Mountain of the Holy Cross

A towering figure of the Hudson River School, his sweeping landscapes captured the sublime grandeur of the American West with a luminosity that bordered on the divine. Though born in England, his artistic vision became inseparable from the untamed wilderness of Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and other iconic sites he helped immortalize. Unlike contemporaries who emphasized meticulous detail, his work balanced realism with a poetic, almost theatrical use of light—skies aflame with dawn or stormy twilight, mist-shrouded peaks, water shimmering like liquid gold. Government expeditions in the 1870s gave him firsthand access to remote territories, and his paintings, such as *The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone*, were instrumental in convincing Congress to establish national parks. Yet his art wasn’t mere documentation; it throbbed with a spiritual reverence for nature’s scale, a quality that drew comparisons to Turner, whose work he admired. Later in life, as industrialization encroached, his palette softened, reflecting nostalgia for vanishing frontiers. Though sometimes criticized for romanticizing the wild, Moran’s legacy endures in the way his brushstrokes shaped America’s perception of its own landscape—not just as land, but as myth.