THOMAS MORAN: PAINTER OF YELLOWSTONE

About a week before we left for our trip to Yellowstone, I saw a program about the artist, Thomas Moran.  He travelled to Yellowstone to document, in watercolor sketches, the unbelievable beauty of the region.  Along with photographer, William Henry Jackson, they gave our government documented proof of the wild stories of erupting geysers and pools of gold and blue the early settlers had talked about.  Because of Moran and Jackson, Congress established Yellowstone as the world's first national park in 1872. 

In Mammoth Hot Springs, in the Albright Visitor Center, there is a permanent display of some of Moran's watercolors and Jackson's photographs.  They are displayed in a very dark area (to keep the colors from fading).  I enjoyed seeing the sights as they looked when Moran saw them in 1871-1872 - and then compared those sights with the way they looked as we travelled to some of those same sights.

I picked up a couple of postcards - which were highly saturated - to have a souvenir of his work.  Can you imagine going to some place wild and undocumented and being the one to return with work to show what you've seen?  If I remember the program correctly, he was the first artist to sell a painting to be displayed in the halls of Congress - an oil painting of a waterfall in Yellowstone.