrysler Museum of Art, February 21 - June 23, 2019.
"Thomas Moran," The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., September 28, 1997 - January 11, 1998.
"The American West: Out of Myth, Into Reality," Trust for Museum Exhibitions with the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, Miss., February 8 - June 8, 2000.
"Behind the Seen: The Chrysler's Hidden Museum," Large Changing Gallery, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va., October 21, 2005 - February 19, 2006.
"Watercolor: An American Medium," Photography Gallery, Chrysler Museum of Art, February 21 - June 23, 2019.
Label textThomas Moran
American, 1837–1926
Shoshone Falls, Snake River, Idaho, ca. 1875
Watercolor on paper board
Thomas Moran was one of the first painters to capture the dramatic scenery of the American West for audiences back East.
Known today for his grandiose oil paintings, Moran was a longtime member of the American Watercolor Society. A work like this one was likely completed in the studio but rooted in his expeditionary watercolor practice based upon firsthand observation in the field.
Gift of Hugh Gordon Miller 60.52.47
American, 1837–1926
Shoshone Falls, Snake River, Idaho, ca. 1875
Watercolor on paper board
Thomas Moran was one of the first painters to capture the dramatic scenery of the American West for audiences back East.
Known today for his grandiose oil paintings, Moran was a longtime member of the American Watercolor Society. A work like this one was likely completed in the studio but rooted in his expeditionary watercolor practice based upon firsthand observation in the field.
Gift of Hugh Gordon Miller 60.52.47
Published References
Idaho State Historical Society. 610N. Boise, Idaho.
Number 11 in Hugh Gordon Miller Collection 1960 catalog.
Carol C. Clark, "The Most Remarkable Scenery," _The American West: The Magazine of Western History_ XVII, No. 2. (March 1980): 40-46.
Carol Clark, _Thomas Moran: Watercolors of the American West_, (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1980), 145, 172, Plate 73, cat. no. 176. ISBN: 0292750595
Michael Duty, "Thomas Moran's Watercolors of the American West," _The Magazine Antiques_ CXIX, No. 1 (January 1981): 212-215.
_The Chrysler Museum: Selections from the Permanent Collection, Norfolk, Virginia_, (Norfolk: Chrysler Museum, 1982): 84. ISBN: 0-940744-37-6
_Time and Light_, co-produced by WETA-TV and the Smithsonian Institution, WETA-TV, 1984, videorecording.
Katharine M. McClinton, "Thomas Moran's Yellowstone Watercolours," _Apollo_ CXXIV, No. 293 (July 1986): 38-43.
Audrey Knoth, "Same falls captured in different ways: 19th-century painting, photograph at Chrysler," _Compass_ (Norfolk, Va., August 22, 1990): 14.
Brooks Johnson, "Shoshone Falls Photograph Complements Museum Collection," _The Chrysler Museum, A Monthly Bulletin_ 20, No. 8. (September 1990): 1-2.
Peter H. Hassrick, Donna Davies, Bradley A. Finson, and Stephanie Foster Rahill, _The American West: Out of Myth, Into Reality_ exh. cat., Washington, D.C.: Trust for Museum Exhibitions in Association with The Mississippi Museum of Art, 2000, 135. ISBN: 1882507088
Nancy K. Anderson, _Thomas Moran_ exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1997, 102. ISBN: 0300073259, 0894682253
Anne Morand, "The camera and the artist's eye," _Gilcrease Journal_ 10 (Tulsa, Okla.: Thomas Gilcrease Museum Association, Summer 2002), 20-21.
Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 76-77, no. 42. ISBN: 0-940744-71-6
Joni L. Kinsey, _Thomas Moran's West: Chromolithography, High Art, and Popular Taste_ (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas. 2006) p. 143 & Fig. 117. ISBN: 0-7006-1413-3
Provenance
The artist, L. Prang and Co., Boston, Mass.; Hugh Gordon Miller; Gift of Hugh Gordon Miller to the Chrysler Museum, 1960.
Catalogue EntryThomas Moran
Bolton-le-Moor, England 1837-1926 Santa Barbara, Calif.
Salvator Rosa Sketching the Banditti, 1860
Oil on canvas, 40 × 66 7/8 in. (101.6 × 169.9 cm)
Signed and dated lower left: Thos Moran 1860
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 71.2127
Reference: Nancy K. Anderson et al., Thomas Moran, exhib. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, and Seattle Art Museum, 1997-98, pp. 34-35, no. 1.
Shoshone Falls, Snake River, Idaho, c. 1875
Watercolor on paper board, 10 × 14 in. (25.4 × 35.6 cm)
Signed in monogram lower right: TYM (in ligature)
Gift of Mr. Hugh Gordon Miller, 60.52.47
References: Carol Clark, Thomas Moran: Watercolors of the American West, Austin, 1980, p. 145, no. 176; Nancy K. Anderson et al., Thomas Moran, exhib. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, and Seattle Art Museum, 1997-98, p. 102, no. 49, Appendix 1, p. 346.
Memorialized at his death as "the dean of American landscape painters," Thomas Moran achieved enduring fame in the 1870s for his mammoth oils and luminous watercolors of Yellowstone and other dramatic Western locations such as the Chrysler's Shoshone Falls, Snake River, Idaho. Yet Moran's earliest paintings, produced in Pennsylvania, were far more tranquil forest scenes and traditional Romantic landscapes in the manner of Salvator Rosa Sketching the Banditti.
Born in England, the young Moran immigrated with his family to Philadelphia in the mid-1840s and was apprenticed there to a local wood-engraving firm. Guided by his older brother, Edward-himself a gifted artist (see object 71.791)-Thomas, by 1856, had turned to painting and begun a series of landscapes reflecting the influence of Edward and of fellow-Philadelphians Paul Weber and James Hamilton. He was also influenced by prints made after paintings by the great European masters of the day, chief among them British landscapist J.M.W. Turner. Among the most ambitious of these youthful paintings is Salvator Rosa Sketching the Banditti.
Responding to the well-established nineteenth-century taste for romantic "historical" subjects drawn from the lives of earlier artists, Moran fashions an imaginary scene involving the great seventeenth-century Italian painter Salvator Rosa, long renowned for wild, desolate landscapes inhabited by bandits, witches, and other sinister folk. Moran imagines Rosa actually invading the wilderness lair of a pack of highwaymen to sketch these exotic outlaws on the spot. (According to legend, Rosa was captured by the banditti of the Abruzzi region of central Italy and lived among them for a time.) Moran renders the surrounding vista-a rocky ravine with blasted trees and a rushing stream-in clear imitation of Rosa, whose style he could have studied in prints made after his paintings.
In the spring of 1861 Moran exhibited Salvator Rosa Sketching the Banditti at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The following year he and Edward departed for England, drawn by their long-standing desire to study Turner's work firsthand. Turner's vaporous, light-filled landscape paintings had a transforming effect on Thomas. And in 1871, when he joined Ferdinand V. Hayden and the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey on their expedition at Yellowstone, Moran discovered in the vast, sun-bleached vistas of the American West a range of heroic landscape themes worthy of his new style. The 1871 Yellowstone trip-the turning point of Moran's career-and his subsequent journeys west inspired several colossal paintings and a host of pencil sketches and watercolors, many made as designs for magazine illustrations and other print ventures (and all shrewdly intended by Moran to capitalize on the American public's insatiable desire to learn more about the remote Western territories). Indeed, his art played a key role in convincing the United States Congress, in 1872, to designate the Yellowstone region as a national park.
By far the most influential and most artful of Moran's commercial print enterprises was the 1876 deluxe portfolio The Yellowstone National Park, and the Mountain Regions of Portions of Idaho, Nevada, Colorado, and Utah. Published by Louis Prang of Boston, the portfolio contained fifteen chromolithographs made from a selection of Moran's Western watercolors, and a lengthy descriptive text by Ferdinand Hayden. "To a person who has not visited the Yellowstone and the territory adjacent to it," Hayden wrote, "it is simply impossible to conceive of the character of the scenery . . . unless accompanied by color illustrations." Widely praised at the time for their beauty and technical brilliance, Prang's chromolithographs include a view of Shoshone Falls for which the Chrysler's watercolor served as the model.
When Moran painted Shoshone Falls, he had not yet seen the great cataract on Idaho's Snake River. (In fact, he would not travel there until 1900.) Instead, he based his composition on photographs of the site taken by Timothy O'Sullivan in 1868, when O'Sullivan accompanied Clarence King on the U.S. Geological Survey of the Fortieth Parallel. To achieve the proper palette, Moran consulted King's description of Shoshone Falls, which appeared in the October 1870 issue of The Overland Monthly. King emphasized the falls' "gloomy, solemn" ambience, the deep, blue-green water, and the jet-black bluffs. Moran's reliance on photographs and verbal descriptions was a common artistic practice at the time, and though his Shoshone Falls was not painted on site, it nonetheless evokes, quite masterfully, the sweep and majesty of this unspoiled wilderness. In dramatic vistas such as this, Moran created a new and compelling vision of America's western Eden, one that would make him the rival, and ultimately the anointed successor, of Albert Bierstadt (see object 89.59).
JCH
Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 76-77, no. 42.
Bolton-le-Moor, England 1837-1926 Santa Barbara, Calif.
Salvator Rosa Sketching the Banditti, 1860
Oil on canvas, 40 × 66 7/8 in. (101.6 × 169.9 cm)
Signed and dated lower left: Thos Moran 1860
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 71.2127
Reference: Nancy K. Anderson et al., Thomas Moran, exhib. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, and Seattle Art Museum, 1997-98, pp. 34-35, no. 1.
Shoshone Falls, Snake River, Idaho, c. 1875
Watercolor on paper board, 10 × 14 in. (25.4 × 35.6 cm)
Signed in monogram lower right: TYM (in ligature)
Gift of Mr. Hugh Gordon Miller, 60.52.47
References: Carol Clark, Thomas Moran: Watercolors of the American West, Austin, 1980, p. 145, no. 176; Nancy K. Anderson et al., Thomas Moran, exhib. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, and Seattle Art Museum, 1997-98, p. 102, no. 49, Appendix 1, p. 346.
Memorialized at his death as "the dean of American landscape painters," Thomas Moran achieved enduring fame in the 1870s for his mammoth oils and luminous watercolors of Yellowstone and other dramatic Western locations such as the Chrysler's Shoshone Falls, Snake River, Idaho. Yet Moran's earliest paintings, produced in Pennsylvania, were far more tranquil forest scenes and traditional Romantic landscapes in the manner of Salvator Rosa Sketching the Banditti.
Born in England, the young Moran immigrated with his family to Philadelphia in the mid-1840s and was apprenticed there to a local wood-engraving firm. Guided by his older brother, Edward-himself a gifted artist (see object 71.791)-Thomas, by 1856, had turned to painting and begun a series of landscapes reflecting the influence of Edward and of fellow-Philadelphians Paul Weber and James Hamilton. He was also influenced by prints made after paintings by the great European masters of the day, chief among them British landscapist J.M.W. Turner. Among the most ambitious of these youthful paintings is Salvator Rosa Sketching the Banditti.
Responding to the well-established nineteenth-century taste for romantic "historical" subjects drawn from the lives of earlier artists, Moran fashions an imaginary scene involving the great seventeenth-century Italian painter Salvator Rosa, long renowned for wild, desolate landscapes inhabited by bandits, witches, and other sinister folk. Moran imagines Rosa actually invading the wilderness lair of a pack of highwaymen to sketch these exotic outlaws on the spot. (According to legend, Rosa was captured by the banditti of the Abruzzi region of central Italy and lived among them for a time.) Moran renders the surrounding vista-a rocky ravine with blasted trees and a rushing stream-in clear imitation of Rosa, whose style he could have studied in prints made after his paintings.
In the spring of 1861 Moran exhibited Salvator Rosa Sketching the Banditti at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The following year he and Edward departed for England, drawn by their long-standing desire to study Turner's work firsthand. Turner's vaporous, light-filled landscape paintings had a transforming effect on Thomas. And in 1871, when he joined Ferdinand V. Hayden and the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey on their expedition at Yellowstone, Moran discovered in the vast, sun-bleached vistas of the American West a range of heroic landscape themes worthy of his new style. The 1871 Yellowstone trip-the turning point of Moran's career-and his subsequent journeys west inspired several colossal paintings and a host of pencil sketches and watercolors, many made as designs for magazine illustrations and other print ventures (and all shrewdly intended by Moran to capitalize on the American public's insatiable desire to learn more about the remote Western territories). Indeed, his art played a key role in convincing the United States Congress, in 1872, to designate the Yellowstone region as a national park.
By far the most influential and most artful of Moran's commercial print enterprises was the 1876 deluxe portfolio The Yellowstone National Park, and the Mountain Regions of Portions of Idaho, Nevada, Colorado, and Utah. Published by Louis Prang of Boston, the portfolio contained fifteen chromolithographs made from a selection of Moran's Western watercolors, and a lengthy descriptive text by Ferdinand Hayden. "To a person who has not visited the Yellowstone and the territory adjacent to it," Hayden wrote, "it is simply impossible to conceive of the character of the scenery . . . unless accompanied by color illustrations." Widely praised at the time for their beauty and technical brilliance, Prang's chromolithographs include a view of Shoshone Falls for which the Chrysler's watercolor served as the model.
When Moran painted Shoshone Falls, he had not yet seen the great cataract on Idaho's Snake River. (In fact, he would not travel there until 1900.) Instead, he based his composition on photographs of the site taken by Timothy O'Sullivan in 1868, when O'Sullivan accompanied Clarence King on the U.S. Geological Survey of the Fortieth Parallel. To achieve the proper palette, Moran consulted King's description of Shoshone Falls, which appeared in the October 1870 issue of The Overland Monthly. King emphasized the falls' "gloomy, solemn" ambience, the deep, blue-green water, and the jet-black bluffs. Moran's reliance on photographs and verbal descriptions was a common artistic practice at the time, and though his Shoshone Falls was not painted on site, it nonetheless evokes, quite masterfully, the sweep and majesty of this unspoiled wilderness. In dramatic vistas such as this, Moran created a new and compelling vision of America's western Eden, one that would make him the rival, and ultimately the anointed successor, of Albert Bierstadt (see object 89.59).
JCH
Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 76-77, no. 42.
