Green River Cliffs, Wyoming

Moran painted this canvas during one of the most productive decades of his career, following his celebrated expeditions to Yellowstone in 1871 and the Grand Canyon in 1873. By 1881 he had established himself as the foremost painter of the American West, and the Green River region in Wyoming held particular personal significance for him; he had first visited the area in 1871 en route to Yellowstone and returned repeatedly because of its distinctive geology and extraordinary light. The site's dramatic buttes and cliffs, eroded into monumental columns and plateaus of red and white sandstone, gave Moran exactly the kind of sublime natural architecture he sought to document and interpret. Working within the tradition of American Luminism and the broader Hudson River School, Moran brought to Western subjects the same reverence for light and the same belief in landscape painting as a vehicle of national meaning that his eastern predecessors had applied to the Catskills and the White Mountains. His Western canvases were instrumental in building public and congressional support for the establishment of the national park system, and works such as this one circulated widely through exhibition and engraving, shaping how Americans imagined their own continent.